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THE MODERN LIBRARY

OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS

ARROWSMITH

"» \*uaum JB

The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE modern library, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price.

Arrowsmith

BY

Sinclair Lewis

THE

MODERN LIBRARY

NEW YORK

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COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HARCOURT, BRACE & CO., INC,

COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, BY THE DBSIGNER PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC

_^g^y!ik«»iwiifa
Random House is the	PUBL I S HE R OF
THE MODERN	LIBRARY
BENNETT A. CBRF • DONALD S. KLOPFER • ROBERT K. HAAS
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Parkway Printing Company	Bound by H. Wolff

To Dr. Paul H. de Kruif I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological ana medical ma- terial in this tale but equally for his help in the planning of the fable itself — for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of companionship while wording on the boo\, in the United States, in the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontaine- bleau. I wish I could reproduce our tal\s along the way, and the laboratory afternoons, the restau- rants at night, and the dec\ at dawn as we steamed into tropic ports.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

ARROWSMITH

CHAPTER I

THE driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of four- teen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela — the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.

She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered, "Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess he'd take us in."

"Nobody ain't going to take us in," she said. "We're going on jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing!"

She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire, alone.

That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.

ii

Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson's office, a boy was reading "Gray's Anatomy." His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.

There was a suspicion in Elk Mills — now, in 1897, a dowdy red-brick village, smelling of apples — that this brown-leather ad- justable seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a barber's chair. There was also a belief that its proprietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.

Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call he took charge — though what there was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of that quer- ulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic ex- pression of energy, of independence, and a hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.

Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as "Jewish," and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of Primitive Britain, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.

It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to be- come a Great Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging stone- bruises, dissecting squirrels, and explaining the astounding and secret matters to be discovered at the back of the physiology, but he was not completely free from an ambition to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the son of the Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the section on the lymphatic system, and he muttered the long and perfectly in- comprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty room.

It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vicker- son, facing on Main Street above the New York Clothing Bazaar. On one side of it was the foul waiting-room, on the other, the Doc's bedroom. He was an aged widower; for what he called "female fixings" he cared nothing; and the bedroom

4

with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sani- tation.

This central room was at once business office, consultation- room, operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoological collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills — a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skele- ton's jaw.

On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished board. Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts which the Doc was always swearing he would "collect from those dead-beats right now," and which he would never, by any chance, at any time, collect from any of them. A year or two — a decade or two — a century or two — they were all the same to the plodding doctor in the bee-murmuring town.

The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.

The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of shoe-boxes in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to ques- tioning and adventure for Martin Arrowsmith.

in

The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin would not have to help him into bed.

But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the hall to his bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the

5

Doc open the lower part of the washstand, where he kept his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long gurgle the invisible Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the doors shut. Still good. Only one drink. If he came into the consultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing in the bed- room. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.

The Doc's step was much livelier when he loomed into the office, a gray mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a form vast and unreal and undefined, like a cloud taking for the moment a likeness of humanity. With the brisk attack of one who wishes to escape the discussion of his guilt, the Doc rum- bled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:

"What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door un- locked." He gulped slightly; he smiled to show that he was being humorous — people had been known to misconstrue the Doc's humor.

He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was talking about:

"Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor. Locate in Zenith and make five thousand dollars year — much as United States Senator! Set a high goal. Don't let things slide. Get training. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin. Knowledge! I'm plug doc — got chick nor child — nobody — old drunk. But you — leadin' physician. Make five thousand dollars year.

"Murray woman's got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for her. Wants somebody hold her hand. Road's damn' disgrace. Cul- vert's out, beyond the grove. 'Sgrace.

"Endocarditis and —

"Training, that's what you got t' get. Fundamentals. Know chemistry. Biology. I nev' did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she's got gastric ulcer. Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both eat too much.

"Why they don't repair that culvert — And don't be a booze- hoister like me, either. And get your basic science. I'll splain."

The boy, normal village youngster though he was, given to

stoning cats and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained some- thing of the intoxication of treasure-hunting as the Doc strug- gled to convey his vision of the pride of learning, the universal- ity of biology, the triumphant exactness of chemistry. A fat old man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his grammar was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his rival, good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin a vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and stink and of seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had ever beheld.

The Doc's voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair, blurry of eye and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to bed, but the Doc insisted:

"Don't need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don't appreciate but — Old man now. Giving you all I've learned. Show you collection. Only museum in whole county. Scientif pioneer."

A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the speci- mens in the brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and chunks of mica; the embryo of a two-headed calf, the gallstones removed from a respectable lady whom the Doc enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood before the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.

"Looka that butterfly. Name is porthesia chrysorrhoea. Doc Needham couldn't tell you that! He don't know what butterflies are called! He don't care if you get trained. Remember that name now?" He turned on Martin. "You payin' attention? You interested? Huh? Oh, the devil! Nobody wants to know about my museum — not a person. Only one in county but — I'm an old failure."

Martin asserted, "Honest, it's slick!"

"Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It's an appendix. First one ever took out 'round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the first 'pendectomy in this neck of the woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain't — so big — but it's start. I haven't put away money like Doc Needham, but I started first election — I started it!"

He collapsed in a chair, groaning, "You're right. Got to sleep. All in." But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on his desk, and looked back doubtfully. "Want

to give you something— start your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old man?"

He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.

CHAPTER If

THE state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Mid- western in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till i860.

The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engi- neering, Provencal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Mat- thew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia \ymoparalytica, and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money- raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.

It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want — or what they are told they want — is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle

a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly inter- changeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in numbers and influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have created an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger and brisker and purer.

11

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was already brisk.

Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds mur- mured that he "looked so romantic," but as this was before the invention of sex and the era of petting-parties, they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he was shy. He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he did not make an occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile pride it was to smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.

The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did not exist. Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgotten; Martin's father and mother were dead, leaving him only enough money for his arts and medical courses. The purpose of life was chemistry and physics and the prospect of biology next year.

His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the depart- ment of chemistry, who was universally known as "Encore." Edwards' knowledge of the history of chemistry was immense. He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all their researches. Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.

This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular At Home's. He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being quietly humorous for the benefit of Martin and half a dozen other fanatical young chemists, and baiting Dr. Norman Brum- fit, the instructor in English. The room was full of heartiness and beer and Brumfit.

Every university faculty must have a Wild Man to provide thrills and to shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so energeti-

10

cally virtuous an institution as Winnemac there was one Wild Man, and he was Norman Brumfit. He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and social- istic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in form, tonight. He asserted that whenever a man showed genius, it could be proved that he had Jewish blood. Like all discussions of Judaism at Winnemac, this led to the mention of Max Gottlieb, profes- sor of bacteriology in the medical school.

Professor Gottlieb was the mystery of the University. It was known that he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany, and that his work on immunology had given him fame in the East and in Europe. He rarely left his small brown weedy house except to return to his laboratory, and few students outside of his classes had ever identified him, but everyone had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered about him. It was believed that he was the son of a German prince, that he had immense wealth, that he lived as sparsely as the other professors only because he was doing terrifying and costly ex- periments which probably had something to do with human sacrifice. It was said that he could create life in the laboratory, that he could talk to the monkeys which he inoculated, that he had been driven out of Germany as a devil-worshiper or an anarchist, and that he secretly drank real champagne every eve- ning at dinner.

It was the tradition that faculty-members did not discuss their colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be re- garded as anybody's colleague. He was impersonal as the chill northeast wind. Dr. Brumfit rattled:

"I'm sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the claims of science, but with a man like Gottlieb — I'm prepared to be- lieve that he knows all about material forces, but what astounds me is that such a man can be blind to the vital force that creates all others. He says that knowledge is worthless unless it is proven by rows of figures. Well, when one of you scientific sharks can take the genius of a Ben Jonson and measure it with a yard- stick, then I'll admit that we literary chaps, with our doubtless absurd belief in beauty and loyalty and the world o' dreams, are off on the wrong track!"

Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant

II

and he enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Pro- fessor Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness made a sound curiously like "Oh, hell!" and took the conversa- tion away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore would have sug- gested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was a "crapehanger" who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of making new ones of his own. But tonight, in detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb's long, lonely, failure-burdened effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his diabolic pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of Ehrlich or Sir Almroth Wright. He spoke of Gottlieb's great book, "Immunology," which had been read by seven-ninths of all the men in the world who could possibly understand it — the number of these being nine.

The party ended with Mrs. Edwards' celebrated doughnuts. Martin tramped toward his boarding-house through a veiled spring night. The discussion of Gottlieb had roused him to a reasonless excitement. He thought of working in a laboratory at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had never seen the man, but he knew that Gottlieb's laboratory was in the Main Medical Building. He drifted toward the distant medical campus. The few people whom he met were hurrying with midnight timidity. He entered the shadow of the Anatomy Building, grim as a barracks, still as the dead men lying up there in the dissect- ing-room. Beyond him was the turreted bulk of the Main Medi- cal Building, a harsh and blurry mass, high up in its dark wall a single light. He started. The light had gone out abruptly, as though an agitated watcher were trying to hide from him.

On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after, appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart. His swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-bridged and thin. He did not hurry, like the belated home-bodies. He was unconscious of the world. He looked at Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to himself, his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in the shadows, himself a shadow.

He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor, yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant on his breast.

12

X III

On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was .in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more pic- turesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the other departments go to their rooms to peer into their books. But also as an academic graduate, with a training in the basic sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom had but a high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room Lutheran college among the cornfields.

For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operat- ing, of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more immediate, macabre fear, he thought of the dissecting-room and the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by hooks, like rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of brine in the dark base- ment; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul the cadavers out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and to scold them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.

There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to recog- nize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him — He halted in Gottlieb's private laboratory, a small, tidy apart- ment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-tempera- ture bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.

If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously precise

13

chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and delicate were the scientist's thin hands among the papers. He looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.

"Veil? Yes?"

"Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I'm a medic freshman, Winnemac B.A. I'd like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I've had a lot of chemistry — "

"No. It is not time for you."

"Honest, I know I could do it now."

"There are two kinds of students that the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind — they are very few! — they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become sci- entists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ulti- mate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the po- tatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year."

"But honestly, with my chemistry — "

"Have you taken physical chemistry?"

"No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic."

"Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug- store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year."

Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, "Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?"

"Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart's dress — and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips!

Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?"

"Nobody. I was just wondering," Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:

"I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I'll learn some physical chemistry. I'll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I'll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he'll look foolish in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won't take sick, first time I go into the dis- secting-room. ... I want to take bacteriology — now!"

He recalled Gottlieb's sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.

"I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What is Truth?" he puzzled.

IV

Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other medics, calling them "Billy" and "Ike" and "the Parson," and regarding them as he had regarded animals in biology. The dissecting- room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of hard plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor seemed to cling about him outside the dissecting-room; but he smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he was exploring arteries with youthful and altogether unholy joy.

His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known to the class by a similar but different name.

Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of the Sanctification Bible and Missions School. He had played football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was a bright and

15

happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed away sin and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to have a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the de- baucheries of card-playing.

