I
Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was eager to have
Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His
scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the visiting
nurses, but he had little jealousy, and he demanded of Martin only the
belief that a rapid and noisy moving from place to place is the means
(and possibly the end) of Progress.
In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but a slight
swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper floor. There was
a simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns, these wide maple-shaded
streets, and a joy in freedom from the peering whisperers of
Wheatsylvania.
Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of Nautilus.
A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the telephone to
hear a masculine voice rasping:
“Hello. Martin? I bet you can’t guess who this is!”
Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, “You win--g’ by!”
and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new Assistant Director:
“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Well, make a guess.”
“Oh-- Clif Clawson?”
“Nope. Say, I see you’re looking fine. Oh, I guess I’ve got you guessing
this time! Go on! Have another try!”
The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had not yet
learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her presence. He said
with a perceptible tartness:
“Oh, I suppose it’s President Wilson. Look here--”
“Well, Mart, it’s Irve Watters! What do you know about that!”
Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it took ten
seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might be. Then he had
it: Watters, the appalling normal medical student whose faith in the
good, the true, the profitable, had annoyed him at Digamma Pi. He made
his response as hearty as he could:
“Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?”
“Why, I’m settled here. Been here ever since internship. And got a nice
little practise, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I want you and your
wife-- I believe you are married, aren’t you?--to come up to the house
for dinner, to-morrow evening, and I’ll put you onto all the local
slants.”
The dread of Watters’s patronage enabled Martin to lie vigorously:
“Awfully sorry--awfully sorry--got a date for to-morrow evening and the
next evening.”
“Then come have lunch with me to-morrow at the Elks’ Club, and you and
your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon.”
Hopelessly, “I don’t think I can make it for lunch but-- Well, we’ll
dine with you Sunday.”
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than
the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. Martin’s
imaginative dismay at being caught here by Watters was not lessened when
Leora and he reluctantly appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a
fury of Old Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.
Watters’s house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in and
leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practise already become
didactic and incredibly married; he had put on weight and infallibility;
and he had learned many new things about which to be dull. Having been
graduated a year earlier than Martin and having married an almost rich
wife, he was kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire
to do homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and admonitions:
“If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a couple of years
and take care to meet the right people, you’ll be able to go into very
lucrative practise here. It’s a fine town--prosperous--so few dead
beats.
“You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in
the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve picked up more than one
high-class patient there.
“Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he’s got a bad
socialistic tendency. These clinics--outrageous--the people that go to
them that can afford to pay! Pauperize people. Now this may startle
you--oh, you had a lot of crank notions when you were in school, but you
aren’t the only one that does some thinking for himself!--sometimes I
believe it’d be better for the general health situation if there weren’t
any public health departments at all, because they get a lot of people
into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private
physicians, and cut down the earnings of the doctors and reduce their
number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.
“I guess by this time you’ve gotten over the funny ideas you used to
have about being practical--‘commercialism’ you used to call it. You can
see now that you’ve got to support your wife and family, and if you
don’t, nobody else is going to.
“Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just come to
me. Pickerbaugh is a crank--he won’t give you the right dope--the people
you want to tie up with are the good, solid, conservative, successful
business men.”
Then Mrs. Watters had her turn. She was meaty with advice, being the
daughter of a prosperous person, none other than Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the
manufacturer of the Daisy Manure Spreader.
“You haven’t any children?” she sobbed at Leora. “Oh, you must! Irving
and I have two, and you don’t know what an interest they are to us, and
they keep us so young.”
Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.
After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the “good times we used
to have together at the dear old U.” He took no denial. “You always want
to make folks think you’re eccentric, Mart. You pretend you haven’t any
college patriotism, but I know better-- I know you’re showing off--you
admire the old place and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I know
you better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let’s give a long cheer
and sing ‘Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.’”
And, “Don’t be silly; of course you’re going to sing,” said Mrs.
Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she dealt in a firm
manner.
