-21-

CHAPTER III

I

John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in the University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came from Back Bay; he was proud of it and let you know about it. With three other Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony which stood for sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light. On all occasions he remarked, "When I was studying with Ludwig in Germany -----" He was too absorbed in his own correctness to heed individual students, and Clif Clawson and the other young men technically known as "hell-raisers" looked forward to his lectures on physiology.

They were held in an ampitheater whose seats curved so far around that the lecturer could not see both ends at once, and while Dr. Robertshaw, continuing to drone about blood circulation, was peering to the right to find out who had been making that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far and imitate him, over on the left Clif Clawson would rise and stroking of imaginary whiskers, imitate the profind out who was making that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far over on the left Clif Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing arm and stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the masterpiece of throwing a brick into the sink beside the platform, just when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual climax about the effect of brass bands on the intensity of the knee-jerk.

-48-

and when they looked shocked, he pranced a little, and his eye-glasses glittered.

Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, "Dr. Brumfit, you're terribly learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes in English classes I'm simply scared to death of you, but other times you're nothing but a bad small boy, and I won't have you teasing the girls. You can help me bring in the sherbet, that's what you can do."

Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of disappearing with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat. Madeline! She was the one person who understood him! Here, where every one snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious, she was something he must have.

On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment with her, and whimpered, "Lord, you're so lovely!"

"I'm glad you think I'm a wee bit nice." She, the rose and the adored of all the world, gave him her favor.

"Can I come call on you tomorrow evening?"

"Well, I ------ Perhaps."

### III

It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass, that Martin's intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called "honorable." He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student who would have to wait for years before he could make a living. Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted -- like most poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.

As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure. He pictured her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek. He warned himself, "Don't be a fool now! Probably nothing doing at all. Don't go get

-56-

nity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summery songs to a
banjo.

In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the
North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft
flesh and her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited
by what he thought would be a long winter, and then he decided to
train for the examination in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb
should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.

-157-

Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at a quarter after three.

When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out of existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.

"I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery, Dr. Gottlieb. I've been talking to the technical director and the sales-manager and we feel it's the time to strike. We'll patent your method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put them on the market in large quantities, with a great big advertising campaign -- you know -- not circus it, of course -- strictly high-class ethical advertising. We'll start with anti-diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next check you'll find we've raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year." Hunziker was a large purring pussy, now, and Gottlieb death-still. "Need I say, my dear fellow, that if there's the demand I anticipate, you will have exceedingly large commissions coming!"

Hunziker leaned back with a manner of "How's that for glory, my boy?"

Gottlieb spoke nervously: "I do not approve of patenting serological processes. They should be open to all laboratories. And I am strongly against immature production or even announcement. I think I am right, but I must check my technique, perhaps improve it -- be sure. Then, I should think, there should be no objection to market production, but in very small quantities, and in fair competition with others, not under patents, as if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!"

"My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should like nothing just so much as to spend my whole life in/producing one priceless scientific discovery, without consideration of mere profit. But we have our duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson Hunziker Company to make money for them. Do you realize that they have -- and many of them are poor widows and orphans -- invested their Little All in our stock, and that we must keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant.

-185-

a crucial case, you better call in some older doctor for consultation not
that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it divides
the responsibility, and keeps 'em from going around criticizing. I, uh,
I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my younger col-
leagues. Just wait, I'll phone the editor of the *Gazette* and give him
an item about the case."

When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicated
his electric cabinet. "Got one of those things yet? Ought to, my boy.
Don't know as I use it very often, except with the cranks that haven't
anything the matter with 'em, but say, it would surprise you how it im-
presses folks. Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married? Won't
you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon? Mrs. Winter
will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service to you
in a consultation ----- I only charge a very little more than my regular
fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with an older man."

Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:

"You bet I'll stick to it! At worst, I'll never be as bad as that
snuffling old fee-splitter!"

Two weeks after, the *Wheatsylvania Eagle*, a smeary four-page rag,
reported:

Our enterprising contemporary, the *Leopolis Gazette*, had as follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently welcomed to our midst.

"Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are informed by our valued pioneer local physician Dr. Adam Winter, by the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of mm each other's virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific skill.

"Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt

follow
copy

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CHAPTER XVIII

I

Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide's Grove was Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not well paid, and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with benevolence, assuring him that it would have a great effect on his private practise.

It did. It almost ruined his private practise.