Martin found himself viewing "Billy," their cadaver — an un- dersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his petrified, vealy face — as a machine, fascinating, complex, beauti- ful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble belief in man's divinity and immortality. He might have kept his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would not let him alone. Ira believed that he could bring even medical students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and un- lovely hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

"Mart, my son," he roared, "do you realize that in this, what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?"

"Huh! Souls. I haven't found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do you believe that junk?"

Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laugh- ter, slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored, "Brother, you've got to do better than that to get Ira's goat! You think you've got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts. You haven't — you've only got indigestion. What you need is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y.M.C.A. and I'll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little agnostic, here you have a chance to see the Almighty's handiwork, and all you grab out of it is a feeling that you're real smart. Buck up, young Arrowsmith. You don't know how funny you are, to a fellow that's got a serene faith!"

To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him, very painfully, upon the head, and amiably resumed work, while Martin danced with irritation.

16

In college Martin had been a "barb" — he had not belonged to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been "rushed," but he had resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men from the larger cities. Now that most of his Arts classmates had departed to insurance offices, law schools, and banks, he was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi, the chief medical fraternity.

Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night, and a good deal of singing about When I Die Don't Bury Me at All; yet for three years Digams had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery. This autumn the Digams elected Ira Hinkley, because they had been gaining a reputation for dissipation — girls were said to have been smuggled in late at night — and no company which included the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could possibly be taken by the Dean as immoral, which was an advantage if they were to continue comfortably immoral.

Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In a fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in common. When Ira found that Martin was hesitating, he in- sisted, "Oh, come on in! Digam needs you. You do study hard — I'll say that for you — and think what a chance you'll have to influence The Fellows for good."

(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The Fel- lows, and frequently he used the term in prayers at the Y.M.C.A.)

"I don't want to influence anybody. I want to learn the doctor trade and make six thousand dollars a year."

"My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when you try to be cynical! When you're as old as I am, you'll understand that the glory of being a doctor is that you can teach folks high ideals while you soothe their tortured bodies."

"Suppose they don't want my particular brand of high ideals?"

"Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?"

"No! Quit! Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I ever met you take the rottenest advantages. You can lick anybody in the class, and when I think of how you're going to bully the poor

17

heathen when you get to be a missionary, and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!"

The prospect of leaving his sheltered den for the patronage of the Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till Angus Duer accepted election to Digamma Pi that Martin him- self came in.

Duer was one of the few among Martin's classmates in the academic course who had gone on with him to the Winnemac medical school. Duer had been the valedictorian. He was a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse. So brilliant was his work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic. Martin compared Angus Duer to a razor blade on a January morning; he hated him, was uncomfortable with him, and envied him. He knew that in biology Duer had been too busy passing examinations to ponder, to get any concept of biology as a whole. He knew that Duer was a tricky chemist, who neatly and swiftly completed the ex- periments demanded by the course and never ventured on orig- inal experiments which, leading him into a confused land of wondering, might bring him to glory or disaster. He was sure that Duer cultivated his manner of chill efficiency to impress instructors. Yet the man stood out so bleakly from a mass of students who could neither complete their experiments nor ponder nor do anything save smoke pipes and watch football- practice that Martin loved him while he hated him, and almost meekly he followed him into Digamma Pi.

Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty class jester, and one "Fatty" Pfaff were initiated into Digamma Pi together. It was a noisy and rather painful performance, which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but Fatty PfafT was in squeaking, billowing, gasping terror.

Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most useful to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything, he knew nothing, he could memorize nothing; and anxiously he forgave the men who got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him. They persuaded him that mustard plasters were excellent for colds—

18

solicitously they gathered about him, affixed an enormous plaster to his back, and afterward fondly removed it. They concealed the ear of a cadaver in his nice, clean, new pocket handkerchief when he went to Sunday supper at the house of a girl cousin in Zenith. ... At supper he produced the handkerchief with a flourish.

Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between the sheets — soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was the perfect person to whom to sell useless things. Clif Clawson, who combined a brisk huckstering with his jokes, sold to Fatty for four dollars a History of Medicine which he had bought, second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read it, never conceivably could read it, the possession of the fat red book made him feel learned. But Fatty's greatest beneficence to Di- gamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. He was always seeing them emerging at night from the dissecting-room windows. His classmates took care that he should behold a great many of them flitting about the halls of the fraternity.

VI

Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife- gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps, and cigarette stubs.. Above, there were four men to a bed- room, and the beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.

For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bed- room walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing. In Martin's room was a complete skeleton. He and his room- mates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such a genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told G. U. stories and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the installment plan. . . . Later the salesman was less genial.

Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an earnest second-year medic named Irving Watters.

Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in

19

demonstrations could not have done better than to have engaged Irving Watters. He was always and carefully dull; smilingly, easily, dependably dull. If there was any cliche which he did not use, it was because he had not yet heard it. He believed in mor- ality— except on Saturday evenings; he believed in the Episco- pal Church — but not the High Church; he believed in the Con- stitution, Darwinism, systematic exercise in the gymnasium, and the genius of the president of the university.

Among them, Martin most liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the clown of the fraternity-house, he was given to raucous laughter, he clogged and sang meaningless songs, he even practiced on the cornet, yet he was somehow a good fellow and solid, and Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley, his fear of Angus Duer, his pity for Fatty PfafT, his distaste for the amiable dull- ness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to some- thing living and experimenting. At least Clif had reality; the reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was Clif who would box with him; Clif who — though he loved to sit for hours smoking, grunting, magnificently loafing — could be per- suaded to go for a five-mile walk.

And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans at the Reverend Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily and sweetly corrective.

In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his merriment at such of Martin's ideas as had not been accepted in Pottsburg Christian College, but in the fraternity-house he was a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their profanity. After three years on a backwoods football team he still believed with unflinching optimism that he could sterilize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant.

Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.

He was full of statistics. Where he got them did not matter to him; figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in the Miscellany Column of the Sanctification Herald were equally valid. He announced at supper table, "Clif, it's a wonder to me how as bright a fella as you can go on sucking that dirty old pipe. D'you realize that 67.9 per cent of all women who go to the operating table have husbands who smoke tobacco?"

"What the devil would they smoke?" demanded Clif.

20

"Where'd you get those figures?" from Martin.

"They came out at a medical convention in Philadelphia in 1902," Ira condescended. "Of course I don't suppose it'll make any difference to a bunch of wise galoots like you that some day you'll marry a nice bright little woman and ruin her life with your vices. Sure, keep right on — fine brave virile bunch! A poor #eakling preacher like me wouldn't dare do anything so brave as smoke a pipe!"

He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, "Ira makes me want to get out of medicine and be an honest harness maker."

"Aw, gee now, Mart," Fatty Pfaff complained, "you oughtn't to cuss Ira out. He's awful sincere."

"Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!"

Thus they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a superior silence that made Martin nervous. In the study of the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.

2$

CHAPTER III

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 Win- nemac 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 Lud- wig 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 amphitheater 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 circula- tion, was peering to the right to find 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 master- piece 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.

Martin had been reading Max Gottlieb's scientific papers — as much of them as he could read, with their morass of mathemati- cal symbols — and from them he had a conviction that experi- ments should be something dealing with the foundations of life and death, with the nature of bacterial infection, with the chem- istry of bodily reactions. When Robertshaw chirped about fussy little experiments, standard experiments, maiden-aunt experi- ments, Martin was restless. In college he had felt that prosody

22

and Latin Composition were futile, and he had looked'forward to the study of medicine as illumination. Now, in melancholy worry about his own unreasonableness, he found that he was developing the same contempt for Robertshaw's rules of the thumb — and for most of the work in anatomy.

The professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself an anatomy, a dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of nerves and blood vessels and bones. Stout had precise and enormous knowledge; in his dry voice he could repeat more facts about the left little toe than you would have thought anybody would care to learn regarding the left little toe.

No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a decent normal doctor who made a good living and did not worry about reading papers at medical associations, of remem- bering anatomical terms. But no matter what they thought, they all ground at learning the lists of names which enable a man to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Person, with a market value of five dollars an hour. Unknown sages had invented rimes which enabled them to memorize. At supper — the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana layer-cake — the Freshmen earnestly repeated after a senior:

On old Olympus' topmost top

A fat-eared German viewed a hop.

Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world's noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they had become practicing physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.

In Dr. Stout's anatomy lectures there were no disturbances, but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest of them was the insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on which the two virginal and unhappy co-eds worked. The real excitement during Freshman year was the incident of Clif Claw- son and the pancreas.

23

Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because he was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall of Main Medical without shouting, "How's your vermiform appendix functioning this morning?" or "I bid thee a lofty greet- ing, old pediculosis." With booming decorum he presided at class meetings (indignant meetings to denounce the proposal to let the "aggies" use the North Side Tennis Courts), but in pri- vate life he was less decorous.

The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the su- preme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manu- facturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the presi- dent was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bank- ers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson's dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverendy held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas.

Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker's hat.

Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Win- nemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker's hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess.

Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, "This is outrageous! I'm going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine."

Martin protested, "Cut it out. You don't want to get him fired?"

"He ought to be!"

24

Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, "Will you kindly shut up?" and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.

in

When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here, listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat- eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfafr" or Irving Watters, then Martin had relief in what he considered debauches. Actually they were extremely small debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a clear brain, they afterward seemed tragic.

His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how much bad beer he drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated than in his normal state. Martin sank or rose to Clif's buoyancy, while Clif rose or sank to Martin's speculativeness. As they sat in a back-room, at a table glistening with beer-glass rings, Clif shook his finger and babbled, "You're only one 'at gets me, Mart. You know with all the hell-raising, and all the talk about bein' c'm- mercial that I pull on these high boys like Ira Stinkley, I'm jus' sick o' c'mmercialism an' -bunk as you are."

"Sure. You bet," Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness. "You're jus' like me. My God, do you get it — dough-face like Irving Watters or heartless climber like Angus Duer, and then old Gottlieb! Ideal of research! Never bein' content with what seems true! Alone, not carin' a damn, square-toed as a captain on the bridge, working all night, getting to the bottom of things!"

"Thash stuff. That's my idee, too. Lez have 'nother beer. Shake you for it!" observed Clif Clawson.

Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and the University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roaring, steel interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students went for their forays. To say that one had "gone into town last night" was a matter for winks and leers. But with Angus Duer, Martin discovered a new Zenith.

25

At supper Duer said abruptly, "Come into town with me and hear a concert."

For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was illimit- ably ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That the blood- less and acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to fiddlers was astounding to him. He discovered that Duer had enthusiasm for two composers, called Bach and Beethoven, pre- sumably Germans, and that he himself did not yet comprehend all the ways of the world. On the interurban, Duer's gravity loosened, and he cried, "Boy, if I hadn't been born to carve up innards, I'd have been a great musician! Tonight I'm going to lead you right into Heaven!"

Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vast gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became achingly long-winded. He exulted, "I'm going to have 'em all — the fame of Max Gottlieb — I mean his ability — and the lovely music and lovely women — Golly! I'm going to do big things. And see the world. . . . Will this piece never quit?"

IV

It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline Fox.

Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opin- ionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was stay- ing on, ostensibly to take a graduate course in English, actually to avoid going back home. She considered herself a superb tennis player; she played it with energy and voluble swoopings and large lack of direction. She believed herself to be a connoisseur of literature; the fortunates to whom she gave her approval were Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thackeray, none of whom she had read for five years. She had often reproved Martin for his inappreciation of Howells, for wearing flannel shirts, and for his failure to hand her down from street-cars in the manner of a fiction hero. In college, they had gone to dances together, though as a dancer Martin was more spirited than accurate, and his partners sometimes had difficulty in deciding just what he

26

was trying to dance. He liked Madeline's tall comeliness and her vigor; he felt that with her energetic culture she was somehow "good for him." During this year, he had scarcely seen her. He thought of her late in the evenings, and planned to telephone to her, and did not telephone. But as he became doubtful about medicine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday after- noon of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.

From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant rolling hills. In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the stunted oaks and brilliant birches, there is the adventurousness of the frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and told each other they were going to conquer the world.

He complained, "These damn' medics — "

"Oh, Martin, do you think 'damn' is a nice word?" said Madeline.

He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.

"Well — these darn' studes, they aren't trying to learn science; they're simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowl- edge that'll enable them to cash in. They don't talk about saving lives but about 'losing cases' — losing dollars! And they wouldn't even mind losing cases if it was a sensational operation that'd advertise 'em! They make me sick! How many of 'em do you find that're interested in the work Ehrlich is doing in Germany — yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and now! Gott- lieb's just taken an awful fall out of Wright's opsonin theory."

"Has he, really?"

"Has he! I should say he had! And do you get any of the medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, 'Oh, sure, science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,' and then they begin to argue about whether they can make more money if they locate in a big city or a town, and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow and lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought to hear Irve Watters. He's just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in medicine, is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner, near a trolley car junction, with a 'phone number that'll be easy for patients to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate I believe I'll be a ship's doctor. You see the worlr1.

27

that way, and at least you aren't racing up and down the boat trying to drag patients away from some rival doc that has an office on another deck!"

"Yes, I know; it's dreadful the way people don't have ideals about their work. So many of the English grad students just want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship the way I do."

It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think that she was a superior person quite as much as himself, but he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:

"At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical, doesn't one! Think how much more money — no, I mean how much more social position and power for doing good a success- ful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter, and don't know what's going on in the world. Look at a surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb — somebody pointed him out to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I certainly thought he could stand a hair-cut."

Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, re- ligious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plan- tains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm of his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked, "Yes, I see now, I see," without stating what it was she saw. "Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine — such integrity."

"Honest? Do you think I have?"

"Oh, indeed I do, and I'm sure you're going to have a won- derful future. And I'm so glad you aren't commercial, like the others. Don't mind what they say!"

He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understand- ing spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman — fresh color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the right mate for him. Under his training she would learn the distinc- tion between vague "ideals" and the hard sureness of science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and

28

determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man, to be, in fact, "worthy of her."

"Oh, Madeline," he mourned, "you're so darn' lovely!"

She glanced at him, timidly.

He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her. It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of her jaw, while she struggled and begged, "Oh, don't!" They did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis, that the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their voices and without impatience now she heard his denunciation of Pro- fessor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to her re- marks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brum- fit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boarding-house she sighed, "I wish I could ask you to come in, but it's almost sup- pertime and — Will you call me up some day?"

"You bet I will!" said Martin, according to the rules for amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.

He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now re- proving, now warm with trust in him. "I love her! I love her! I'll 'phone her — Wonder if I dare call her up as early as eight in the morning?"

But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus to think of ladies' eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the publicity of her boarding-house porch, crowded with co-eds, red cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year's final examinations.

At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book; geniuses for detail had labored through the volume and marked with red pencil the problems most often set in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the ques- tions they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their tem-

29

pies in the endeavor to give the right answer before Angus Duer should read it to them out of the textbook.

In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty Pfaff.

Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had to pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him the annoyed affection they might have had for a second-hand motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the examination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with them.

The night before his special examination they kept him at it till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity. They repeated lists — lists — lists to him; they shook their fists in his mournful red round face and howled, "Damn you, will you remember that the bicuspid valve is the same as the mitral valve and not another one?" They ran about the room, holding up their hands and wailing, "Won't he never remember nothing about nothing?" and charged back to purr with fictive calm, "Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to this, quietly, will yuh, and try," coaxingly, "do try to remember one thing, anyway!"

They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.

When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had forgotten everything he had learned.

"There's nothing for it," said the president of Digamma Pi. "He's got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yesterday. It's a lulu. It'll cover enough of the questions so he'll get through."

Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: "Gee, I don't like to cheat. I don't think a fellow that can't get through an exam- ination had hardly ought to be allowed to practice medicine. That's what my Dad said."

They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who wasn't exactly sure what the effect might be but

30

who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firm- ness, growled, "I'm going to stick this crib in your pocket — look, here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief."

"I won't use it. I don't care if I fail," whimpered Fatty.

"That's all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God knows — " The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. "—God knows you can't take it in through your head!"

They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.

"Is it possible he's going to be honest?" marveled Clif Claw- son.

"Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this ole frat'll never have another goat like Fatty," grieved the president.

They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his nose — and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.

They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fra- ternity, piously assuring one another, "He'll use it — it's all right — he'll get through or get hanged!"

He got through.

VI

Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin's restless doubtings than by Fatty's idiocy, Clif Clawson's raucousness, Angus Duer's rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley's nagging.

During the strain of study for examinations Martin was pe- culiarly vexing in regard to "laying in the best quality medical terms like the best quality sterilizers — not for use but to impress your patients." As one, the Digams suggested, "Say, if you don't like the way we study medicine, we'll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you won't be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look

V

here! We don't tell you how you ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!"

Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, "We'll admit we're simply carpenters, and you're a great investigator. But there's several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How's your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who's the premier of Austro-Hungary?"

Martin struggled, "I don't pretend to know anything — except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He's got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they're simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn't religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don't you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don't you — "

Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, "Praying in the lab! I'll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bac- teriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!"

"Damn it, listen!" Martin wailed. "I tell you, you fellows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a man — "

So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.

When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, "Look here, old son. We're all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you're so confoundedly honest, why don't you get out?"

He left Martin to agonize, "He's right. I've got to shut up or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What am I going to do?"

VII

Angus Duer's studiousness and his reverence for correct man- ners were alike offended by Clif's bawdy singing, Clif's howling conversation, Clif's fondness for dropping things in people's soup, and Clif's melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension

32

of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped, "Will you kindly not make so much racket?"

"I'll make all the damn' racket I damn' please!" Clif asserted, and a feud was on.

Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, "Darn him, he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out of Digam, that's a cinch, and it won't be me!"

He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who got out. He said that the Digams were a "bunch of bum sports; don't even have a decent game of poker," but he was fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin resigned from the fraternity with him, planned to room with him the coming autumn.

Clif's blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had nc reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was demand- ing, "How much chuh pay for those shoes — must think you're a Vanderbilt!" or "D'l see you walking with that Madeline Fox femme — what chuh tryin' to do?" But Martin was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next year he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not be bothered.

That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in Montana.

He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators, then down and to another pole.

They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple — they removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand.

33

Climbing all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a miracle.

He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad- beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? "I'm here!" he gloated.

The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled elec- trical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scien- tists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at the University save Max Gottlieb.

He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb's "Immunology." He could often get through half a page of it before he bogged down in chemical formulae. Occasionally, on Sundays or rainy days, he tried to read it, and longed for the laboratory; occasionally he thought of Madeline Fox, and became certain that he was devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped into careless and robust week, and when he awoke in a stable, smelling the sweet hay and the horses and the lark-ringing prairie that crept near to the heart of these shanty towns, he cared only for the day's work, the day's hiking, westward toward the sunset.

So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole duchies of wheat in one shining field, through the cattle-country and the sagebrush desert, and suddenly, staring at a persistent cloud, Martin realized that he beheld the mountains.

Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already forgotten; and he was thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Clawson, Angus Duer, and Max Gottlieb.

M

CHAPTER IV

PROFESSOR MAX GOTTLIEB was about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.

They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless red cultures of Bacillus prodigiosus, and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inocula- tion of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two days be stifl and dead.

Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator's desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.

The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.

(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbriider and ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days! Die goldene Zeit! His first classes in America, at Queen City College had been awed by the sensational discov-

35

eries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him reverendy; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked at them — Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a door- knob; the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrow- smith and Angus Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)

He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them — a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys. He took a hypodermic needle from the instru- ment-bath and lifted the test-tube. His voice flowed indolently, with German vowels and blurred W's:

"This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of Bacillus anthracis. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already, that in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the tube from being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of anthrax germs and afterwards getting the hands into the culture. You might merely get anthrax boils — "

The class shuddered.

Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so neatly that the medical students who had complained, "Bacteri- ology is junk; urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we need to know," now gave him something of the respect they had for a man who could do card tricks or remove an appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, "Every time you take the plug from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science."

The class was impatient. Why didn't he get on with it, on to the entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?

(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the prison of its battery jar, meditated, "Wretched innocent! Why should I murder him, to teach Dummkopfe? It would be better to experiment on that fat young man.")

He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston dextrously with his index finger, and lectured:

"Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of M.D.'s — those to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those

36

to whom it means compound cathartic. The second kind are more prosperous."

(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the sardonic amiability, the hiss of the S's, the D's turned into blunt and challenging T's.)

The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up the skin of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust of the hypodermic needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little squeak, and the co-eds shuddered. Gottlieb's wise fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was reached. He pushed home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly, "This poor animal will now soon be dead as Moses." The class glanced at one another uneasily. "Some of you will think that it does not matter; some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life interesting."

While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, "Gentlemen, the most im- portant part of living is not the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative notes — in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dis- missed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater's 'Marius the Epicurean,' to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of laboratory skill."

As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam, "Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn't got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into

37

the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate sur- geon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don't suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!"

Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordi- narily kindly man, this huge and bumbling parson. He rever- ently accepted everything, no matter how contradictory to every- thing else, that his medical instructors told him, but this killing of animals — he hated it. By a connection not evident to him he remembered that the Sunday before, in the slummy chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Di- gamma Pi in a fog of pondering pity.

Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, "Gosh, ole pig certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle home!" and Fatty begged, "Don't! Please!"

But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experi- ment and, as he remembered Gottlieb's unerring fingers, his hands curved in imitation.

in

The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On the dem- onstrator's table was a wooden tray, scarred from the tacks which for years had pinned down the corpses. The guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled. The class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to neck, and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula — the class quivered as they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette. With the distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made wavy smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the class for examination. The students who had learned to look through the microscope without having

38

to close one eye were proud and professional, and all of them talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as they twiddled the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells rose from cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them. But they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalking behind them, saying nothing, watching them always^ watching the disposal of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the benches ran nervous rumors about a bygone studen/ who had died from anthrax infection in the laboratory.

IV

There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of crea- tion. He woke early and thought contentedly of the day; he hurried to his work, devout, unseeing.

