I
It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration
so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill,
or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his
congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man
organized was overpowering.
He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all
the churches and associations into coöperation; he made the newspapers
promise to publish three columns of praise each day.
He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in which the
Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the
sin in the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The
Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W. C. T. U. booth at
which celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the
evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a
dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An
anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour
by injecting ground-up cigarette paper into it. The Pickerbaugh twins,
Arbuta and Gladiola, now aged six, were to show the public how to brush
its teeth, and in fact they did, until a sixty-year-old farmer of whom
they had lovingly inquired, “Do you brush your teeth daily?” made
thunderous answer, “No, but I’m going to paddle your bottoms daily, and
I’m going to start in right now.”
None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family, who had
volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an example of the
benefits of healthful practises.
They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful and
powerful that they had recently been presenting refined acrobatic
exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them smoked, drank, spit
upon pavements, used foul language, or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to
them the chief booth, on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the
Reverend Mr. Sunday.
There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners and
leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song recitals, and
daily there were lectures, most of them by Pickerbaugh or by his friend
Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor of hygiene and most other
subjects in Mugford College.
A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the governor of the
state, were invited to come and “give their messages,” but it happened,
unfortunately, that none of them seemed able to get away that particular
week.
The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was a slight
misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers’ Association spoke
strongly to Pickerbaugh about the sign “Too much pie makes pyorrhea” on
the diet booth. But the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was
removed at once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery
in town.
The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Pickerbaugh had
fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which, except that it had no
running water and except that the fire laws forbade his using any kind
of a flame, was exactly like a real one. All day long he poured a
solution of red ink from one test-tube into another, with his microscope
carefully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons
who wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had caught
them swimming about.
Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a nurse’s
costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low cursing. They
found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid person with stories
about pet cats in the fire-house and no tendency to ask questions in
bacteriology. It was he who showed them how they could smoke in safety.
Behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature
Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an
extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a broken
window which would carry off the smoke of their cigarettes. To this
sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman retired a dozen times a
day, and thus wore through the week.
One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant, coming in not to
detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse dying in agony
from cigarette paper, stopped before the booth of the Eugenic Family,
scratched his head, hastened to the police station, and returned with
certain pictures. He growled to Pickerbaugh:
“Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don’t smoke or booze or anything?”
“Absolutely! And look at their perfect health.”
“Hm. Better keep an eye on ’em. I won’t spoil your show, Doc--we fellows
at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I won’t run ’em out of
town till after the Fair. But they’re the Holton gang. The man and woman
ain’t married, and only one of the kids is theirs. They’ve done time for
selling licker to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went
into education, used to be the badger game. I’ll detail a plain-clothes
man to keep ’em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give
this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods.
Good luck! Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when you get to
Congress? I’ve got a nephew that’s a crackajack stenographer and a
bright kid and knows how to keep his mouth shut about stuff that don’t
concern him. I’ll send him around to have a talk with you. So long.”
But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic Family
relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking a long,
gurgling, ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found nothing wrong
in their conduct, till Saturday. There was nothing wrong with anything,
till then.
Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so much publicity.
Every newspaper in the congressional district gave columns to it, and
all the accounts, even in the Democratic papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh’s
campaign.
Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.
There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and the lady
in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also leaked, was taken
home threatened with pneumonia. At noon, when the Eugenic Family were
giving a demonstration of perfect vigor, their youngest blossom had an
epileptic fit, and before the excitement was over, upon the Chicago
anti-nicotine lady as she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an
anti-vivisection lady, also from Chicago.
Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered a crowd. The
anti-vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady a murderer, a
wretch, and an atheist, all of which the anti-nicotine lady endured,
merely weeping a little and calling for the police. But when the
anti-vivisection lady wound up, “And as for your pretensions to know
anything about science, you’re no scientist at all!” then with a shriek
the anti-nicotine lady leaped from her platform, dug her fingers into
the anti-vivisection lady’s hair, and observed with distinctness, “I’ll
show you whether I know anything about science!”
Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing happily with Leora
and their friend the fireman on the edge, distinctly did not. Both
ladies turned on Pickerbaugh and denounced him, and when they had been
removed he was the center of a thousand chuckles, in decided danger of
never going to Congress.
At two o’clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after-lunch crowd
had come in and the story of the anti ladies was running strong, the
fireman retired behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit for his
hourly smoke. He was a very sleepy and unhappy little fireman; he was
thinking about the pleasant fire-house and the unending games of
pinochle. He dropped the match, unextinguished, on the back porch of the
model Clean House. The Clean House had been so handsomely oiled that it
was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It flared up, and instantly the
huge and gloomy Tabernacle was hysterical with flames. The crowd rushed
toward the exits.
Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had been blocked
by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and children were being
trampled.
Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Suddenly, coming
from nowhere, he was marching through the Tabernacle at the head of his
eight daughters, singing “Dixie,” his head up, his eyes terrible, his
arms wide in pleading. The crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a
clipper captain he unsnarled them and ushered them safely out, then
charged back into the spouting flames.
The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman, with Martin and
the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating the flames. Nothing was
destroyed save the Clean House, and the crowd which had fled in agony
came back in wonder. Their hero was Pickerbaugh.
Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials which explained
that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the greatest lesson in health
ever seen, but he had also, by his courage and his power to command,
saved hundreds of people from being crushed, which latter was probably
the only completely accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.
Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages of a
disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the city
struggled into the Tabernacle that evening, and when Pickerbaugh took
the platform for his closing lecture he was greeted with frenzy. Next
day, when he galloped into the last week of his campaign, he was
overlord of all the district.
