V
In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men who might have been doctors or school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the row with him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having no good opinions whatever.
Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly flaxen hair—a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight. He was strengthened to endure even the depressing man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:
“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in Erewhon—the swine stole that idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it—the only crime for w’ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis.”
“Umph!” grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.
Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and blunted sword of the law.
“That’s what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out bodies but make a new world!” Martin hungered. “Gosh, I’d follow him through fire! And the way he lays out the crapehangers that criticize public health results! If I could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a couple o’ minutes—”
He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded Sondelius on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor worried, “But how about the danger of free clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?” Martin stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A janitor was closing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great Man was lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:
“Sir, if you aren’t due some place, I wonder if you’d like to come out and have a—a—”
Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, “Have a drink? Well, I think maybe I would. How did the joke about the dog and his fleas go tonight? Do you think they liked it?”
“Oh, sure, you bet.”
The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, “Was it all right—was it? Did they like it? So hot tonight, and I been lecturing nine time a week—Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet [but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay] and—I forget. Was it all right? Did they like it?”
“Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life!”
The prophet crowed, “Come! I buy a drink. As a hygienist, I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee or even ice cream soda. But as one who is fond of talking, I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy. Is there a cool place with some Pilsener here in Detroit—no; where am I tonight?—Minneapolis?”
“I understand there’s a good beer-garden. And we can get the trolley right near here.”
Sondelius stared at him. “Oh, I have a taxi waiting.”
Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxicab he tried to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.
“Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?”
Sondelius ignored him. “Did you see that girl going by? What ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden? Have they any decent cognac? Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know, I mean all the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget being earnest, let us drink, let us sing ‘Der Graf von Luxembourg,’ let us detach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of ‘Die Meistersinger,’ which only I appreciate!”
In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the Cosmos Club, Halle’s investigation of infant mortality, the suitability of combining benedictine and applejack, Biarritz, Lord Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George Gissing, and homard thermidor. Martin looked for a connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with the notorious or with people met abroad. He might have said, “I think I met a man who knows you,” or “I have had the pleasure of reading all your articles,” but he fished with “Did you ever run into the two big men in my medical school—Winnemac—Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?”
“Silva? I don’t remember. But Gottlieb—you know him? Oh!” Sondelius waved his mighty arms. “The greatest! The spirit of science! I had the pleasure to talk with him at McGurk. He would not sit here bawling like me! He makes me like a circus clown! He takes all my statements about epidemiology and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!” He beamed, and was off on a denunciation of high tariff.
Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a fantastic drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black coffee, and a liquid which the waiter asserted to be absinthe. “I should go to bed at midnight,” he lamented, “but it is a cardinal sin to interrupt good talk. Yoost tempt me a little! I am an easy one to be tempted! But I must have five hours’ sleep. Absolute! I lecture in—it’s some place in Iowa—tomorrow evening. Now that I am past fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I used to, and yet I have found so many new things that I want to talk about.”
He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A surly-looking man at the next table listened and peered, and laughed at them. Sondelius dropped from Haffkine’s cholera serum to an irate:
“If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and kill him! I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but I do not like starers. I will go and argue with him. I will yoost hit him a little!”
While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man, threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands repeatedly, and brought him back to Martin.
“This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He is a carpenter. Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink. Herumph! vai-ter!”
The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist, a ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He denounced Sondelius as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for his ignorance of economics, he denounced the waiter concerning the brandy; Sondelius and Martin and the waiter answered with vigor; and the conversation became admirable. Presently they were turned out of the beer-garden and the three of them crowded into the still waiting taxicab, which shook to their debating. Where they went, Martin could never trace. He may have dreamed the whole tale. Once they were apparently in a roadhouse on a long street which must have been University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar; once in the carpenter’s house, where an unexplained man made coffee for them.
Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in Moscow and Curaçao and Murwillumbah. The carpenter created communistic states, while Sondelius, proclaiming that he did not care whether he worked under socialism or an emperor so long as he could bully people into being well, annihilated tuberculosis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.
They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in Minnesota or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin started for Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of allowing people to be ill.
And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain “Encore” Edwards the playful chemist, Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain the minister’s son who had a real trapeze in his barn.