The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to him — the students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine, their fingers gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heat- ing media in an autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring Bunsen flames beneath the hot-air ovens, the steam from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the rafters, clouding the windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and to him the most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes filled with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich with gentian violet stain.

He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to work by himself in the laboratory at night. . . . The long room was dark, thick dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his micro- scope. The cone of light cast a gloss on the bright brass tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he bent over the eyepiece. He was studying trypanosomes from a rat — an eight-branched rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster of organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and a little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the dark-

39

ness, a step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on Martin's shoulder. Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the microscope toward him. Bending down, a cigarette stub in his mouth — the smoke would have stung the eyes of any human being — Gottlieb peered at the preparation.

He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, "Splen- did! You have craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science — for a few. You Americans, so many of you — all full with ideas, but you are impatient with the beautiful dullness of long labors. I see already — and I watch you in the lab before — perhaps you may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. They are very, very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It is quite a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent of the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might work on the bugs."

Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in batde.

"I shall have," said Gottlieb, "a little sandwich in my room at midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be very pleast if you would come to have a bite."

Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb's immaculate laboratory at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sand- wiches, curiously small and excellent sandwiches, foreign to Martin's lunch-room taste.

Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus Duer seemed but an absurd climber. He summoned forth Lon- don laboratories, dinners on frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the dome of San Pietro, ex- treme danger and overpowering disgust from excreta-smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though Martin were a contemporary.

The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife — it might be cancer. The three children — the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the fourteen- year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not study. Himself, he had worked for yeaps on the synthesis of antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having

40

an agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.

"No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And — No. Not five times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t'ink perhaps you may have them. If I can help you — So!

"I do not t'ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine — often they are artists — but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was — Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz — what a wild blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics of sound — I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a chemist — a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble. It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I feel an exile, cold — I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing to sing Die Wacht am Rhein and trying to kill a cavalry captain — he was a stout fellow — I had to choke him — you see I am boasting, but I was a lifely Kerl thirty years ago! Ah! So!

"There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y.M.C.A.'s and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into them — iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly functioning Bacillus typhosus with its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not care for my met'od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges pres- ent, all in nice clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother Arrhenius.

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Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so good night."

When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home altogether drunk.

CHAPTER V

THOUGH bacteriology was all of Martin's life now, it was the theory of the University that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius.

Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wall- paper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irri- tating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty socks; he sang "Some Die of Diabetes" when Martin was studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had to be humorous. He remarked, "Is it your combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?" or "How 'about ingurgitat- ing a few calories?" But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his vari- ous parts.

In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk to success over his grandmother's head, and that for an idiot like Fatty Pfaff to practice on helpless human beings was criminal,- but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.

If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the trick of using the word "control" in reference to the person or animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as a

43

standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuriating. When a physician boasted of his success with this drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, "Where was your con- trol? How many cases did you have under identical conditions, and how many of them did not get the treatment?" Now Martin began to mouth it — control, control, control, where's your con- trol? where's your control? — till most of his fellows and a few of his instructors desired to lynch him.

He was particularly tedious in materia medica.

The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From him a future physician could learn that most important of all things : the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him. His classes listened with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred and fifty favorite prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more than his predecessor had required.)

But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, "Dr. Davidson, how do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas? Isn't it just rotten fossil fish — isn't it like the mummy-dust and puppy-ear stuff they used to give in the olden days?"

"How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, because thousands of physicians have used it for years and found their patients getting better, and that's how they know!"

"But honest, Doctor, wouldn't the patients maybe have gotten better anyway? Wasn't it maybe a post hoc, propter hoc? Have they ever experimented on a whole slew of patients together, with controls?"

"Probably not — and until some genius like yourself, Arrow- smith, can herd together a few hundred people with exactly identical cases of erysipelas, it probably never will be tried! Meanwhile I trust that you other gentlemen, who perhaps lack Mr. Arrowsmith's profound scientific attainments and the power to use such handy technical terms as 'control,' will, merely on my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!"

But Martin insisted, "Please, Dr. Davidson, what's the use of getting all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We'll forget most of 'em, and besides, we can always look 'em up in the book."

Davidson pressed his lips together, then:

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"Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you as I would a three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. There- fore, you will learn the properties of drugs and the contents of prescriptions because I tell you to! If I did not hesitate to waste the time of the other members of this class, I would try to con- vince you that my statements may be accepted, not on my humble authority, but because they are the conclusions of wise men — men wiser or certainly a little older than you, my friend — through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge in fancy flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say that you will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize, because I tell you to!"

Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializ- ing in bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had become impatient of his fretting, and he turned again to the energetic and willowy Madeline Fox.

ii

Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not com- plete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do?

They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the Uni- versity Dramatic Society play. Madeline's widowed mother had come to live with her, and they had taken a top-floor flat in one of the tiny apartment-houses which were beginning to replace the expansive old wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat was full of literature and decoration: a bronze Buddha from Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare's epitaph, a set of Anatole France in translation, a photograph of Cologne cathedral, a wicker tea- table with a samovar whose operation no one in the University understood, and a souvenir post-card album. Madeline's mother was a Main Street dowager duchess. She was stately and white- haired but she attended the Methodist Church. In Mohalis she was flustered by the chatter of the students; she longed for her home-town, for the church sociables and the meetings of the women's club — they were studying Education this year and she hated to lose all the information about university ways.

With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to "entertain": eight-o'clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken salad, and word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous of his

45

evenings, beautiful evenings of research. The first affair to which she enticed him was her big New Year's Party in Janu- ary. They "did advertisements" — guessed at tableaux represent- ing advertising pictures; they danced to the phonograph; and they had not merely a lap-supper but little tables excessively covered with doilies.

Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new waltz called the "Boston." There was no strength, no grace, no knowl- edge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption. If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry for every skill.

His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his ad- miration for Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed outdoor girl, but this was an exquisite indoor Madeline, slender in yellow silk. She seemed to him a miracle of tact and ease as she bullied her guests into an appearance of merriment. She had need of tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and it was one of Dr. Brumfit's evenings to be original and naughty. He pretended to kiss Madeline's mother, which Vastly discomforted the poor lady; he sang a strongly improper Negro song containing the word hell; he maintained to a group of women graduate stu- dents that George Sand's affairs might perhaps be partially justi- fied by their influence on men of talent; 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 Eng- lish 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 everyone snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious, she was something he must have.

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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."

in

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 all worked up and then be disap- pointed. She'll probably cuss you out for something you did wrong at the party. She'll probably be sleepy and wish you hadn't come. Nothing!" But he did not for a second believe it.

He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down the meager hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the over-bright living-room — and he found her mother, solid as a pyramid, permanent-looking as sunless winter.

But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to conquest.

Mother did not.

In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart is ten o'clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin did battle with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an audible gossip and a mute but furious protest, while Madeline — she was present; she sat about and looked pretty. In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him, till the room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to be discussing the weather, the University, and the trolley service into Zenith.

47

"Yes, of course, some day I guess they'll have a car every twenty minutes," he said weightily.

("Darn her, why doesn't she go to bed? Cheers! She's doing up her knitting. Nope. Damn it! She's taking another ball of wool")

"Oh, yes, I'm sure they'll have to have better service," said Mrs. Fox.

("Young man, I don't know much about you, but I don't believe you're the right kind of person for Madeline to go with. Anyway, it's time you went home.")

"Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service."

("I know I'm staying too long, and I know you know it, but I don't care!")

It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid persistence. He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypnotism, and when he rose, defeated, she was still there, extremely placid. They said good-by not too warmly. Madeline took him to the door; for an exhilarating half-minute he had her alone.

"I wanted so much — I wanted to talk to you!"

"I know. I'm sorry. Some time!" she muttered.

He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.

IV

Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the Zenith Advocate-Times — Madeline leaped into an orgy of jocund but extraordinarily tiring entertainments, and Martin obediently and smolderingly followed her. She appeared to have trouble in getting enough men, and to the literary evening Martin dragged the enraged Clif Clawson. Clif grumbled, "This is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever did time in," but he bore off treasure — he had heard Madeline call Martin by her favorite name of "Martykins." That was very valuable. Clif called him Martykins. Clif told others to call him Martykins. Fatty Pfaff and Irving Watters called him Martykins. And when Martin wanted to go to sleep, Clif croaked:

"Yuh, you'll probably marry her. She's a dead shot. She can hit a smart young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you'll have one fine young time going on with science after that skirt sets you at

48

tonsil-snatching. . . . She's one of these literary birds. She knows all about lite'ature except maybe how to read. . . . She's not so bad-looking, now. She'll get fat, like her Ma."

Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded, "She's the only girl in the graduate school that's got any pep. The others just sit around and talk, and she gets up the best parties — "

"Any kissing parties?"

"Now you look here! I'll be getting sore, first thing you know! You and I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox — she's like Angus Duer, some ways. I realize all the stuff we're missing: music and literature, yes, and decent clothes, too — no harm to dressing well—"

"That's just what I was tellin' you! She'll have you all dolled up in a Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything as rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame — Where's your control?"

Clif's opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to marry her.

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men, and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes — his corduroys and soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat — at his vocabulary and his taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way of saying, "Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest thinker" irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb's dark patience.

"Oh, let me alone!" he hurled at her. "You're the nicest thing the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemotherapy — Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you're right about slang. I'll cut Out all this junk about 'feeding your face' and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled collar! I won't!"

49

He might never have proposed to her but for the spring eve- ning on the roof.

She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japa- nese lanterns — they were ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment- house, who were "so prosaic, so conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place." She compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese garden, to a "pleasaunce of old Provencal." But to Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother snifnly told him that she was to be found on the roof.

"Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections," he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.

Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excite- ment but with a noncommittal "Hello." She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, "Say, that's a dandy new strip of matting you've put down."

"It is not! It's mangy!" She turned toward him. She wailed, "Oh, Mart, I'm so sick of myself, tonight. I'm always trying to make people think I'm somebody. I'm not. I'm a bluff."

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, it's lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him — only he was right — he as good as told me that if I don't work harder I'll have to get out of the graduate school. I'm not doing a thing, he said, and if I don't have my Ph.D., then I won't be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I'd better land one, too, because it doesn't look to poor Madeline as if any- body was going to marry her."

His arm about her, he blared, "I know exactly who — "

"No, I'm not fishing. I'm almost honest, tonight. I'm no good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don't suppose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!"

"They do not! If they did — I'd like to see anybody that tried laughing — "

50

"It's awfully sweet and dear of you, but I'm not worth it. Tho poetic Madeline. With her ree-fined vocabulary! I'm a — I'm a— Martin, I'm a tin-horn sport! I'm everything your friend Clil thinks I am. Oh, you needn't tell me. I know what he thinks. And — I'll have to go home with Mother, and I can't stand it, dear, I can't stand it! I won't go back! That town! Never any- thing doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old men, always telling the same old jokes. I won't!"

Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was whispering:

"Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You're going to marry me and — Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and couple in hospital, then we'll be married and — By thunder, with you helping me, I'm going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We're going to have everything!"

"Dearest, do be wise. I don't want to keep you from your scientific work — "

"Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research. But thunder, I'm not just a lab-cat. Battle o' life. Smashing your way through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can't do that and do some scientific work too, I'm no good. Course while I'm with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but afterward — Oh, Madeline!"

Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.

VI

He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would demand, "Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use bad language." But she took his hand and mourned, "I hope you and my baby will be happy. She's a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty sometimes, and I know you're nice and kind and hard-working. I shall pray you'll be happy — oh, I'll pray so hard! You young people don't seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped me — Oh, I'll petition for your sweet happiness!"

She was weeping; she kissed Martin's forehead with the dry, soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.

51

At parting Madeline whispered, "Boy, I don't care a bit, my- self, but Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don't you think you could, just once?"

The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Claw- son, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a pain- ful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Meth- odist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on "The One Way to Righteousness."

They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy gloating at Martin's captivity.

VII

For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb's pessimistic view of the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if Madeline had once admitted she was an ordi- nary young woman who occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. "You think it's terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why should you be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won't kiss you. I want you to grow up and listen to reason."

In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.

A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriologi- cal laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that sum- mer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment Station grounds.

"You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson," she complained. "I don't suppose vou care to hear my opinion of him."

"I've had your opinion, my beloved." Martin sounded mature, and not too pleasant.

"Well, I can tell you right now you haven't had my opinion of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can't understand why you don't get some gentlemanly job for vacation, instead of hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn't you work on a news- paper, where you'd have to dress decently and meet nice people?"

"Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won't work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I'll go to Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every night."

"It wouldn't hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It's like Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a roughneck ? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blossoms. ... Or maybe a great scientist like you, that's so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!"

"Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for weeks now, you're dead right."

"Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but — Will you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?"

"I will. It looks to me like a hired-man's shirt."

"Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I'm ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck — "

"And if you think I'm going to marry a dame that keeps nag- nag-naggin' and jab-jab-jabbin' at me all day long — "

They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing heart-break- ing summer 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 for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.

53

CHAPTER VI

THE waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not sup- posed to appear at the Lodge dances — they merely ap- peared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid — and enormously in love with Madeline.

They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin's native Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:

Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to \now how much I prize all the tal\s use had together about science & ideals & education, etc. — / certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stic\ in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn't I? I cant always be in the wrong can I?

"My dear, my little girl!" he lamented. "'Can't always be in the wrong'! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!"

By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to her raresses — lay awake for minutes at a time.

54

The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging together in the quiet of her living-room. It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.

His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physi- cal diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the use of microscope and filter and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scien- tific German or French; to see Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original research — his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs would die. Unfortunately — he felt — the germs grew joyfully. He was troubled; he was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed his experiment over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing some- thing she ought not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, "The darn' bugs ought to die in this immune serum, but they don't. There's something wrong with the theories."

"Young man, do you set yourself up against science?" grated Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. "Do you feel com- petent, huh, to attack the dogmas of immunology?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't help what the dogma is. Here's my protocols. Honestly, I've gone over and over the stuff, and I gel. the same results, as you can see. I only know what I observe."

Gottlieb beamed. "I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it doeb violence to all the nice correct views of science — out they go-

55

I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the under- neath principle."

Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him "Arrowsmith" or "You" or "Uh." When he was furious he called him, or any other student, "Doctor." It was only in high moments that he honored him with "Martin," and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why that made every- thing so.

in

Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interest- ing patient. The bored reception clerk — who was interested only in obtaining the names, business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died or who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about collecting meningo- cocci, so long as the addresses were properly entered — loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways, past num- berless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sit- ting up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.

He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a bril- liant young surgeon who is about to operate. He was so ab- sorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing filled with private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by ask- ing directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bed- room in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.

She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head with an elastic — a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.

"Nurse," he said, "I want to find Ward D."

Lazily, "Do you?"

"I do! If I can interrupt your work — "

"Doesn't matter. The damn' superintendent of nurses put me

56

at scrubbing, and wc aren't ever supposed to scrub floors, be- cause she caught me smoking a cigarette. She's an old terror. If she found a child like you wandering around here, she'd drag you out by the ear."

"My dear young woman, it may interest you to know — "

"Oh! 'My dear young woman, it may — ' Sounds exactly like our old prof, back home."

Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

"I am Dr. Arrowsmith," he snorted, "and I've been informed that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of — it may interest you to \nowl — a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly direct me — "

"Oh, gee, I've been getting fresh again. I don't seem to get along with this military discipline. All right. I'll stand up." She did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. "You go back, turn right, then left. I'm sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to — Honestly, Doctor — if you are a doctor — "

"I don't see that I need to convince you!" he raged, as he stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled* derision. He was an eminent scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure impudence from a probationer — a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and slangy young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke: "I don't see that I need to convince you." He was proud of himself for hav- ing been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it, concluding, "I just said to her quietly, 'My dear young woman, I don't know that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,' I said, and she wilted."

But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her — "Take a better man than she is, better man than I've ever met, to get away with being insulting to me!" said the modest young scientist.

57

He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken of? her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a stack of straw.

"Oh," she said gravely. "I didn't mean to be rude then. I was just — Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor."

"I'm not. I'm a medic. I was showing off."

"So was I!"

He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a rela- tion free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Made- line. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only :

"Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess."

"Not so awful, but it's just as romantic as being a hired girl — that's what we call 'em in Dakota."

"Come from Dakota?"

"I come from the most enterprising town — three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants — in the entire state of North Dakota — Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?"

To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.

"Yes, I'm a Junior medic in Mohalis. But — I don't know. I'm not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I'll be a bac- teriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don't think much of the bedside manner."

"I'm glad you don't. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients — the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs — they seem sort of real. I don't suppose you can bluff a bacteria — what is it?—' bacterium?"

58

"No, they're— What do they call you?"

"Me? Oh, it's an idiotic name — Leora Tozer."

"What's the matter with Leora? It's fine."

Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eter- nally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bounc- ing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together ihey were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.

He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told him that she "adored" vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn't particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with deb- onair regret, that she was not too popular with the superintend- ent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was al- ways dragged into rebellions connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of gay courage.

He interrupted with an urgent, "When can you get away from the hospital for dinner? Tonight?"

"Why—"

"Please!"

"All right."

"When can I call for your"

"Do you think I ought to — Well, seven."

All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith twice in one day; he remembered that he was engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a kitchen wench and as

59

impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times he decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.

He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.

He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She'd probably be agonizingly dull, through a whole long dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti ? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue uniform was gone; she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now than she had been in the dignity of her job but look- ing up at him with confidence.

"Glad I came?" he demanded.

She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted, "Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you'd go and get sore at me because I was so fresh, and I wanted to apologize and — I liked your being so crazy about your bacteriology. I think I'm a little crazy, too. The interns here — they come both- ering around a lot, but they're so sort of — so sort of soggy, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity. Oh — " Most gravely of all: "Oh, gee, yes, I'm glad you came. . . . Am I an idiot to admit it?"

"You're a darling to admit it." He was a little dizzy with her. He pressed her hand with his arm.

"You won't think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?"

"Leora! And you don't think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet? I liked — I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can't we? Can't we?"

"I don't know. We'll see. Where are we going for dinner?"

"The Grand Hotel."

"We are not! It's terribly expensive. Unless you're awfully rich. You aren't, are you?"

"No, I'm not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I want—"

"Let's go to the Bijou. It's a nice place, and it isn't expensive."

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He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith's most re- splendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought of Made- line that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness, surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but un- demanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubt- ful if Leora herself had a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his idol: "Up to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is the opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what will happen."

He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost glaring at her. He insisted, "Do you see where he leaves all these detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the ma- nure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?"

"Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please don't bully me so!"

"Was I bullying? I didn't mean to. Only, when I get to think- ing about the way most of these damned profs don't even know what he's up to — "

Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether under- stand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of Madeline Fox's gently corrective admonitions.

She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.

"I've talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven't bored you," he blurted.

"I loved it."

"And I was so technical, and so noisy — Oh, I am a. chump!"

"I like having you trust me. I'm not 'earnest,' and I haven't any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think

61

I'm intelligent enough to hear what they really think and — Good night!"

They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced, Madeline.

He came to know all of Leora's background. Her bed-ridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednes- day evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United Brethren Church; Ger- man Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the vil- lage, the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora, always an "odd child/' doing obediently enough the flat household tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the colored world.

It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood that he cried, "Darling, you don't have to tell me about you. I've always known you. I'm not going to let you go, no matter what. You're going to marry me — "

They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant restaurant. Her first words were:

"I want to call you 'Sandy.' Why do I? I don't know why. You're as unsandy as can be, but somehow 'Sandy' means you to me and — Oh, my dear, I do like you!"

Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.

IV

He had promised to see Madeline the next morning. By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog;

62

but he could not bring it off. He thought of Madeline's pathetic enthusiasms: her "Provencal pleasaunce" and the limp-leather . volumes of poetry which she patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine illustra- tions. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty. But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora. Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate for Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably chewed gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in public, her commonness was dear to the com- monness that was in himself, valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific curiosity.

He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium, and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the ruck of students. He snarled, "Arrow- smith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I to spend my life with Dummkppje? I cannot be always alone, Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been keen about work."

Martin went off mumbling, "I love that man!" In his tangled mood he catalogued Madeline's pretenses, her nagging, her self- ishness, her fundamental ignorance. He worked himself up to a state of virtue in which it was agreeably clear to him that he must throw Madeline over, entirely as a rebuke. He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze out at her first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their engagement and make life resolutely simple again.

She did not complain.

She ran to him. "Dear, you're so tired — your eyes look tired. Have you been working frightfully hard? I've been so sorry you couldn't come 'round, this week. Dear, you mustn't kill your- self. Think of all the years you have ahead to do splendid things in. No, don't talk. I want you to rest. Mother's gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I'll make you so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back — go to sleep if you want to — and I'll read you The Crock of Gold.' You'll love it."

He was determined that he would not love it and, as he prob-

63

ibly had no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated it, but its differentness aroused him. Though Madeline's voice was shrill and cornfieldish after Leora's lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she, with her pre- tenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless Leora . who was mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with which he had planned to crush her vanished.

Suddenly she was beside him, begging, "I've been so lonely for you, all week!"

So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had intolerably roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caress- ing now; but it was Madeline who took his hunger to herself, and when she whimpered, "I'm so glad you're glad to be here," he could say nothing. He wanted to talk about Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that Madeline was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar; and while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself away, at ten. He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like a low dog.

He hastened to Clif Clawson.

He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif's probable scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness with which he came into their room. Clif was sitting on the small of his back, shoeless feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested on the powerful volume of Osier's Medicine which he considered himself to be reading.

"Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let's sneak down to Barney's and see if we can rustle one."

"Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the speed behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebel- lum and the medulla oblongata."

"Oh, cut out the cuteness! I'm in a bad temper."

"Ah, the laddie has been having a scrap with his chaste lil Madeline! Was she horrid to ickly Marty kins? All right. I'll quit. Come on. Yoicks for the drink."

He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost coaxed Martin into cheerfulness. "Barney's" was a pool-

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room, a tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif and the hairy-handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy manner:

"The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your circula- tion proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the ulnar artery, in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop."

