I
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 Midwestern 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 1860.
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 engineering,
Provençal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car
designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold,
the diagnosis of
myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, 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 interchangeable 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.
II
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 murmured
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 department 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 Brumfit, 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 energetically
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 socialistic, so long as it was
universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and
Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in form, to-night. 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, professor 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 every one 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 experiments 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 evening at dinner.
It was the tradition that faculty-members did not discuss their
colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be regarded 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 believe 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 yardstick, 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 and he
enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Professor
Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness made a
sound curiously like "Oh, hell!" and took the conversation away
from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore would have suggested, 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 dissecting-room. Beyond him was the turreted bulk
of the Main Medical 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
homebodies. 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.
III
On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a
high state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque 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 operating,
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 basement; 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 recognize him as a genius,
make him an assistant, predict for him- He halted in Gottlieb's
private laboratory, a small, tidy apartment with racks of
cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and
unmagical save for the constant-temperature 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 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.
"Vell? 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 scientists, to work
with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I
denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of
science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, 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
dissecting-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 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 debaucheries of card-playing.
Martin found himself viewing "Billy," their cadaver-an
undersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his
petrified, vealy face-as a machine, fascinating, complex,
beautiful, 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 unlovely 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 laughter,
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.
V
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 insisted,
"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
Fellows, 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 hully the poor
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 himself 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 experiments demanded by the course and never ventured
on original 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 Pfaff 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-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 Digamma 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 bedroom, and the
beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.
For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bedroom
walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing. In
Martin's room was a complete skeleton. He and his roommates 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 instalment 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
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 cliché which he did not
use, it was because he had not yet heard it. He believed in
morality-except on Saturday evenings; he believed in the Episcopal
Church-but not the High Church; he believed in the Constitution,
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 practised 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 Pfaff, his distaste for the amiable dullness of Irving
Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to something 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 persuaded 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.
"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 weakling
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.