When they had politely labored through the fried chicken and brick ice
cream, through the maxims, gurglings, and memories, Martin and Leora
went forth and spoke in tongues:
“Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin to believe
he has sense enough to come in when it rains.”
In their common misery they forgot that they had been agitated by a girl
named Orchid.
II
Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into many of
the associations, clubs, lodges, and “causes” with which Nautilus
foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club,
the Elks’ Club, the Oddfellows, and the Evangeline County Medical
society. He resisted, but they said in a high hurt manner, “Why, my boy,
if you’re going to be a public official, and if you have the slightest
appreciation of their efforts to make you welcome here--”
Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that they, who
had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, complained now that they
could have no quiet evenings at home. But they fell into the habit of
social ease, of dressing, of going places without nervous anticipation.
They modernized their rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge,
rather badly, and tennis rather well; and Martin, not by virtue and
heroism but merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp
of small talk.
Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates, but
considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were protégés of
Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since they
were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.
Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so thick a rind
that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin’s frequent
refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he did not wish
to come. He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection,
diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the
work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by
urging, “Come on now, Mart, let’s hear some of those crazy ideas of
yours!”
His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife. Mrs. Watters
had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe that she was
the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to correct the
barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked Martin’s damns, Leora’s
smoking, and both their theories of bidding at bridge. But she never
nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons
who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief,
humorous, and introduced by a strident “Now don’t be silly,” and she
expected that to settle the matter.
Martin groaned, “Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it’s easier to
become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting.”
But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to
respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus
as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by
Orchid.
III
He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis
which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened
fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to
passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in
securing publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an
address on “What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics” for the Sunday
Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.
He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning
of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would
do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to
the Star of Hope Church.
People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, “They’re
coming to hear _me_, and I haven’t got a darn’ thing to say to ’em!” It
made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to
listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely
shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, “You’ll find
plenty room right up the side aisles, young man.”
“I’m the speaker for the afternoon.”
“Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance,
if you please, Doctor.”
In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee
of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian
intellectuality.
They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women to meet him,
they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and dismayingly
they expected him to say something intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly
frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched doorway into the
auditorium. Millions of faces were staring at his apologetic
insignificance--faces in the curving lines of pews, faces in the low
balcony, eyes which followed him and doubted him and noted that his
heels were run down.
The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.
The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with
suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to look brazenly at
the massed people who were looking at him, while he sat nude and exposed
and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor made announcement of
the Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little Lads’ Marching Club. They
sang a brief cheerful hymn or two-- Martin wondering whether to sit or
stand--and the chairman prayed that “our friend who will address us
to-day may have power to put his Message across.” Through the prayer
Martin sat with his forehead in his hand, feeling foolish, and raving,
“I guess this is the proper attitude--they’re all gawping at me--gosh,
won’t he ever quit?--oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to
make about fumigation?--oh, Lord, he’s winding up and I’ve got to
shoot!”
Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it for support,
and his voice seemed to be going on, producing reasonable words. The
blur of faces cleared and he saw individuals. He picked out a keen old
man and tried to make him laugh and marvel.
He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring him. He
dared to look away from the path of faces directly in front of him. He
glanced at the balcony--
The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest about sera and
vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that churchly young man had
noted two silken ankles distinguishing the front row of the balcony, had
discovered that they belonged to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was
flashing down admiration.
At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever known--all
lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind of
applause--and the chairman said the most flattering things ever uttered,
and the audience went out with the most remarkable speed ever
witnessed, and Martin discovered himself holding Orchid’s hand in the
parlors while she warbled, in the most adorable voice ever heard, “Oh,
Dr. Arrowsmith, you were just wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old
stuffs, but you put it right over! I’m going to do a dash home and tell
Dad. He’ll be so tickled!”
Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the parlors and
was looking at them like a wife.
As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.