There was never an official appointment. Martin signed Woestijne's name (spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he felt) to papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized Martin's limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.

There was small science and considerably less heroism in his first furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his fellow-townsmen. He were to be sympathized with as least as much as he. Martin poked into yards, he denounced Mrs. Beeson for her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the street, and the schoolboard for the school ventilation and lack of instruction in tooth-brushing. The citizens had very reasonably been agitated by his irreligion, his moral looseness, and his lack of local patriotism, but when they were prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial dirt, they exploded. Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He did not make them understand his mission; he scarce tried to make them understand. His authority, as Woestijne's alter ego, was imposing on paper but feeble in action, and it was worthless.

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CHAPTER XIX

I

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glits-tens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undev-iating 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.

What Chicago is to Zenith, that Zenith is to Nautilus.

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, or between Nautilus and Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or Schenectady, 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 the quality of Nautilus is that no one has determined whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There are three houses with butlers and concubines, but on August evenings all save a few score citizens of Nautilus 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 cafes of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion com-

-225-

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 oppor-
tunity you'll have here to get in touch with all the movements for civic
weal."

He held out
in a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-
ink caricature showing Dr. Pickerbaugh 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 the 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 pop-
ular of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the lit-
erary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I was
in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregationalist Sunday-
schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on 'The Morality of
A 1 Health.' So Chum wrote this poem about me:

Zenith welcomes with high hurra!
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.

-237-

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 one man could 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 of 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 damn 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 down-stairs, 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

-261-

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor everything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A., M.D. nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thär she blows!) From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie our-sellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.

Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you're next. Let's have those cards saying you're coming.

This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:

> I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty. I think we may say it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was "undignified"! Can you beat it! I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!

## II

Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then Martin was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with a holy frenzy and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been a natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Picker-

-263-

Irving titude of ~~Clyde~~ Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics. He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh's figures on bad teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone, every person in the city has a one hundred and eighty per cent. chance of dying before the age of sixteen, and he could not startle much with alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, "Do you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine, and that they might all have been saved, yes sir, *saved* by a daily cold shower?"

For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.

To Pickerbaugh the existence of "variables," a word which Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used "control," was without significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, general immunity, or by anything save health-department campaigns for increased washing and *hygienic* morality, was to him inconceivable.

"Variables! Huh!" Pickerbaugh snorted. "Why, every enlightened man in the public service *knows* enough about the causes of disease -- matter now of acting on that knowledge."

When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they *used* in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw *Irving* Watters again, and returned to Picker-

-270-

He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she with-drew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains what-ever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small Midwestern de-nominational college. Verbena was going to college this autumn, but Or-chid, she explained, thought she "ought to stay home and help Mama take care of the chickabiddies."

"Meaning," Martin reflected, "that she can't even pass the Mugford Merriam entrance exams!" But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly enlarged as she whimpered, "Poor little me, probably I'll always stay here in Nautilus, while you oh, with your knowledge and your frightfully strong will-power, I know you're going to conquer the world!"

"Nonsense, I'll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much will-power?" you think I could still be labbing for years, like ditties that I was telling you about?

The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Picker-baugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the ragged grape-arbor a chapel to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler was a fountain, and over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible ponder-ing, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.

-276-

"Meet Ol' Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has hailed
as 'the two-fisted, fighting poet-doc, a scientist who puts his remark-
able discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a reg'lar old-fash-
ioned Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the theistic so-called scien-
tists who menace the foundations of our religion and liberties by their
aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving," chanted the
scholarly chronicler.

Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that a fabulous New
York magazine, with a million circulation, could be so much less intelli-
gent than the <u>Wheatsylvania Eagle</u>, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.

"Mart," he said, "do you feel competent to run this Department?"

"Why, uh -----"

"Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all
by yourself?"

"Why, uh -----"

"Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next con-
gressman from this district!"

"Really?"

"Looks that way. Boy, I'm going to take to the whole nation the Mes-
sage I've
tried to ram home here."

Martin got out quite a good "I congratulate you." He was so astonished
that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief
that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance. . . . . . He had
never encountered congressmen.

"I've just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans of
the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe they picked me
because they haven't anybody else to run this year. Ha, ha, ha!"

Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not the
right response, but he recovered and caroled on:

"I said to them, 'Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I

-286-

he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he caught her, over a highly
simplified French grammar, breathing "J'ay -- j'aye -- damn it, whatever
it is!"

