I
Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the
whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a
faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and
visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of
which to complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many
roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed
children and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they
did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but
certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more
gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human
material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin Arrowsmith who
had been supercilious toward Pickerbaughs and old Dr. Winters had for
Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the
clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and
shrewd.
He admired Angus’s firmness of purpose and stability of habit.
Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily and fenced
like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-thirty; he never
took more than one drink a day; and he never read anything or said
anything which would not contribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young
Surgeon. His underlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive
precisely on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool,
and appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for
a smile.
Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and ardent
tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to Angus for
abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any operation of the head or
neck, providing he was himself quite sure the operation was necessary,
but he was never able to rise to the clinic’s lyric faith that any
portions of the body without which people could conceivably get along
should certainly be removed at once.
The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working
day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth of his brain, he
made blood counts, did urinalyses and Wassermanns and infrequent
necropsies, and all the while he was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid
the blattings of Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had
lived, had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.
After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of
book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts. They read novels
and history and travel; they talked, at dinners given by Rouncefield or
Angus, to journalists, engineers, bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian
play, and heard Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb’s beloved Rabelais.
Martin learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the
first time to a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in
French. She had called Martin a “lie-hunter,” a “truth-seeker.” They
decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room
flat, that most people who called themselves “truth-seekers”--persons
who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible
separable thing, like houses or salt or bread--did not so much desire to
find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers
quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did not seem to be
provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense
and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan
monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all
sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in
eating rice and gazing on one’s navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, “Rot!” He insisted that there is
no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be
chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical
attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by
stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability
to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average
job-holder.
His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he was progressing
adequately. When he tried to match himself with the experts of the
clinic or with their professional friends, he was even more
uncomfortable than he had been under the disconcerting scorn of Dr.
Hesselink of Groningen. At clinic luncheons he met surgeons from London,
New York, Boston; men with limousines and social positions and the
offensive briskness of the man who has numerous engagements, or the yet
more offensive quietness of the person who is amused by his inferiors;
master technicians, readers of papers at medical congresses, executives
and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred peering doctors,
or to give well-bred and exceedingly final orders to subordinates;
captain-generals of medicine, never doubting themselves; great priests
and healers; men mature and wise and careful and blandly cordial.
In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged fusser, Gustaf
Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nautilus unworthy of passionate
warfare. As their suave courtesy smothered him, Martin felt like a
footman.
In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he discussed with
Leora the question of “What is this Martin Arrowsmith and whither is he
going?” and he admitted that the sight of the Famous Surgeons disturbed
his ancient faith that he was somehow a superior person. It was Leora
who consoled him:
“I’ve got a lovely description for your dratted Famous Surgeons. You
know how polite and important they are, and they smile so carefully?
Well, don’t you remember you once said that Professor Gottlieb called
all such people like that ‘men of measured merriment’?”
He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they made of it a
beating impish song:
“Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment! Damn the great
executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful
smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured
merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured
merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles!”
II
While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of Wheatsylvania to
mature man, his relations to Leora developed from loyal boy-and-girl
adventurousness to lasting solidity. They had that understanding of each
other known only to married people, a few married people, wherein for
all their differences they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as
are the eye and hand. Their identification did not mean that they dwelt
always in rosy bliss. Because he was so intimately fond of her and so
sure of her, because anger and eager hot injustices are but ways of
expressing trust, Martin was irritated by her and querulous with her as
he would not have endured being with any other woman, any charming
Orchid.
He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to answer her,
and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the knowledge that he was
hurting her, that she was alone, waiting, perhaps weeping. Because he
loved her and also was fond of her, he was annoyed when she was less
sleek, less suave, than the women he encountered at Angus Duer’s.
Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler--beside her, Leora was shining
and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber and ice. She was a rich young
woman, she dressed with distinction, she spoke with finishing-school
mock-melodiousness, she was ambitious, and she was untroubled by the
possession of a heart or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving
Watters believed herself to be.
In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus Smart set, Mrs. Clay Tredgold
had petted Leora and laughed at her if she lacked a shoe-buckle or split
an infinitive, but the gold-slippered Mrs. Duer was accustomed to sneer
at carelessness with the most courteous and unresentable and
unmistakable sneers.
As they returned by taxicab from the Duers’, Martin flared:
“Don’t you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nautilus we stopped
on a country road and talked till--oh, darn’ near dawn, and you were
going to be so energetic, but here we are again to-night, with just the
same thing-- Good God, couldn’t you even take the trouble to notice that
you had a spot of soot on your nose to-night? Mrs. Duer noticed it, all
right! Why are you so sloppy? Why can’t you take a little care? And why
can’t you make an effort, anyway, to have something to say? You just sit
there at dinner--you just sit and look healthy! Don’t you want to help
me? Mrs. Duer will probably help Angus to become president of the
American Medical Association, in about twenty years, and by that time I
suppose you’ll have me back in Dakota as assistant to Hesselink!”
Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxury of a taxicab.
She sat straight now, and when she spoke she had lost the casual
independence with which she usually regarded life:
“Dear, I’m awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went out and had
a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and then I knew you like
conversation, so I got my little book about modern painting that I
bought and I studied it terribly hard, but to-night I just couldn’t seem
to get the conversation around to modern painting--”
He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, “Oh, you poor, scared,
bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these dollar-chasers!”
III
After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the
Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose knots of
his streptolysin research.
When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, “Look here, Martin, I’m glad
you’re keeping on with your science, but if I were you I wouldn’t, I
think, waste too much energy on mere curiosity. Dr. Rouncefield was
speaking about it the other day. We’d be glad to have you do all the
research you want, only we’d like it if you went at something practical.
Take for instance: if you could make a tabulation of the blood-counts in
a couple of hundred cases of appendicitis and publish it, that’d get
somewhere, and you could sort of bring in a mention of the clinic, and
we’d all receive a little credit--and incidentally maybe we could raise
you to three thousand a year then.”
This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin’s desire to do
any research whatever.
“Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I’m finished. I am.
I’ll never try to do anything original again.”
It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic for a year,
that his streptolysin paper was published in the _Journal of Infectious
Diseases_. He gave reprints to Rouncefield and to Angus. They said
extremely nice things which showed that they had not read the paper, and
again they suggested his tabulating blood-counts.
He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk Institute of
Biology.
Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script:
Dear Martin:
I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the
relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are
illuminating. I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming
to us--to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you here.
The last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when I see your
fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you
should be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready to come
back to work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.
Truly yours,
M. Gottlieb.
“I’m simply going to adore New York,” said Leora.