“Well, did you like my spiel?” he said, after a suitable time of
indignant waiting.
“Yes, it wasn’t bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk to all those
stupid people.”
“Stupid? What d’you mean by ‘stupid’? They got me splendidly. They were
fine.”
“Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won’t have to keep up this
silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too well to let
you in on it very often.”
“I didn’t mind it. Fact, don’t know but what it’s a good thing to have
to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you think more lucidly.”
“As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!”
“Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband is a mutt, and
no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you might _pretend_ to be
a little enthusiastic over the first address he’s ever made--the very
first he’s ev-er tackled--when it went off so well.”
“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were
terribly smart. It’s just-- There’s other things I think you can do
better. What shall we do to-night; have a cold snack at home or go to
the cafeteria?”
Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures
of inappreciation.
He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of
winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild
bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for
secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday. They sat down to what
he announced as “getting back to some real reading, like physiology and
a little of this fellow Arnold Bennett--nice quiet reading,” but which
consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.
He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded:
“What’re you going to wear at Pickerbaugh’s snow-picnic to-morrow?”
“Oh, I haven’t-- I’ll find something.”
“Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I talked too much at
Dr. Strafford’s last evening? I know I’ve got most of the faults going,
but I didn’t know talking too much was one of ’em.”
“It hasn’t been, till now.”
“’Till now’!”
“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You’ve been pouting like a bad brat,
all week. What’s the matter with you?”
“Well, I-- Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so enthusiastic
about my Star of Hope spiel--that note in the _Morning Frontiersman_,
and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a corker--and you never so much
as peep!”
“Didn’t I applaud? But-- It’s just that I hope you aren’t going to keep
up this drooling.”
“You do, do you! Well, let me tell you I _am_ going to keep it up! Not
that I’m going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave ’em straight science,
last Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn’t realized it isn’t necessary to
be mushy, to hold an audience. And the amount of good you can do! Why, I
got across more Health Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab
in that three-quarters of an hour than-- I don’t care for being a big
gun but it’s fine to have people where they have to listen to what
you’ve got to say and can’t butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania. You
bet I’m going to keep up what you so politely call my damn’ fool
drooling--”
“Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you. I can’t
tell you--that’s one reason why I haven’t said more about your talk-- I
can’t tell you how astonished I am to hear you, who’re always sneering
at what you call sentimentality, simply weeping over the Dear Little
Tots!”
“I never said that--never used the phrase and you know it. And by God!
_You_ talk about sneering! Just let me tell you that the Public Health
Movement, by correcting early faults in children, by looking after their
eyes and tonsils and so on, can save millions of lives and make a future
generation--”
“I know it! I love children much more than you do! But I mean all this
ridiculous simpering--”
“Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can’t work with people till you
educate ’em. There’s where old Pick, even if he is an imbecile, does
such good work with his poems and all that stuff. Prob’ly be a good
thing if I could write ’em--golly, wonder if I couldn’t learn to?”
“They’re horrible!”
“Now there’s a fine consistency for you! The other evening you called
’em ‘cute.’”
“I don’t have to be consistent. I’m a mere woman. You, Martin
Arrowsmith, you’d be the first to tell me so. And for Dr. Pickerbaugh
they’re all right, but not for you. You belong in a laboratory, finding
out things, not advertising them. Do you remember once in Wheatsylvania
for five minutes you almost thought of joining a church and being a
Respectable Citizen? Are you going on for the rest of your life,
stumbling into respectability and having to be dug out again? Will you
never learn you’re a barbarian?”
“By God, I am! And--what was that other lovely thing you called
me?-- I’m also, soul of my soul, a damn’ backwoods hick! And a fine lot
you help! When I want to settle down to a decent and useful life and not
go ’round antagonizing people, you, the one that ought to believe in me,
you’re the first one to crab!”
“Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better.”
“She probably would! Believe me, she’s a darling, and she did appreciate
my spiel at the church, and if you think I’m going to sit up all night
listening to you sneering at my work and my friends-- I’m going to have
a hot bath. Good _night_!”