He crowed, "Lee dear, if you want to go to France ----- Listen!
Some day we'll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on our backs,
and we'll see that ole country from end to end!"

Gratefully yet doubtfully: "You know, if you got bored, Sandy, you
could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would like to
tramp, just once, between high plastered walls, and come to a foolish lit-
tle cafe' and watch the men with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go
by. Really, do you think maybe we could?"

Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group, though she
possessed nothing of what Martin called their "elegance." She always had
at least one button missing, and she was no more to be depended upon in
the matter of washing behind her ears than when she had lived in a furnished
room in Zenith, and bathed had been a luxury to be prowled for and waited
for at the one bathroom in the housing house.

Mrs. Tredgold, best natured as she was least pious of women, adopted
her complete. Nautilus had always doubted the doted Clara Tredgold.
Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh said that she "took no part in any movement for
the betterment of the city." For years she had seemed content to grow her
roses, to make her startling hats, to cold-cream her lovely hands, and to
listen to her husband's improper stories -- and for years she had been a
lonely woman. In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to
her own. The two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading,
doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each
other.

With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with
Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic
whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent profan-

-289-

yellow tights at a civic pageant.

"Gosh, I may be up against it when I become director," he fretted.
"I wonder if there's people who become what's called 'successful' and then
hate it? Well anyway, I'll start a decent system of vital statistics in
the department before they get me. I won't lay down! I'll fight! I'll
make myself succeed!"

-297-

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. 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, "After all, good Resolution, 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, but he knew that, 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 lamb. 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 *nomination* of a national Secretary of Health. There was a considerable struggle over the appointment of Martin in his stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was bitter; *Irving* and *Gale* Watters whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was likely to extend the social-istic free clinics; F.X. Jordan had a sensible young doctor as his own

-299-

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
damned if he is! The world's always letting people get away with asinities because they're kind-hearted. And here I've sat back like a coward, not saying a word, and I watched them 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."

-321-

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 <u>dollar-chasers!</u>"

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, old man, 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 re-
search you want, <u>we want to leave you absolutely free</u> -- 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 ap-
pendicitis and publish it, that'd get somewhere, and you could sort of
bring in a mention of the clinic, and we'd all <u>receive</u> 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 <u>try to</u> 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 Dis-
eases*. He gave reprints to Rouncefield and to Angus. They said extremely
nice things which showed that they had not read the paper, and again sug-
gested 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:

-341-

tists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name things
and rename them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night;
he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair **complaisant** rumpled,
sitting **for hours** with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath.
Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett in-
**ranciole** instead of the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from Martin
so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sound-
ing in his **cave** experimentation.

-352-

sively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked over his
dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she politely awoke to
let him worry at her, "But look here now, I've got to keep up my research
at the same time. God I am so tired!"

She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in
March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, "I'm going
back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their
crazy physical chemistry. I've had enough, now I've done math," and
she commented, "Yes, I certainly would -- though isn't it funny how Dr.
Gottlieb always seems to be right?"

He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not
realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a lit-
tle dazed when America entered the war.

VI

Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Insti-
tute to the War Department.

All the members of the staff, except <u>Gottlieb and two others</u>, who declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to run out and buy nice uniforms, <u>and watch their fellow-officers on the street, to learn how to salute</u>.

Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin and
Wickett and Billy Smith were Captains. But the <u>musketeer</u> garçons had no
military rank whatever, nor any military duties except the polishing of
brown riding-boots and leather puttees, which the several warriors wore
as pleased their fancies or their legs. And the most belligerent of all,
Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at tea heroically slaughtered not only German
men but all their women and viperine children, was wickedly unrecognized
and had to make up a uniform for herself.

The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty Street
was Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was transferred to the
artillery, and sailed off to France.

-359-

lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at
all sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his staphylolysin
research, he gave what time he could to seeking out Gottlieb and warming his
vanity by reverent listening.

Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget Gottlieb
and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made him turn his war work
over to others, and *momm* confounded night and day in one insane flaming
blur as he realized that he really had something not unworthy of a Gott-
lieb, something at the mysterious source of life.

-375-

dawn.

Instantly he was tense again, with anticipation, and he lay awake till

For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under trees or
in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with enough reserve of energy
to support him till his experiment should have turned from overwhelming
glory into sane and entertaining routine.

-379-

the test-tube; perhaps it had no large value for human healing. He wanted
to know -- to know.

Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:

"Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling me about your
discovery and his splendid plans for you. I want to congratulate you with
all my heart, and to welcome you as a fellow department-head -- and you so
young -- only thirty-four, isn't it? What a magnificent future! Think,
Martin ---" Major Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride a chair.
"--- think of all you have ahead! If this work really pans out, there's
no limit to the honors that'll come to you, you lucky young dog! Acclaim
by scientific societies, any professorship you might happen to want,
prizes, the biggest men begging to consult you, a ripping place in soc-
iety!

"Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to Dr. Tubbs,
and I see no reason why you shouldn't come in with us, and we three run
things here to suit ourselves. Wasn't it *simply* too utterly dear of the
Director to be so eager to recognize and help you in every way! So cordial
-- and so helpful. Now you really understand him. And the three of us
--- Some day we might be able to erect a superstructure of cooperative
science which would control not only McGurk but every *mutually* insti-
tute and university scientific department in the *mutually* country, and so
produce really efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs retires, I have -- I'm
speaking with the most complete confidence -- I have some reason to suppose
that the Board of Trustees will consider me as his successor. Then, old
boy, *fellow* if this work succeeds, you and I can do things together!

"To be ever so frank, there are very few men in our world (think of
poor old Yeo!) who combine presentable personalities with first-rate
achievement, and if you'll just get over some of your abruptness and your
unwillingness to appreciate big executives and charming women (because,
thank God, you do wear your clothes well -- when you take the trouble!)

-387-

not have to do his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd
and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and weighty.
Department head Dr. Arrow Smith

He grinned, "Gosh, I'll bet Tubbs was disappointed. He'd figured
on signing all my papers with me and getting the credit. Now for this
Shiga experiment --- Poor Lee, she'll have to get used to my working
nights, I guess."

Leora kept to herself what she felt about it -- or at least most of
what she felt.

-403-

On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the messroom stewart on the _Pendown Castle_ died of what the skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and ruffled.

So the _Pendown Castle_ came to Blackwater, the capital and port of St. Hubert.

It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports a hundred thousand people -- English planters and clerks, Hindu road-makers, negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.

Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had relished to lash came on him shaving, and unheavily, lather smeared, and immediately immuon the lather was fantastically smeared with blood.

Today, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and rubber trees and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin chapels, colored washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots of silk-cotton trees, steamy heat and royal palms and the immortelle that fills the valleys with crimson; today it is all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled cane-quotations, against the unsparing sun.

Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster houses and incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus and balconied stores whose dark depths open without barrier from the stifling streets, has the harbor to one side and a swamp to the other. But behind it are the Penrith Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is Government House, looking to the winking sails.

-410-

the tourist and export business."

But Stokes of St. Swithin's secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Di-
rector of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and
consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about it?

-412-

bins had enough pencils, whether it would be quite all right for Dr. Hola-bird to receive the Lettish scientific mission this afternoon, so that Dr. Sholtheis might attend the Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the Host.

He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular in Washington, Gustaf Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmith who could not (whether because he was too big or too small) quite attain Gottlieb's concentrated indifference.

It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something which might eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb, "Can you stand by, with the stuff of salvation in your hands, and watch thousands of these unfortunate people dying in St. Hubert, and what is more, are you going to let the dreaded plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My dear man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and act!"

Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too diffi-dently, that this was the opportunity for the Institute to acquire world-fame.

Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb's own imagination aroused enough to visualize the far-off misery of the blacks in the canefields, he summoned Martin and remarked:

"It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you, Martin, to use the phage with only half your patients and keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions but without the phage, then you could make an absolute determination of its value, as complete as what we have of yellow fever, and then I would send you down to St. Hubert. Well, vat you t'ink?"

Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast between patients

-438-

"My name is Oliver Marchand."

"Yes?"

"Dr. Marchand --- I have my M.D. from Howard."

"Oh."

"May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask before I hurry off --- I have three cases from official families isolated at the bottom of the hill --- oh yes, in this crisis they permit a negro doctor to practise even among the whites! But ----- Dr. Stokes insists that D'Hérelle and you are right in calling bacteriophage an organism. But what about Bordet's contention that it's an enzyme?"

Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Marchand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague of race-fear, draw diagrams.

Marchand sighed, "I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any way I can? It is a great privilege to know Martin Arrowsmith and, through him, Max Gottlieb."

He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.

