II
Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.
Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.
Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such crusades. He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined”—this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.
Martin was so alienated that he took an antisocial and probably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.
It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take much share in his publicity campaigns, but rather to be his substitute in the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.
Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What if my statistics aren’t always exact? What if my advertising, my jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it’s all on the right side. No matter what methods we use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re justified.”
To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really matter? Does truth matter—clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?
“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the desire for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man’s excitement about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick by Pickerbaugh.”
To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.
He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone, every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty percent chance of dying before the age of sixteen and he could not startle with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir, saved, by a daily cold shower?”
For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.
To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,” was without significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to him inconceivable.
“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every enlightened man in the public service knows enough about the causes of disease—matter now of acting on that knowledge.”
When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his leaders.
He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven practical value” of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh’s biology. He noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an association of which he had never heard.
But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he beheld in Pickerbaugh’s most ardent eloquence.
When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt down instead of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he hinted that these attacks would save more lives than ten thousand sermons and ten years of parades by little girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain, then Pickerbaugh worried, “No, no, Martin, don’t think we could do that. Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords. Can’t accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from offending people.”
When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of “the value of health in making life more joyful,” but when he addressed a business luncheon he changed it to “the value in good round dollars and cents of having workmen who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to work faster at the same wages.” Parents’ associations he enlightened upon “the saving in doctors’ bills of treating the child before maladjustments go too far,” but to physicians he gave assurance that public health agitation would merely make the custom of going regularly to doctors more popular.
To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan, and Edison as his masters, but in asking the businessmen of Nautilus—the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association of wholesalers—for their divine approval of more funds for his department, he made it clear that they were his masters and lords of all the land, and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.
Gradually Martin’s contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and he saw that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one’s self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.