"Gosh, Clif, you cer'nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever need a' arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I'll come around and let you talk it ofr". Strawberry pop, gents?"

The front room of Barney's was an impressionistic painting in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables with broken chairs. Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift. Martin's confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it! He would invite Leora and Made- line to lunch together, tell them the truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another whisky; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was shut of? from public hearing in a closet.

At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintend- ent, and the night superintendent was a man frosty and sus- picious. "This is no time to be calling up a probationer! Half- past eleven! Who are you, anyway?"

Martin checked the "I'll damn' soon tell you who I am!" which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora's invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low, and if the night superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless gentlewoman —

When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and so- berly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers into the security of her presence:

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"Leora ? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby tomorrow, twelve-thirty. Must! Important! Fix 't somehow — your aunt's sick."

"All right, dear. G' night," was all she said.

It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline's flat, then Mrs. Fox's voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

"Yes, yes?"

" 'S Martin."

"Who is it? Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?"

"Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it's Martin Arrowsmith speaking."

"Oh. oh, my dear! The 'phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I couldn't make out what you were saying. I was so fright- ened. I thought maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had happened to Maddy's brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing's happened!"

Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no, nothing had happened, but he'd forgotten to tell Madeline something — so shor — so sorry call so late — could Le speak Mad just minute —

Then Madeline was bubbling, "Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here—"

"Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There's a — there's a great friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet — "

"Who is he?"

"You'll see tomorrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet — come meet um at lunch. Going," with ponderous jocularity, "going to blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand — "

"Oh, how nice!"

" — so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College Square. Can you?"

Vaguely, "Oh, I'd love to but — I have an eleven o'clock, and I don't like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shop- ping with her — she's looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with her pink crepe de chine but that you can walk in — and we sort of thought maybe we might lunch at Ye Kol- lege Karavanserai — and I'd half planned to go to the movies

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with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply dandy, she saw it tonight, and I thought I might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study and not go anywhere at all — "

"Now listen! It's important. Don't you trust me? Will you come or not?"

"Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I'll try to be there. The eleven-forty?"

"Yes."

"At College Square? Or at Bluthman's Book Shop?"

"At College Square!"

Her gentle "I trust you" and her wambling "I'll try to" were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.

"What's the grief?" Clif wondered. "Wife passed away? Or did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy- tonight looks like a necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician."

"Oh, shut up," was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little bright- nesses; he had praised Clif's pool-playing and called Barney "old Cirnex lectularius" ; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), "If you knew all the troubles I have — all the doggone mess a fellow can get into — you'd feel down in the mouth!"

Clif was alarmed. "Look here, old socks. If you've gotten in debt, I'll raise the cash, somehow. If it's — Been going a little too far with Madeline?"

"You make me sick! You've got a dirty mind. I'm not worthy to touch Madeline's hand. I regard her with nothing but respect."

"The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was something I could do for you. Oh! Have 'nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin'!"

By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.

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His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practicing the tactful observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from the "great friend of his" whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney's; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.

"Who is this man we're going to see? What are you so mys- terious about? Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren't we going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I've always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do think it's too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and — Did I guess it, darling?"

"No, there's someone — Oh, we're going to meet somebody, all right!"

"Then why don't you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient."

"Well, I'll tell you. It isn't a Him; it's a Her."

"Oh!"

"It's — You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully help- ful." He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment. "Especially there's one nurse there who's a wonder. She's learned so much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl — Miss Tozer, her name is — I think her first name is Lee or something like that — and she's so — her father is one of the big men in North Dakota — awfully rich — big banker— I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world's work." He had achieved Madeline's own tone of poetic uplift. "I thought you two might like to know each other.

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You remember you were saying how few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate — appreciate ideals."

"Ye-es." Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it was, she did not like it. "I shall be ver' pleased to meet her, of course. Any friend of yours — Oh, Mart! I do hope you don't flirt; I hope you don't get too friendly with all these nurses. I don't know anything about it, of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular man-hunters."

"Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn't!"

"No, I'm sure, but — Oh, Martykins, you won't be silly and let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They have such an advantage. Poor Madeline, she wouldn't be allowed to go hanging around men's .rooms learning — things, and you think you're so psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around her finger."

"Well, I guess I can take care of myself!"

"Oh, I mean — I don't mean — But I do hope this Tozer per- son— I'm sure I shall like her, if you do, but — I am your own true love, aren't I, always!"

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was goug- ing painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, "Sure — sure — gosh, honest, Mad, look out. That old dufler across the aisle is staring at us."

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was ade- quately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was com- pared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West Hotel. It has been humbled since by the super- cilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its pon- derous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse- dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn between Chicago and Pittsburgh; an oriental palace, the entrance a score of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl, and amber skylight seven stories above.

They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built round a pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting.

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Martin perceived that Leora was unusually sloppy — his own word. It did not matter to him how clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a characterless little mush- room of a hat, but he did see and resent the contrast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her checked skirt, her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket, and Madeline's sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora. Scanning them together (not haughtily, as the choosing and lofty male, but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by Madeline. That she should be better dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard Leora, to wrap and protect her.

And all the while he was bumbling:

" — thought you two girls ought know each other — Miss Fox, want t' make you 'quainted with Miss Tozer — little celebration — lucky dog have two Queens of Sheba — "

And to himself, "Oh, hell!"

While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded them into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was full of gilt chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged Negro retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round the walls ran select views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and Versailles.

"Swell room!" chirped Leora.

Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same thing in longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and explained, "Well, it's very large — "

He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dol- lars for the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food was that he must spend every cent of the four dol- lars. While he wondered what "Puree St. Germain" could be, and the waiter hideously stood watching behind his shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying politeness:

"Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss — Tozer."

"Yes, sort of."

"Do you find it interesting?"

"Well — yes — yes, I think it's interesting."

"I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course my work — I'm taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in Eng- lish— " She made it sound as though she were taking her earl- dom— "it's rather dry and detached. I have to master the growth

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of the language and so on and so forth. With your practical training, I suppose you'd find that rather stupid."

"Yes, it must be — no, it must be very interesting."

"Do you come from Zenith, Miss — Tozer?"

"No, I come from — Just a little town. Well, hardly a town. . . . North Dakota."

"Oh! North Dakota!"

"Yes Way West."

"Oh, yes. . . . Are you staying East for some time?" It was precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had once said to Madeline.

"Well, I don't — Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time."

"Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?"

"Oh, yes, it's pretty nice. These big cities — So much to see."

" 'Big' ? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view, doesn't it? I always think of New York as big but — Of course — Do you find the contrast to North Dakota interesting?"

"Well, of course it's different."

"Tell me what North Dakota's like. I've always wondered about these Western states." It was Madeline's second plagiarisrk of her cousin. "What is the general impression it makes on you?"

"I don't think I know just how you mean."

"I mean what is the general effect? The — impression."

"Well, it's got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes."

"But I mean — I suppose you're all terribly virile and energetic, compared with us Easterners."

"I don't — Well, yes, maybe."

"Have you met lots of people in Zenith?"

"Not so awfully many."

"Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hos- pital? He's such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully talented. He sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most frightfully nice family."

"No, I don't think I've met him yet," Leora bleated.

"Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest — the most gorgeous game of tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties on Royal Ridge. Frightfully smart."

Martin now first interrupted. "Smart? Him? He hasn't got ' any brains whatever."

"My dear child, I didn't mean 'smart' in that sense!" He sat

7i

alone and helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly inquired whether Leora knew this son of a cor- poration lawyer and that famous debutante, this hatshop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what were known as the Lead- ers of Zenith Society, the personages who appeared daily in the society columns of the Advocate-Times, the Cowxes and Van Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the famil- iarity; he remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had not known that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora had appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor ever attended the concerts, the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent all her glittering evenings.

Madeline shrugged a little, then, "Well — Of course with the fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I suppose you'd find lectures frightfully tame. Well — " She dis- missed Leora and looked patronizingly at Martin. "Are you planning some more work on the what-is-it with rabbits?"

He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. "Madeline! Brought you two together because — Don't know whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could, because I've — I'm not making any excuses for myself. I couldn't help it. I'm engaged to both of you, and I want to know — "

Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she touched Leora's shoulder, and quietly kissed her. "Dear, I'm sorry for you. You've got a job! You poor baby!" She strode away, her shoulders straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. "Sandy, I warn you that I'm never going to give you up. I suppose you're as bad as She says; I suppose I'm foolish — I'm a hussy. But you're mine! I warn you it isn't a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I'd tear her eyes out! Now don't think so well of yourself! I guess you're pretty selfish. But I don't care. You're mine!"

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.

She pondered, "I do feel we're nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me — because I tag after you and She never would. And I know your

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work is more important to you than I am, maybe more impor- tant than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She isn't. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her."

"No! I swear it isn't because I can bully you, Leora — I swear it isn't — I don't think it is. Dearest, don't don't think she's brighter than you are. She's glib but — Oh, let's stop talking! I've found you! My life's begun!"

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CHAPTER VII

THE difference between Martin's relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other's loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever. Yet his absorption in her was not stagnant. He was always making discoveries about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret little head whiie she made smoke rings with her cigarettes and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay frank passion she answered him; but to an- other, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod or an occa- sional word she encouraged him to confidence in his evolving ambition and disdains.

Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of Winnemac becoming that they were ex- pected to wear the symbols of respectability known as "dress- suits." On the solitary and nervous occasion when Martin had worn evening clothes he had rented them from the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to introduce Leora to the world as his pride and flowering. Like two little old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently ex- ploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city where their alien- ated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch's, the loftiest depart- ment store in Zenith. She was intimidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous

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mufflers and creamy riding breeches. When he had tried on a dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-collared shirt somewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat, and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:

"Darn it, Sandy, you're too grand for me. I just simply can't get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you're going to go and look so spifTy I won't have a chance with you."

He almost kissed her.

The clerk, returning, warbled, "I think, Modom, you'll find that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars."

Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed :

4'Oh, gee, you're one of these people that get ahead. I never thought I'd have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-to-Heaven collar. Oh, well, I'll tag!"

in

For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.

In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embrac- ing were the chief delight of the co-educational university. When he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crepe de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly de- sire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waist- coat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents' Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when

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that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.

"Come on, we'll dance," he said, as though it were a defiance to all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distin- guished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing, the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignor- ing his Leora.

"Not many here yet," he fussed. "Pretty soon they'll all be coming, and then you'll have lots of dances."

"Oh, I don't mind."

("God, won't somebody come and ask the poor kid?")

He fretted over his. lack of popularity among the dancing- men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were pres- ent— Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional normality, wan- dering toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride was gone. If Leora could be happy —

"I wouldn't care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over — No,«that's one thing I couldn't stand: crawling to that dirty snob — I will!"

Up ambled Fatty Pfaflf, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly. "H'lo, old Fat! You a stag tonight? Meet my friend Miss Tozer."

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Fatty's bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora's cheeks and amber hair. He heaved, "Pleasedmeetch — dance starting — have the honor?" in so flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.

