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, Provencal 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, 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,
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 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 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 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.
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
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! Drugstore 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 bully 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
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 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 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 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 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.