"I never thought a negro doctor ----- I wish people wouldn't keep showing me how much I don't know!" said Martin.

VI

While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones's administration, which proved to be almost anything that could be wrong.

A plague epidemic today, in a civilized land, is no longer an affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting "Bring out your dead! The fight against it is conducted like modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers. The ancient horror bears a face of efficiency. There are offices, card indices, reports of bacteriological examinations of patients and of rats. There is, or should be, a lone director with superlegal powers. There are large funds, education of the public by placard and news-

-454-

General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal assignment of Martin to St. Swithin's Parish, as medical officer with complete power. This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twyford, made his experiment possible.

He was invited to stay at Twyford's. His only trouble was the guarding of Leora. He did not know what he would encounter in St. Swithin's, while Penrith Lodge was as safe as any place on the island. When Leora insisted that, during his experiment, the cold thing which had stilled the laughter of Sondelius might come to him and he might need her, he satisfied her by promising that if there was a place for her in St. Swithin's, he would send for her.

Naturally, he was lying.

"Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she's not going to run risks!" he vowed.

He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier butler, with Dr. Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.

## VII

In St. Swithin's Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken cane-fields. Here Cecil Twyford, that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre and interpreted the law.

His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot humming plain. The house was old and low, of thick stone and plaster walls; the paneled rooms were lined with the china, the portraits, and the swords of Twyfords for three hundred years; and between the wings was a walled garden dazzling with hibiscus.

Twyford led Martin through the low cool hall and introduced him to five great sons and to his mother, who was now mistress of the house.

"Have you tea?" said Twyford. "Our American guest will be down in a moment."

He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn that since for generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at this seemly hour, no panic should prevent their going on drinking it at that hour.

-469-

had become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue of the *Blackwater Guardian* after the quarantine was raised, "the savior of all our lives." He was the universal hero. If Sondelius had helped to save them, had *him* Sondelius not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention of the Lord, as the earnest old negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord surely sent him?

No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease without phage.

When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was "feeling seedy," that he had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:

> The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk's agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to us apprize us far more that *do your own* modest report what a really sensational success you have had. You have done what few other men living could *do*, both established the value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have added and still more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk Institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.

"Established the value -- rats! I about half made the tests," sighed Martin, and: "Department! I've given too many orders here. Sick of authority. I want to get back to my lab and start all over again."

It came to him that now he would probably have ten thousand a year.... Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant dinners.... For what could he use money now?

-482-

CHAPTER XXXVII

I

Not all, not quite all, of Martin's life was a hermit devotion to abstruse research. He went with Terry Wickett on prowling adventures no more edifying than his noctambulations with Clif Mm Clawson in Zenith; he was invited to hearty home-dinners by Dr. Nicholas Yeo; and with Billy Smith he discovered restaurants, Syrian, Basque, Alsatian. If the Europeanized Dr. Smith was not so good a bio-chemist as Terry, he was a better judge of sauces and fugues and communism and novels.

Leora, Gottlieb, Sondelius, and Terry had been the only forces which had drawn Martin from complete absorption in work to the kindliness of common humanity, and with three of them lost, he was in peril of becoming, at least for this intense and egotistic period of achievement, a machine performing possessed exquisitely of every device for uncommuniqué his tastes except any reason for doing anything at all.

Terry had far more nearly than Martin the gorgeous ripe ease of gen-
lus. It was a Gottliebian jest of the gods that Martin should long for
accomplishment with such close fierce ness that he was in danger of racing
on without ever lifting his head to discover whither he was going.

But he was daily more conscious of power. He had lost apprehension
that he might be discharged from the Institute; lost too the inspiration
merely to convince the high ones that he could "make goods."
The sureness

-505-

He made a sound of surprise.

"Oh, I'm not going to do the weeping mother. And I don't know whether I'm glad or furious, though I do believe I'd like to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven't I? I really do like you, you know! I don't want you to desert me, and you would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place."

"Couldn't we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?"

"Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it."

Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about taking a house near Birdies' Rest to the extent of doing it.

-512-

"I --- Do you mean --- Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I
think perhaps I would."

"Ataboy! I'll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I'll show you
folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes on. Well,
it's been a great pleezhure to meet Mart's Missus, and we will now close
with singing 'Till We Meet Again' or 'Au Reservoir.'"

When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, "Sweet, I can't do it!
The man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take care of him and let me
go to bed. Besides: you two won't want me -- you'll want to talk over
old times, and I'd only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now,
I ought to go to bed early."