II
His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in his
training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor, county judge.
But the Democratic slogan, “Pickerbaugh the Pick-up Candidate,” was
drowned in the admiration for the hero of the health fair. He dashed
about in motors, proclaiming, “I am not running because I want office,
but because I want the chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of
health.” Everywhere was plastered:
For Congress
PICKERBAUGH
The two-fisted fighting poet doc
Just elect him for a term
And all through the nation he’ll swat the germ.
Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and vague about his
Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering the European War, but he
assured them, he certainly did assure them, that he was for using every
power of our Government to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for
high tariff, but it must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district
could buy everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each and
every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder, like a moraine,
for protecting the prosperity of all manufacturers, merchants, and
real-estate owners.
While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding in Nautilus a
smaller and much defter campaign, to reëlect as mayor one Mr. Pugh,
Pickerbaugh’s loving chief. Mr. Pugh sat nicely at desks, and he was
pleasant and promissory to everybody who came to see him; clergymen,
gamblers, G. A. R. veterans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and
ladies of reasonable virtue--everybody except perhaps socialist
agitators, against whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In
his speeches Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for “that firm integrity and
ready sympathy with which His Honor had backed up every movement for the
public weal,” and when Pickerbaugh (quite honestly) begged, “Mr. Mayor,
if I go to Congress you must appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows
nothing about politics but he’s incorruptible,” then Pugh gave his
promise, and amity abode in that land.... Nobody said anything at all
about Mr. F. X. Jordan.
F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in politics.
Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time Pugh had been
elected--it had been on a Reform Platform, though since that time the
reform had been coaxed to behave itself and be practical--both Pugh and
Pickerbaugh had denounced Jordan as a “malign force.” But so kindly was
Mayor Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could hurt
Mr. Jordan’s feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jordan do but speak
forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in blind-pigs and houses of ill
fame?
On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were among the company
awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs’. They were confident. Martin
had never been roused by politics, but he was stirred now by
Pickerbaugh’s twitchy pretense of indifference, by the telephoned report
from the newspaper office, “Here’s Willow Grove township-- Pickerbaugh
leading, two to one!” by the crowds which went past the house howling,
“Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!”
At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels weak with
unconfidence, realized that he was now Director of Public Health, with
responsibility for seventy thousand lives.
He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found assurance.
Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening, and
dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she drew him into
the back parlor and “So I’m going off to Washington--and you don’t care
a bit!” she said, her eyes blurred and languorous and undefended. He
held her, muttering, “You darling child, I can’t let you go!” As he
walked home he thought less of being Director than of Orchid’s eyes.
In the morning he groaned, “Doesn’t anybody ever learn anything? Must I
watch myself and still be a fool, all my life? Doesn’t any story ever
end?”
He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the train.
Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had gone, “Sandy
dear, I know how you feel about losing your Orchid. It’s sort of Youth
going. She really is a peach. Honestly, I can appreciate how you feel,
and sympathize with you-- I mean, of course, providin’ you aren’t ever
going to see her again.”
III
Over the _Nautilus Cornfield’s_ announcement was the vigorous headline:
ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINS
First Scientist Ever Elected
to Congress
Side-kick of Darwin and Pasteur
Gives New Punch to Steering
Ship of State
Pickerbaugh’s resignation was to take effect at once; he was, he
explained, going to Washington before his term began, to study
legislative methods and start his propaganda for the creation of a
national Secretaryship of Health. There was a considerable struggle over
the appointment of Martin in his stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was
bitter; Irving Watters whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was
likely to extend the socialistic free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a
sensible young doctor as his own candidate. It was the Ashford Grove
Group, Tredgold, Schlemihl, Monte Mugford, who brought it off.
Martin went to Tredgold worrying, “Do the people want me? Shall I fight
Jordan or get out?”
Tredgold said balmily, “Fight? What about? I own a good share of the
bank that’s lent various handy little sums to Mayor Pugh. You leave it
to me.”
Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Director, with a
salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thousand.
That he had been put in by what he would have called “crooked politics”
did not occur to him.
Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:
“Doc, there’s been a certain amount of opposition to you, because you’re
pretty young and not many folks know you. I haven’t any doubt I can give
you the full appointment later--if we find you’re competent and popular.
Meantime you better avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my
advice. I know this town and the people that count better than you do.”
IV
The day of Pickerbaugh’s leaving for Washington was made a fiesta. At
the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of Commerce gave to
everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies, doughnuts, and coffee, with
chewing gum for the women and, for the men, Schweinhügel’s Little Dandy
Nautilus-made Cheroots.
The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the astonishment
of innocent passengers gaping from the train windows, jammed with
thousands.
By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor Pugh held forth.
The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played three patriotic selections, then
Pickerbaugh stood on the platform, his family about him. As he looked on
the crowd, tears were in his eyes.
“For once,” he stammered, “I guess I can’t make a speech. D-darn it, I’m
all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all I can say is-- I love you
all, I’m mighty grateful, I’ll represent you my level best, neighbors!
God bless you!”
The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he could see them.
And Martin to Leora, “Oh, he’s a fine old boy. He-- No, I’m hanged if he
is! The world’s always letting people get away with asininities because
they’re kind-hearted. And here I’ve sat back like a coward, not saying a
word, and watched ’em loose that wind-storm on the whole country. Oh,
curse it, isn’t anything in the world simple? Well, let’s go to the
office, and I’ll begin to do things conscientiously and all wrong.”