IV
The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old-Fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along the ridge pole. Over the front gate was the name: Uneedarest.
Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk all at once.
Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.
He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home Nest:
“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their lives—practically—and though Mother does have her sick-headaches, that’s to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while her father, the old deacon—and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our present prosperity—but he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I’ve always thought—”
The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.
Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:
“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My Jewels—I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses, don’t you?—but that’s what they really are to their mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished—Of course when we’d started giving them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase—it is Chrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the girls are getting quite famous—their pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’ Baseball Team all our own—only the Doctor has to play on it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”
Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y.W.C.A. or the Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.
“In fact,” said Dr. Pickerbaugh, “we think they’re a very striking brood of chickabiddies.”
“They certainly are!” quivered Martin.
“But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of the Mens Sana in the Corpus Sano. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have trained them to sing together, both in the home and publicly, and as an organization we call them the Healthette Octette.”
“Really?” said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed beyond speech.
“Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you’re going to see bands of happy young women going around spreading their winged message into every dark corner. Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and enthusiastic and good basketball players! I tell you, they’ll make the lazy and willful stir their stumps! They’ll shame the filthy livers and filthy talkers into decency! I’ve already worked out a poem-slogan for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?
“Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.
Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,
So against the evil-minded we’ll also make strife.
We’ll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette!
“But of course an even more important Cause is—and I was one of the first to advocate it—having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the cabinet at Washington—”
On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a stupendous dinner. With a hearty “Nonsense, nonsense, man, of course you want a second helping—this is Hospitality Hall!” Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck, candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they became dangerously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself did not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers, seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of ice-water.
Not always was he merely fantastic. “Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell you we’re lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest best to make the people in a he-town like this well and vital. I could be pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private practice, and I’ve been told I could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I’m glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of four thousand. Think of our having a job where we’ve got nothing to sell but honesty and decency and the brotherhood o’ man!”
Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame of the realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching the first freight train out of Nautilus.
After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the famous Health Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but as the twins’ voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:
Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?
You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,
To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health.
Then we’ll all go marching on.
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
The slogan for one and all.
As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently at the Congregational Festival, one of their father’s minor lyrics:
What does little birdie say
On the sill at break o’ day?
“Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,
Hurray, hurray, hurray!”
“There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!” said Mrs. Pickerbaugh. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they’re natural-born actresses? They’re not afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into it—perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would just love them, and maybe they’ve been sent to us to elevate the drama. Upsy go.”
During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.
Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. (“Of course we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.”) But the unexpected feature was Orchid’s cornet solo.
Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.
“I’ve never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and sober up,” he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.
While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as a gay, good, dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late eighties and the early nineties, the naive and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang “Swanee River”; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become a missionary or a millionaire.
For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable heartiness into his “Enjoyed that s’ much.” He felt victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness. But the evening’s orgy was only begun.
They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The sight of him on the floor in his wife’s fur coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.
Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it with frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though they were married.
She planned to enact the word “doleful,” with a beggar asking a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad Daddy has you for assistant—somebody that’s young and good-looking. Oh, was that dreadful of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and the other assistant director—don’t tell Daddy I said so, but he was an old crank!”
He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known him, and said loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”
When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with emphasis.
Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped that he would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora’s eyes.
There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the Leader.”
All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of the fête consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet scientific conversation by the fireside,” made up of his observations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter filing in health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.
He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh’s notes on the value of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and school physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes, that’d be—be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn that girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”
At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.
They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in Nautilus.
“Lord, I don’t know whether I can do it. To work under that gasbag, with his fool pieces about boozers—”
“They weren’t so bad,” protested Leora.
“Bad? Why, he’s probably the worst poet that ever lived, and he certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man could ever learn, all by himself. But when it comes to this—what was it Clif Clawson used to call it?—by the way, wonder what’s ever become of Clif; haven’t heard from him for a couple o’ years—when it comes to this ‘overpowering Christian Domesticity’—Oh, let’s hunt for a blind-pig and sit around with the nice restful burglars.”
She insisted, “I thought his poems were kind of cute.”
“Cute! What a word!”
“It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using! But the cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter—Ugh!”
“Well, now she played darn well!”
“Martin, the cornet is the kind of instrument my brother would play. And you so superior about the doctor’s poetry and my saying ‘cute’! You’re just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe more so!”
“Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about nothing before! And can’t you understand how important—You see, a man like Pickerbaugh makes all public health work simply ridiculous by his circusing and his ignorance. If he said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making me open my windows it’d make me or any other reasonable person close ’em. And to use the word ‘science’ in those flop-eared limericks or whatever you call ’em—it’s sacrilege!”
“Well, if you want to know, Martin Arrowsmith, I’ll have no more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening! I don’t mind your cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way, but ever since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, ‘I hope you girls won’t mind, but I just happen to remember that I’m engaged to both of you’—You’re mine, and I won’t have any trespassers. I’m a cavewoman, and you’d better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd feet—Orchid! She’s no orchid! She’s a bachelor’s button!”
“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she was.”
“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s why. Drat her! Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all.”
At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”
He sat in the Sims House office—singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.
“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.
“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid—no, she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh, I’ll be good, but—I’d like to kiss her once, good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like—like rosebuds!
“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like—Lee, sweet, can’t you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!
“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die than have to live and listen to—
“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and—Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar, but—And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius—
“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him—
“Or does he pull the bunk, too?
“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull the bunk’! Horrible!
“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet he’s used to all those highbrows—
“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be able to go on reading. Still—I don’t suppose they read much, but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.
“Rats!”
He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a hamburger sandwich, demanded:
“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen you at City Hall.”
“Yes. Say, uh, say, how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just starting in, and, uh—You get me.”
With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:
“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he’s one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen’s English, and jever hear one of his poems? They’re darn bright. I’ll tell you: There’s some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’ teeth. But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!
“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot—he ain’t a clam like some of these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn if he didn’t wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful near throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for his money all right! We fellows on the Force all like him, and we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain’t hardly supposed to do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders. You bet. He’s a real guy.”
“I see,” said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:
“But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.
“Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!
“I’m not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.
“Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job—Huh! He’s just the kind of jollying fourflusher that would climb! But anyway, I’ll have my training then, and maybe I’ll make a real health department here.
“Orchid said we’d go skating this winter—
“Damn Orchid!”