That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gor- geously unselfish. . . . That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she could take. Martin's excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that, she followed their steps too eagerly. After the fifth dance he was agitated. "Course! She's enjoying herself! Hasn't got time to notice that I just stand here — yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for. her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself — And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the — the — the damnedest — Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off me — the one thing I've ever loved! Just because they dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness — And that damn' orchestra playing that damn' peppery music — And she falling for all their damn' cheap compliments and — You and I are going to have one lovely little understanding!"

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, "Oh, it doesn't matter about met"

"Would you like this one? Course you shall have it!" She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline's sense of having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her "dandy partners." At the sound of the music he held out his arms.

"No," she said. "I want to talk to you." She led him to a corner and hurled at him, "Sandy, this is the last time I'm going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we're going to stick together — and we are! — I'm going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I'm going to be just as foolish with 'em as I want to. Dinners and those things — I suppose I'll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. Bujt I love dancing, and I'm going to do exactly what I want to, and

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if you had any sense whatever, you'd know I don't care a hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things you do — and they'll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren't you ashamed of yourself!"

"I wasn't jealous — Yes, I was. Oh, I can't help it! I love you so much. I'd be one fine lover, now wouldn't I, if I never got jealous!"

"All right. Only you've got to keep it under cover. Now we'll finish the dance."

He was her slave.

IV

It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.

At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.

Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin's friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif's patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another siren of morality.

He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin, behind her back, "Good-looking kid, I will say that for her — what's wrong with her?" When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:

"Well, it's grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to assassinate with me 'mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh, it's fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker — in which Father deftly removed the sum

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of six simolea, point ten, from the foregathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now rati- ocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on."

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken sandwich and assented, "Um-huh."

"Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that 'If you are a roughneck, I don't see why you think you've got to boast about it' stuff that Mart springs on me!"

Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet com- panion. . . . Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent that he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive. Now, when Leora seemed to look through his boasting, he liked her as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced down the room. Holding out his hand he clamored:

"Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi. That's fine."

Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an in- strument which he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember. He picked it up and shook it tentatively. He did not turn his back; he was worse than rude — he looked patient.

"Well, good luck," said Martin, chilled and shaky.

"Very good of you. Thanks."

Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot. In the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva's party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling noble and mature.

At parting, Clif held Leora's hand and urged, "Honey, I think a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get tied up to — to parties that would turn him into a hand- shaker. I'm a hand-shaker myself. I know less about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has some conscience to him, and I'm so darn' glad he's playing arou/id with a girl that's

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real folks and — Oh, listen at me fallin' all over my clumsy feet! But I just mean I hope you won't mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a lot!"

It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness of Angus Duer racked him as an insult to himself, as somehow an implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry. Didn't Duer, for all his snobbishness and shal- lowness, have something that he himself lacked? Didn't Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as posing, take life too easily? Didn't Duer know how to control and drive his hard little mind? Wasn't there a technique of manners as there was of experimentation. . . . Gottlieb's fluent bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley. ... Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer's own affected stand- ard?

He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting.

As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guilti- ness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has bor- rowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he began to blurt "Hello," but he checked it in a croak, scowled, and stumbled on.

"Oh, Mart," Angus called. He was dismayingly even. "Re- member speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you thought I'd been rude. I'm sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten head- ache. Look. I've got four tickets for 'As It Listeth,' in Zenith, next Friday evening — original New York cast! Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance. Suppose she might like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?"

"Why — gosh — I'll 'phone her — darn' nice of you to ask us — "

It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted

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and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

"Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

"Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

"Why didn't he ask Dad Silva's daughter to go with us ? Does he think Leora is some tart I've picked up?

"Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody — wants to keep us all friendly, so we'll send him surgical patients some day when we're hick G. P.'s and he's a Great and Only.

"Why did I crawl down so meekly?

"I don't care! If Leora enjoys it — Me personally, I don't care two hoots for all this trotting around — Though of course it isn't so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody — Oh, I don't \now\"

VI

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play "with the original New York cast" was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods — graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor- manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York — who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depict- ing "Jack Vanduzen's Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day" was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, "Oh, I don't care. I'll slip in through a window. If you're there in the morning, the Old Cat can't prove you got in late." Shaking her head at this lying

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wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein's Alt Nuremberg Cafe for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking mottos and papier-mache armor.

Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion be- tween Martin and Leora could exist, was probably inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring her for his own uses.

"I hope you enjoyed the play," he condescended to her.

"Oh, yes—"

"Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women."

With unexpected defiance from Leora: "When anybody says that, it means they're not shy, and they despise women."

"Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I don't know how. Won't you give me a lesson?" Angus's aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say, "Don't be jealous, idiot. I'm magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist." But she was flustered by Angus's sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.

Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be going — Leora really had to be back — The trolleys ran infre- quently after midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high- strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, "G' night! Thanks!"

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Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill mo urnf ulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them, and there was a woman's scream breaking down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting — that in the briefness of life he should lose one moment of her living presence.

"I'm going in after her; see she gets there safe," he said.

The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.

"We got to say good night better than that!" he grumbled. "With that damn Duer— "

"Ssssssh! They'd simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want to get me fired?"

"Would you care, if it was because of me?"

"Yes — no — well — But they'd probably fire you from medic school, my lad. If — " His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from door- ways. She sighed, then, resolutely: "We can't talk here. We'll slip ^ip to my room — roommate's away for the week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody's in sight upstairs, I'll come back."

He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

"You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn't have a chance! Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!"

"I wasn't — Yes, I was, but I don't dare! To have to sit there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I'll always be jealous. It's you that have got to trust me. I'm not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me — "

Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in;

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they forgot that Angus was waiting. "Oh, curse Angus — let him go home!" was Martin's only reflection, as his eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.

"Good night, dear love — my love forever," he exulted.

In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter's uniform, who was shouting:

"I've caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we'll find out what you've been up to!"

They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman's clasp he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of un- bathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.

From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin sound of disgust. "Oh, come on! Let's get out of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?"

The watchman bellowed, "Oh, I'm scum, am I? I'll^show you!"

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking to the least experienced a message of death. He gasped only, "He dared to touch me!" A pen-knife was somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.

As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a policeman's night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim but he had pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He hit the watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus's wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an alley, across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on the steps, and were safe.

Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. "My God, I wish

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I'd killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold me here on the car. I thought I'd got over that. Once when I was a kid I tried to kill a fellow — God, I wish I'd cut that filthy swine's throat!"

As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed, "There's an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some white mule. Come on. It'll straighten you up."

Angus was shaky and stumbling — Angus the punctilious. Martin led him into the lunch-room where, between catsup bottles, they had raw whisky in granite-like coffee cups. Angus leaned his head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into obliteration, and Martin steered him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible than Angus Duer. "Well, he'll be a good friend of mine now, for always. Fine!"

Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped, "You were frightfully stewed last night, Arrowsmith. If you can't handl> your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely."

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.

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CHAPTER VIII

AND always Martin's work went on — assisting Max Gott-

ZA lieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lec- JL \* tures and hospital demonstrations — sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional evenings for original re- search or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb's cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wall-paper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep at his rickety study-table.

Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt raw.

Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stum- bling students barked at by tired clinical professors.

The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.

Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva, known as "Dad" Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty. He was a round little man with a little crescent of mus- tache. Silva's god was Sir William Osier, his religion was the art of sympathetic healing, and his patriotism was accurate phys- ical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin's reverence for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Ros- coe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.

Roscoe Geake was a peddler. He would have done well with oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been placed in the human organism for the purpose of provid-

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ing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly over- looking his future health and comfort — the physician's future health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal septum was that it never hurt any patient to have part of it removed, and if the most hopeful examination could find noth- ing the matter with the patient's nose and throat except that he was smoking too much, still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good for him. Geake denounced this cant about Letting Nature Alone. Why, the average well-to-do man appreciated attention! He really didn't think much of his spe- cialists unless he was operated on now and then — just a little and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual address in which, winging far above otolaryngology, he evaluated all medicine, and explained to grateful healers like Irving Watters the method of getting suitable fees:

"Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it's no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first impress your personality on the people who have the dollars. Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must always use salesmanship on him. Explain to him, also to his stricken and anxious family, the hard work and thought you are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the good you have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater than the fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your bill, he will not misunderstand or kick."

There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather shrill. He had no uplifted moments when he saw him- self in relation to the whole world — if indeed he realized that there was a deal of the world besides himself. His friend Clif was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic, however gallant she might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic busyness and in astonishment at dullness. But if he had not ripened, yet he was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his hands, and he did seek iron actualities with a curiosity inextin- guishable.

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And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life; re- laxed for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his admirers. Such was the hour before Christmas vacation when Roscoe Geake rose to glory.

It was announced in the Winnemac Daily News that Dr. Geake had been called from the chair of otolaryngology to the vice-presidency of the puissant New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of Jersey City. In celebration he gave a final address to the entire medical school on "The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor's Office."

He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and en- thusiastic and fond of people. He beamed on his loving students and cried:

"Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter's chill blast and August's untempered heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world's humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practice medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for being that which all good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, 'How to Put Pep in Salesmanship,' by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don't forget, gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who's trained in philosophy, practical philosophy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about 'ethics,' splendid though they are, and 'charity,' glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged 'high ideals' but by the horsepower he puts into carrying them out — and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don't overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a patient is of just as much im- portance, in these days of the new psychology, as the drugs you

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get into him or the operations he lets you get away with. The minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so to get well.

"Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have such an office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun to sell him the idea of being properly cured. I don't care whether a doctor has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and Rochester. I don't care whether he has all science at his finger- tips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a considerable de- gree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether he has the surgical technique of a Mayo, a Crile, a Blake, an Ochsner, a Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-me-down chairs and a lot of second-hand magazines, then the patient isn't going to have confidence in him; he is going to resist the treatment — and the doctor is going to have difficulty in putting over and collecting an adequate fee.

"To go far below the surface of this matter into the funda- mental philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doc- tor, there are today two warring schools, the Tapestry School and the Aseptic School, if I may venture to so denominate and conveniently distinguish them. Both of them have their merits. The Tapestry School claims that luxurious chairs for waiting patients, handsome hand-painted pictures, a bookcase jammed with the world's best literature in expensively bound sets, to- gether with cut-glass vases and potted palms, produce an impres- sion of that opulence which can come only from sheer ability and knowledge. The Aseptic School, on the other hand, main- tains that what the patient wants is that appearance of scrupu- lous hygiene which can be produced only by furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as the inner offices in white-painted chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print against a gray wall.

"But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I wonder it has not been brought out before, that the ideal recep- tion-room is a combination of these two schools! Have your potted palms and handsome pictures — to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his working equipment as a ster- ilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white — and think of the color-schemes you

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can evolve, or the good wife for you, if she be one blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair enameled the purest white! A floor-covering of white enamel, with just a border of delicate rose! Recent and unspotted num- bers of expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white table! Gentlemen, there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with you; there is the gospel which I hope to spread in my fresh field of endeavor, the New Idea Instru- ment Company of Jersey City, where at any time I shall be glad to see and shake by the hand any and all of you."

in

Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home to Dakota, perhaps for months, on the ground that her mother was unwell, and he had, or thought he had, to see her daily. He must have slept less than four hours a night. Grinding at examinations on the interurban car, he dashed in to her, looking up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns and the men patients whom she met in the hospital, scorning himself for being so primitive, and worrying all over again. To see her at all, he had to wait for hours in the lobby, or walk up and down in the snow outside till she could slip to a window and peep out. When they were together, they were completely absorbed. She had a genius for frank passion; she teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and unafraid.

