I
Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and
insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and
glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of
undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled
roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.
Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.
With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk.
There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in Zenith, but that
one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can
make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is
that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do
not look alike for so many miles.
The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has determined
whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There are
houses with chauffeurs and Baccardi cocktails, but on August evenings
all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-sleeves on front
porches. Across from the ten-story office building, in which a little
magazine of the New Prose is published by a young woman who for five
months lived in the cafés of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion
comfortable with maples, and a line of Fords and lumber-wagons in which
the overalled farmers have come to town.
Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest
percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and the most
moral and forward-looking cities of all the States, and Nautilus is the
most Iowan city in Iowa. One out of every three persons above the age of
sixty has spent a winter in California, and among them are the champion
horseshoe pitcher of Pasadena and the woman who presented the turkey
which Miss Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas
dinner in 1912.
Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns and by an
astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires. The fat fields
run up to the edge of the city, and the scattered factories, the
innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly cottages for workmen
are almost amid the corn. Nautilus manufactures steel windmills,
agricultural implements, including the celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader,
and such corn-products as Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-food. It
makes brick, it sells groceries wholesale, and it is the headquarters of
the Cornbelt Coöperative Insurance Company.
One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian College,
which has two hundred and seventeen students, and sixteen instructors,
of whom eleven are ministers of the Church of Christ. The well-known Dr.
Tom Bissex is football coach, health director, and professor of hygiene,
chemistry, physics, French, and German. Its shorthand and piano
departments are known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and once,
though that was some years ago, Mugford held the Grinnell College
baseball team down to a score of eleven to five. It has never been
disgraced by squabbles over teaching evolutionary biology--it never has
thought of teaching biology at all.
II
Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best
hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the
Department of Public Health.
The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of that
large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he entered the drab
reception-office he was highly received by the stenographer and the two
visiting nurses. Into the midst of their flutterings--“Did you have a
good trip, Doctor? Dr. Pickerbaugh didn’t hardly expect you till
to-morrow, Doctor. Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?”--charged
Pickerbaugh, thundering welcomes.
Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford
College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like
President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the same bristly
mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance. He was a man who never
merely talked; he either bubbled or made orations.
He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after the manner of
a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the
Director’s private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly
silence:
“Doctor, I’m delighted to have a man with your scientific inclinations.
Not that I should consider myself entirely without them. In fact I make
it a regular practise to set aside a period for scientific research,
without a certain amount of which even the most ardent crusade for
health methods would scarcely make much headway.”
It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin settled in his
chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him
to look more interested.
“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I have often hoped
that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the
powers above may yet grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt
and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for
public health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it
would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the
Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and high moral
atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and
punch of Kipling.
“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an
opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success
we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the world needs
is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader--say a Billy
Sunday of the movement--a man who would know how to use sensationalism
properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the
papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me
with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian
preachers--sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational. Huh! If they
only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be sensational enough!
Still, I try, I try, and-- Look here. Here’s a placard, it was painted
by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let
me tell you it gets quoted around everywhere:
You can’t get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,
So let’s every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.
“Then there’s another--this is a minor thing; it doesn’t try to drive
home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise you the effect it’s
had on careless housewives, who of course don’t mean to neglect the
health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep
put into them, and when they see a card like this, it makes ’em think:
Boil the milk bottles or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.
“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of
these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some
day when you get time, glance over this volume of clippings--just to
show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the
up-to-date and scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting
I addressed in Des Moines--say, I had that hall, and it was
jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet when I proved by
statistics that ninety-three per cent. of all insanity is caused by
booze! Then this--well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly,
but it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in touch
with all the movements for civic weal.”
He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink
caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was
the headline:
DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER
OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG
GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE
Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy meeting! We
increased church attendance here seventeen per cent.! Oh, Doctor, you
went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well,
this might interest you then. It’s from the _Zenith Advocate-Times_, and
it’s by Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with Eddie
Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most
popular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the
literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I
was in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregational
Sunday-schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The
Morality of A I Health.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:”
Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin’ poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.
He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!
For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.
“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read
a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine
vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at
all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of
Health. My brain-children may teach sanitation and do their little part
to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what
Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist
in an office.
“Still, you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by
having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the
pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out
into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and
lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over
the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting-- I
know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote
from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”
He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled _Pickerbaugh Pickings_.
In verse and aphorism, _Pickings_ recommended good health, good roads,
good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh
backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the
Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by
an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario,
Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of
fifty-three per cent. of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky
daily.
Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched _Pickings_ from
him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You
can look it over some future time. But this second volume of my
clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can
do.”
While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that
Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was
exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent
of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus;
president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling
Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and
cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons,
Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B’nai B’rith, and the Y. M.
C. A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of
Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon
Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.
Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on “A
Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and the Mugford College Alumni
Association on “Wanted: A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But
outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.
He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on “More
Health-- More Bank Clearings.” He had edified the National Interurban
Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley
Folks.” Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had
listened to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze
Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped
organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum Minute Men.
The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house organs,
and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of
himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding daughters, depicted in
Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy
athletic costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of no
known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern
Minnesota pines.
Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.
He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a civilized man
the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be sufficient
reason for ignoring it.
When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself for
what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent normal people....
Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practise, in his
bullying health administration. Now again?
He urged, “This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh’s is exactly the
thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries
of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before
conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long
as he lets me alone and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy
inspection?”
He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into
the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by
the window.
“Well?” she said.
“It’s fine--gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner,
to-morrow evening.”
“What’s he like?”
“Oh, he’s awfully optimistic--he puts things over--he-- Oh, Leora, am I
going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?”
His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one
reality in a world of chattering ghosts.
III
When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang
up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus
had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him
that Pickerbaugh’s flamboyance would not interfere with his own work,
that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was
impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper,
an old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little dishes
which were of interest after the loving but misinformed cooking of
Leora, and they went to the movies and held hands and were not ill
content.
The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant. He gave Martin
a notion of the details of his work.
Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut fingers and
ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory, emerging only to
battle with factory-owners who defied sanitation. But he found that it
was impossible to define his work, except that he was to do a little of
everything that Pickerbaugh, the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus
might think of.
He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain of everything
from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer parties of neighbors;
he was to dictate office correspondence to the touchy stenographer, who
was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give
publicity to the newspapers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and
report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two
part-time physicians in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the
two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to
arrest--or at least to jaw at--all public spitters; to leap into a Ford
and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious
diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epidemics from Vladivostok
to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined)
their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even halt the business
activities of Nautilus.
But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for
private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected
diphtheria.
“I get it,” said Leora, as they dressed for the dinner at Pickerbaugh’s.
“Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the rest of
the time you’re perfectly welcome to spend in research, unless somebody
interrupts you.”
IV
The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West
Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers,
swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a
rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes
along the ridge-pole. Over the front gate was the name: UNEEDAREST.
Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The
eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old
twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk
all at once.
Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her
conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with
her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She
kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh
had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was
extraordinarily cordial and painful.
He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home
Nest:
“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these
great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their
lives--practically--and though Mother does have her sick-headaches,
that’s to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while
her father, the old deacon--and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old
school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel
Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of
Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which
have produced our present prosperity-- BUT he had no knowledge of diet
or sanitation, and I’ve always thought--”
The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil,
Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.
Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:
“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My
Jewels-- I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses,
don’t you?--but that’s what they really are to their mother, and the
Doctor and I have sometimes wished-- Of course when we’d started giving
them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels,
just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and
Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and
Chrysoprase--it _is_ Chrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well,
many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the
girls are getting quite famous--their pictures in so many papers, and we
have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’ Baseball Team all our own--only the Doctor
has to play on it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”
Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart.
They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical,
and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to
the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y. W. C. A. or the
Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of
them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error
the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.
“In fact,” said Dr. Pickerbaugh, “_we_ think they’re a very striking
brood of chickabiddies.”
“They certainly are!” quivered Martin.
“But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of the
_Mens Sana_ in the _Corpus Sano_. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have trained
them to sing together, both in the home and publicly, and as an
organization we call them the Healthette Octette.”
“Really?” said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed beyond
speech.
“Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the name
Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you’re going to see
bands of happy young women going around spreading their winged message
into every dark corner. Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and
enthusiastic and good basket-ball players! I tell you, _they’ll_ make
the lazy and wilful stir their stumps! They’ll shame the filthy livers
and filthy talkers into decency! I’ve already worked out a poem-slogan
for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?
Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.
Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,
So against the evil-minded we’ll also make strife.
We’ll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette!
“But of course an even more important Cause is--and I was one of the
first to advocate it--having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the
cabinet at Washington--”
On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a stupendous
dinner. With a hearty “Nonsense, nonsense, man, of course you want a
second helping--this is Hospitality Hall!” Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin
and Leora with roast duck, candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that
they became dangerously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself
did not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on
discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its
Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers,
seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of
ice-water.
Not always was he merely fantastic. “Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell you we’re
lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest best to
make the people in a he-town like this well and vital. I could be
pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private practise, and I’ve
been told I could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I’m
glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of four
thousand. Think of our having a job where we’ve got nothing to sell but
honesty and decency and the brotherhood o’ man!”
Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame of the
realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching the
first freight train out of Nautilus.
After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms.
Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They
were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing
a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the
famous Health Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was
to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It
was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but as the
twins’ voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an
effect all its own:
Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?
You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,
To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health,
Then we’ll all go marching on.
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
The slogan for one and all.
As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently
recited at the Congregational Festival, one of their father’s minor
lyrics:
What does little birdie say
On the sill at break o’ day?
“Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,
Hurray, hurray, hurray!”
“There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!” said Mrs. Pickerbaugh. “Don’t
you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they’re natural-born actresses? They’re not
afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into
it--perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York
would just love them, and maybe they’ve been sent to us to elevate the
drama. Upsy go.”
During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.
Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. (“Of course we all love
music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the
only real musical genius in the family.”) But the unexpected feature was
Orchid’s cornet solo.
Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior
to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large
portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females.
But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.
“I’ve never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and
sober up,” he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical
plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still
audible twins, sat down at the harp.