"Oh, Joy, Clif 'd be awfully offended, and he's always been so decent
to me and --- And you've asked me so often about my cub days. Don't
you want," plaintively, "to hear about 'em?"

"Very well, dear. I'll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but I
warn you I sha'n't be a success."

They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be raucous,
would drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back. But when he appeared for
dinner he was agonizingly polite and flowery -- till he became slightly
drunk. When Martin said "Damn," Clif reproved him with, "Of course I'm
only a hick, but I don't think a lady like the Princess here would like
you to cuss."

And, "Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to marry the real
bon-ton article."

And, "Oh maybe it didn't cost something to furnish this dining-room,
oh not a-tall!"

And, "Champagne, heh? Well, you're certainly doing poor old Clif
proud. Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to tell his valay to
tell my secretary the address of your bootlegger, will you?"

In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant vocab-

-524-

McGurk: He had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were too expensive and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had contrived a method of using mice infected with pneumococcus and ------"

"Oh, what's the use of my telling you this, Slim? You're not interested, or you'd have been up here at work with me, months ago. You've chosen between Joyce and me. All right, but you can't have both."

Martin snarled, "I'm very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett," snatched up a fur coat and cap, and slammed out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow, blundering in darkness against stumps, he knew the agony of his last hour, the hour of failure.

"I've lost Terry, now (though I won't stand his impertinence!). I've lost everybody, and I've never really had Joyce. I'm completely alone. And I can only half work! I'm through. They'll never let me get to work again!"

Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not going to give up.

He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, "You old grouch, we got to stick together!"

Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far from tears; and as they roughly patted each other's shoulders they growled, "Fine pair of fools, scrapping just because we're tired!"

"I will come and work with you, somehow!" Martin swore. "I'll get a six-months leave from the Institute, and have Joyce stay at some hotel near here, or do something. Gee! Back to real work......Work!.... I have been getting my teeth into bacterial mutation, but I can't get absorbed in it. Imagine working evenings and waiting for Latham Ireland to come pus-syfooting in! Now tell me: When I come up here, what d' you say we ------"

They talked till dawn.

-527-

Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion, and Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.

Martin stammered, "W-why, I'll have to think it over. Sort of unexpected ......"

The rest of the evening Holabird ~~was~~ so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, coördinate, standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from trou-sers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin's silence. At parting he chanted, "Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decis-ion tomorrow. By the way, I think we'll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she's been useful but/she considers herself indespensable. ~~but~~ now that's a detail...... Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy! You've grown and calmed down, and you've widened your interests so much, this past year!"

In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.

"Isn't it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven't I perhaps helped, just a little?"

Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, ~~all of~~ of a little, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, ~~this soft and~~ smothering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur -- ~~his~~ own sort! -- facing the winter. He tried to look as though he were med-~ but ~~itating, in an awed, appreciative, and polite manner,~~ he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the slaughter. Slowly: "Would you really like to see me Director?"

"Of course! All that ...... Oh, you know; I don't just mean the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish good."

-529-

without it. He marched into Joyce's room, irritated by its snobbishness of
discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat
brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:

"I'm not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute -- and
Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this pom-
pous fakery of giving orders and ------"

"Mart! Listen! Don't you want your son to be proud of you?"

"Um. Well ------ No, not if he's to be proud of me for being a
stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker ------"

"Please don't be vulgar."

"Why not? Matter of fact, I haven't been vulgar enough lately. What
I ought to do is to go to Birdies' Rest right now, and work with Terry."

"I wish I had some way of showing you ------ Oh, for a 'scientist'
do
you/have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see
just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old
argument. It's just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired high-
brows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they're getting
strength to conquer life, when they're merely running away from it."

"No. Terry has his place in the country *moralist* only because he can
live cheaper there. If we -- if he could afford it, he'd probably be right
here in town, with garcons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Direc-
tor Holabird, by God -- and no Director Arrowsmith!"

"Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wick-
ett!"

"Now by God let me tell you ------"

"Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a 'by God' in
every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scien-
tific vocabulary?"

"Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I'm think-
ing of joining Terry."

Insert on page 535

As the chauffeur maneuvered the car among the stumps of the clearing, for a moment Joyce and Martin stared at each other, a moment their visions were shaky with tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which borrowed for every little jest, every remembered tenderness, every Kentish twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he began to recall that he had been doing an experiment