He was sick lonely when he saw her of! at the Union Station.

His examination papers were competent but, save in bacteri- ology and internal medicine, they were sketchy. He turned emptily to the laboratory for vacation time.

He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in his tiny original researches. Gottlieb was patient. "It iss a fine system, this education. All what we cram into the students, not Koch and two dieners could learn. Do not worry about the research. We shall do it yet." But he expected Martin to perform a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of the holidays and Martin had no stomach with which to think. He played in the laboratory; he spent his time polishing glassware, and when he transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.

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Gottlieb was instantly grim. "Wass giebt es dann? Do you call these notes? Always when I praise a man must he stop work- ing? Do you think that you are a Theobald Smith or a Novy that you should sit and meditate? You have the ability of Pfafif!"

For once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to himself, as Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, "Rats, I've got some rest coming to me. Gosh, most fellows, why, they go to swell homes for vacation, and have dances and fathers and everything. If Leora was here, we'd go to a show tonight."

He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object), sought Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping between poker games at Barney's, and outlined a project of going into town and getting drunk. It was executed so success- fully that during vacation it was repeated whenever he thought of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring work, whenever he realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held him here. After vacation, in late January, he found that whisky relieved him from the frenzy of work, from the terror of loneliness — then betrayed him and left him the more weary, the more lonely. He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-four now, he reminded himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not even begun. Clif was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and would listen to his bab- bling of her.

But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder's Day.

IV

January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large lack of wine. All the faculty reserved their soundest observations for the event, and all the students were expected to be present.

This year it was held in the large hall of the University Y.M.C.A., a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of whiskered alumni who had gone out to be missionaries, and long thin pine boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams. About the famous guests — Dr. Rouncefield the Chicago surgeon, a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburgh internist — stood massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal, but they

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were worn and nervous after four months of school. They had wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in business suits, mostly unpressed. They sounded scientific and interested; they used words like phlebarteriectasia and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the guests, "So you just been in Rochester? What's, uh, what're Charley and Will doing in orthopedics?" But they were full of hunger and melancholy. It was half-past seven, and they who did not normally dine at seven, dined at six- thirty.

Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black- bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of brow, wild-eyed with genius or with madness. In a marvelous great voice, with a flavor of German accent, he inquired for Dr. Silva, and sailed into the dean's group like a frigate among fish- ing-smacks.

"Who the dickens is that?" wondered Martin.

"Let's edge in and find out," said Clif, and they clung to the fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was introduced as Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.

They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school- bound assistant professors, boom genially of working with Schmiedeberg in Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypen- tamethylendiamin, of the possibilities of chemotherapy, of the immediate cure of sleeping sickness, of the era of scientific heal- ing. "Though I am American-born, I have the advantage of speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I can better understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser. Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!"

There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and 1915) an active Germanophile section of the faculty. They bent before this tornado of erudition. Angus Duer forgot that he was Angus Duer; and Martin listened with excited stimulation. Benoni Carr had all of Gottlieb's individuality, all this scorn of machine-made teachers, all his air of a great world which showed Mohalis as provincial, with none of Gottlieb's nervous touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present; he wondered whether the two giants would clash.

Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers' table, near the dean. Martin was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after

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a shocked inspection of the sour chicken and mishandled salad which made up most of the dinner, pour something into his water glass from a huge silver flask — and pour that something frequently. He became boisterous. He leaned across two men to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he contradicted his neighbors; he sang a stanza of "I'm Bound Away for the Wild Missourai."

Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by the students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.

After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen to announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and shouted, "Let's not have any speeches. Only fools make speeches. Wise men sing -jongs. Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee a lady! You profs are the bunk!"

Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him out of the room, with the assistance of two professors and a foot- ball tackle, and in the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to Martin:

"Here's where I get mine! And the damn' fool promised to stay sober!"

"Huh?"

"I might of known he'd show up stewed and spill the beans. Oh, maybe the dean won't hand me hell proper!"

He explained. Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkowski. He had graduated from a medical school which gave degrees in two years. He had read vastly, but he had never been in Europe. He had been "spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic women. Clif had encountered him in Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif who had told Dean Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist, just back from Europe, was in Zenith for a few days and perhaps might accept an invitation —

The dean had thanked Clif ardently.

The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention to Dr. Rouncefield's valuable address on the Sterilization of Catgut.

Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin's several observations. Next day — he had a way with women when he deigned to take the trouble — he pumped the dean's girl

9*

secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed the talent to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him at once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then exe- cute him in public.

"Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much of the doctor business. Guess I'll be a bond salesman," said Clif to Martin. He strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:

"Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I've decided to resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in Chicago, and I don't think much of the way you run the school, anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So long."

"Gggggg — " said Dean Silva.

Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and beans flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora's eyes and heard Clifs comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not endure.

9*

CHAPTER IX

THE persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in Febru- ary. He looked down on a startling roadster, all stream- lines and cream paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning. He hastened down, and Clif cried:

"Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this suit? Scotch heather — honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed of! a twenty-five-buck-a-week job with commissions, selling autos. Boy, I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell anything to anybody. In a year I'll be making eighty a week. Jump in, old son. I'm going to take you in to the Grand and blow you to the handsomest feed you ever stufTed into your skinny organism." The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith was, in 1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a new Clif. He was as noisy as ever, but more sure, glowing with schemes for immediately acquiring large sums of money. His hair, once bushy and greasy in front, tending to stick out jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his face had the pinkness of massage. He stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with a jar of brakes; before he left the car he changed his violent yellow driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with black stitching, which he immedi- ately removed as he paraded through the lobby. He called the coat-girl "Sweetie," and at the dining-room door he addressed the head-waiter:

"Ah, Gus, how's the boy, how's the boy feeling tonight? How's the mucho famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make you 'quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith. Any time the doc comes

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here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out that well- known service^ my boy, and give him anything he wants, and if he's broke, you charge it to me. Now, Gus, I want a nice little table for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and wouldst fain have thy advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and hore durTers and all the ingredients fair of a Maecenan feast."

"Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson," breathed the head- waiter.

Clif whispered to Martin, "I've got him like that in two weeks! You watch my smoke!"

While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table. He resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back to his suburban bungalow every Saturday evening. He was beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly plump. His rimless eye- glasses, in the midst of a round smooth face, made him seem innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had someone with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man's elbow, and bawled :

"Ah, there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come join the Sporting Gents' Association."

"All right, be glad to. Wife's out of town," said the man.

"Shake hands with Dr. Arrowsmith. Mart, meet George F. Babbitt, the hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr. Bab- bitt has just adorned his thirty-fourth birthday by buying his first benzine buggy from yours truly and beg to remain as always."

It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirth- ful affair, and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St. Louis beer, and highballs, he saw that Clif was the most gen- erous person now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion of charm.

Clif explained how certain he was — apparently his distin- guished medical training had something to do with it — to be president of a motor factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided:

"You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and you haven't learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure is, is in Ideals and Service and a Public Career. Now just between you and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn't lie in real estate but in oratory. Fact, one time I planned to study law and go right in for politics. Just between ourselves, and I don't

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want this to go any farther, I've been making some pretty good affiliations lately — been meeting some of the rising young Re- publican politicians. Of course a fellow has got to start in mod- estly, but I may say, sotto voce, that I expect to run for alder- man next fall. It's practically only a step from that to mayor and then to governor of the state, and if I find the career suits me, there's no reason why in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I shouldn't have the honor of representing the great state of Winnemac in Washington, D. C!"

In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like George F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and business skill, and when he had returned to Mohalis he was restless. Of his poverty he had rarely thought, but now, in con- trast to Clif's rich ease, his own shabby clothes and his pinched room seemed shameful.

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A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed worth doing. In that listless state he was mooning about the laboratory during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour, when Gottlieb sent him to the basement to bring up six male rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working eighteen hours a day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave orders like insults. When Martin came dreamily back with six females instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, "You are the worst fool that was ever in this lab!"

The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful of Martin's own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into raging, "Well, I couldn't make out what you said. And it's the first time I ever fell down. I won't stand your talk- ing to me like that!"

"You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your hat and get out!"

"You mean I'm fired as assistant?"

"I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand thar, no matter how wretchet I talk!"

Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and took a step toward Martin's retreating back. But the class, the small giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more,

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and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least awkward of them for the rabbits, and went on, curiously quiet.

And Martin, at Barney's dive, was hotly drinking the first of the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself. With each drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance to become a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did not care. Had Leora been nearer than Wheatsylvania, twelve hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for salvation. He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a drink to make it possible to live through the morning when he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the office at once.

The dean lectured:

"Arrowsmith, you've been discussed a good deal by the faculty council of late. Except in one or two courses — in my own I have no fault to find — you have been very inattentive. Your marks have been all right, but you could do still better. Recently you have also been drinking. You have been seen in places of very low repute, and you have been intimate with a man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and the University. Various faculty members have complained of your superior attitude — making fun of our courses right out in class! But Dr. Gottlieb has always warmly defended you. He insisted that you have a real flair for investigative science. Last night, however, he admitted that you had recently been im- pertinent to him. Now unless you immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you for the rest of the year and, if that doesn't do the work, I shall have to ask for your resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for your humility — you seem to have the pride of the devil, young man! — it might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reformation by apologizing — "

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

"I'm damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I've given him my life, and then he tattles on me — "

"That's absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely — "

"Sure. He merely let me down. I'll see him in hell before I'll apologize, after the way I've worked for him. And as for Clif Clawson that you were hinting at — him 'take it on himself to

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insult anybody'? He just played a joke, and you went after his scalp. I'm glad he did it!"

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scien- tific life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and hummed and spoke softly:

"Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you're suspended, at least till you come to your senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb." He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he concluded, "And as for Clawson, his 'joke' regarding this Benoni Carr person — and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy — his 'joke,' as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don't think you will be ready to come back to us."

"All right," said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He re- membered with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner jacket.

Martin's money, from his father's tiny estate, came in bi- monthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought Clif, whom he found practicing eloquence over a beauti- ful pearl-gray motor hearse, in .which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, "Well, well, how's the boy? Come out and catchum little drink."

"I could use one."

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Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:

"Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva's fired me, for general foot- lessness. I'm going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God, but I'm tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?"

"You bet. All I've got. How much you want?"

"Guess I'll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite some time."

"Golly, I haven't got that much, but prob'ly I can raise it at the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me."

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been ex- plained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went on to dinner, and Martin had much too much whisky. Clif took him to his own boarding-house — which was decidedly less promissory of prosperity than Clif's clothes — firmly gave him a cold bath to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morning he offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and left Zenith by