While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great
dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as gay, good,
dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical student,
Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late
eighties and the early nineties, the naïve and idyllic age of Howells,
when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang Swanee
River; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of
lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a
nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become a missionary
or a millionaire.
For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable
heartiness into his “Enjoyed that s’ much.” He felt victorious, and
somewhat recovered from his weakness.
But the evening’s orgy was only begun.
They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly
indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The
sight of him on the floor in his wife’s fur coat, being a seal on an
ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged
twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.
Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and
bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not
altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as devoted to
Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it
with frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though
they were married.
She planned to enact the word _doleful_, with a beggar asking a dole,
and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged
Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad
Daddy has you for assistant--somebody that’s young and good-looking. Oh,
was that dreadful of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and
everything, and the other assistant director--don’t tell Daddy I said
so, but he was an old crank!”
He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid
put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of
ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known
him, and said loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”
When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took hers,
and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with
emphasis.
Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as
companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure
had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young
gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped
that he would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in
years he was afraid of Leora’s eyes.
There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of
Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised
Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the Leader.”
All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of the fête
consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet scientific
conversation by the fireside,” made up of his observations on good
roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter
filing in health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have
been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair,
his jaw, his hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought
about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.
He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a
good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh’s
notes on the value of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for
Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with
many full-time clinic and school physicians and possibly Martin as
director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and
interesting activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes,
that’d be--be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn that
girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”
At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest ecstasy;
at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.
They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the
coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in
Nautilus.
“Lord, I don’t know whether I can do it. To work under that gas-bag,
with his fool pieces about boozers--”
“They weren’t so bad,” protested Leora.
“Bad? Why, he’s probably the worst poet that ever lived, and he
certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man could
ever learn, all by himself. But when it comes to this--what was it Clif
Clawson used to call it?--by the way, wonder what’s ever become of Clif;
haven’t heard from him for a couple o’ years--when it comes to this
‘overpowering Christian Domesticity’-- Oh, let’s hunt for a blind-pig
and sit around with the nice restful burglars.”
She insisted, “I thought his poems were kind of cute.”
“Cute! What a word!”
“It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using! But the cornet
yowling by that awful oldest daughter-- Ugh!”
“Well, now she played darn’ well!”
“Martin, the cornet is the kind of an instrument my brother would play.
And you so superior about the doctor’s poetry and my saying ‘cute’!
You’re just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe more so!”
“Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about nothing before! And
can’t you understand how important-- You see, a man like Pickerbaugh
makes all public health work simply ridiculous by his circusing and his
ignorance. If he said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making
me open my windows it’d make me or any other reasonable person close
’em. And to use the word ‘science’ in those flop-eared limericks or
whatever you call ’em--it’s sacrilege!”
“Well, if you want to _know_, Martin Arrowsmith, I’ll have no more of
these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you
came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening! I don’t mind your
cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of
way, but ever since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, ‘I
hope you girls won’t mind, but I just happen to remember that I’m
engaged to both of you’-- You’re mine, and I won’t have any trespassers.
I’m a cavewoman, and you’d better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with
her simper and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd
feet-- Orchid! She’s no orchid! She’s a bachelor’s button!”
“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she was.”
“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s why. Drat her!
Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn
you, that’s all.”
At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial,
convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he
stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little
more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”
He sat in the Sims House office--singularly dismal it was, after
midnight, and singularly smelly.
“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know
hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.
“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid--no,
she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she
acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh,
I’ll be good, but-- I’d like to kiss her once, _good_! She likes me.
Those darling lips, like--like rosebuds!
“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s
got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like-- Lee, sweet, can’t
you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion
Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!
“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if
it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die
than have to live and listen to--
“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as
it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books
the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry
James and everybody and-- Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make
pipets and agar, but-- And yet some day I want to travel like
Sondelius--
“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of
Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him--
“Or does he pull the bunk, too?
“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull the bunk’!
Horrible!
“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one of your social
climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet
he’s used to all those highbrows--
“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be able to go on
reading. Still-- I don’t suppose they read much, but there must be quite
a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes.
Theaters. That stuff.
“Rats!”
He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee.
Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the
noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a
policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:
“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen
you at City Hall.”
“Yes. Say, uh, say how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like
him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just starting in, and, uh-- You get
me.”
With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman
gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the
lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:
“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he’s
one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen’s English, and
jever hear one of his poems? They’re darn’ bright. I’ll tell you:
There’s some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much,
but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all
right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’
teeth. But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need
to be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s
they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and
pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is
the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!
“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot--he ain’t a clam like some of these
docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if
he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Costello chummed up like
two old cronies, and darn’ if he didn’t wrestle a fellow half his age,
and awful’ near throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that
young fellow a run for his money all right! We fellows on the Force all
like him, and we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us
into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain’t hardly supposed to
do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders. You bet.
He’s a real guy.”
“I see,” said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:
“But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.
“Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!
“I’m not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.
“Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job-- Huh! He’s just the kind of
jollying fourflusher that _would_ climb! But anyway, I’ll have my
training then, and maybe I’ll make a real health department here.
“Orchid said we’d go skating this winter--
“_Damn_ Orchid!”