In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have been
quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person in the world,
besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson--by the way, where was
Clif? still in New York? didn’t Clif owe him a letter? but anyway-- He
was a fool to have lost his temper, even if she was so stubborn that she
wouldn’t adjust her opinions, couldn’t see that he had a gift for
influencing people. Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he
loved her--
He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances; they told
each other that they were the most reasonable persons living; they
kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:
“Just the same, my lad, I’m not going to help you fool yourself. You’re
not a booster. You’re a lie-hunter. Funny, you’d think to hear about
these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old Voltaire, they
couldn’t be fooled. But maybe they were like you: always trying to get
away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich,
always selling their souls to the devil and then going and
double-crossing the poor devil. I think-- I think--” She sat up in bed,
holding her temples in the labor of articulation. “You’re different from
Professor Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes or wastes time on--”
“He wasted time at Hunziker’s nostrum factory all right, and his title
is ‘Doctor,’ not ‘Professor,’ if you _must_ give him a--”
“If he went to Hunziker’s he had some good reason. He’s a genius; he
couldn’t be wrong. Or could he, even he? But _anyway_: you, Sandy, you
have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes. I will
say one thing: you learn from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little
tired, sometimes, watching you rush up and put your neck in every
noose--like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid.”
“Well by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace! It’s a good
thing _you_ never make any mistakes! But one perfect person in a
household is enough!”
He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of “Mart--_Sandy_!” He ignored
her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so fell asleep. At
breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she was curt.
“I don’t care to discuss it,” she said.
In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the Pickerbaughs’
snow picnic.
IV
Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks among
the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them drove out in a bob-sled
filled with straw and blue woolly robes. The sleigh bells were exciting
and the children leaped out to run beside the sled.
The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice he
tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compromising. In
jealousy Martin turned openly and completely to Orchid.
He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining Leora but
for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a tweed jacket, with a tam,
a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had dared to display
in Nautilus. She patted Martin’s knee, and when they rode behind the
sled on a perilous toboggan, she held his waist, resolutely.
She was calling him “Dr. Martin” now, and he had come to a warm
“Orchid.”
At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation. Together Martin and
Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they slid down the
hillocks on skiis. When their skiis were entangled, they rolled into a
drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and unembarrassed, it seemed to
him that in the roughness of tweeds she was but the softer and more
wonderful--eyes fearless, cheeks brilliant as she brushed the coating of
wet snow from them, flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in
their pretense of sturdy boyishness--
But “I’m a sentimental fool! Leora was right!” he snarled at himself. “I
thought you had some originality! And poor little Orchid--she’d be
shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you are!”
But poor little Orchid was coaxing, “Come on, Dr. Martin, let’s shoot
off that high bluff. We’re the only ones that have any pep.”
“That’s because we’re the only young ones.”
“It’s because you’re so young. I’m dreadfully old. I just sit and moon
when you rave about your epidemics and things.”
He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was sliding on a
distant slope. It may have been pique and it may have been relief that
he was licensed to be alone with Orchid, but he ceased to speak to her
as though she were a child and he a person laden with wisdom; ceased to
speak to her as though he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to
the high bluff. They skiied down it and fell; they had one glorious
swooping slide, and wrestled in the snow.
They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away. She
stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse. They ferreted
out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her as though he was going
to kiss her, and she looked back at him as though she did not mind. As
they laid out the food they hummed with the intimacy of understanding,
and when she trilled, “Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on
that horrid old table,” it was as one who was content to be with him
forever.
They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands, and as they
rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness, though they sat shoulder
by shoulder he did not put his arms about her except when the bob-sled
slewed on sharp corners. If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was
presumably caused by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing
happened and nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their farewells were
cheery and helpful.
And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there was about her
a chill air which the busy Martin did not investigate.