II
Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the Department of Public Health.
The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of that large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he entered the drab reception-office he was highly received by the stenographer and the two visiting nurses. Into the midst of their flutterings—“Did you have a good trip, Doctor? Dr. Pickerbaugh didn’t hardly expect you till tomorrow, Doctor. Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?”—charged Pickerbaugh, thundering welcomes.
Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance. He was a man who never merely talked: he either bubbled or made orations.
He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the Director’s private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:
“Doctor, I’m delighted to have a man with your scientific inclinations. Not that I should consider myself entirely without them. In fact I make it a regular practice to set aside a period for scientific research, without a certain amount of which even the most ardent crusade for health methods would scarcely make much headway.”
It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin settled in his chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him to look more interested.
“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I have often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for public health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and punch of Kipling.
“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader—say a Billy Sunday of the movement—a man who would know how to use sensationalism properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian preachers—sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational. Huh! If they only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be sensational enough! Still, I try, I try, and—Look here. Here’s a placard, it was painted by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around everywhere:
“You can’t get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,
So let’s every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.
“Then there’s another—this is a minor thing; it doesn’t try to drive home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise you the effect it’s had on careless housewives, who of course don’t mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep put into them, and when they see a card like this, it makes ’em think:
“Boil the milk bottles or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.
“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some day when you get time, glance over this volume of clippings—just to show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed in Des Moines—say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet when I proved by statistics that ninety-three percent of all insanity is caused by booze! Then this—well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly, but it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in touch with all the movements for civic weal.”
He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was the headline:
Doc Pickerbaugh banner booster
of Evangeline County leads big
go-to-church demonstration here
Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen percent! Oh, Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well, this might interest you then. It’s from the Zenith Advocate-Times, and it’s by Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most popular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I was in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregational Sunday-Schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The Morality of A1 Health.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:
“Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin’ poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.
He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son—of—a—gun!”
For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.
“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu‑ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brainchildren may teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.
“Still you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting—I know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”
He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled “Pickerbaugh Pickings.”
In verse and aphorism, “Pickings” recommended good health, good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three percent of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.
Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched “Pickings” from him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time. But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do.”
While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus; president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and cheerleader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B’nai Brith, and the Y.M.C.A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grownups.
Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on “A Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and the Mugford College Alumni Association on “Wanted: A Man-Sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.
He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on “More Health—More Bank Clearings.” He had edified the National Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley Folks.” Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-Rum Minute Men.
The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy athletic costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern Minnesota pines.
Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.
He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a civilized man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be sufficient reason for ignoring it.
When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself for what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent normal people … Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practice, in his bullying health administration. Now again?
He urged, “This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh’s is exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long as he lets me do my work in the lab and dairy inspection?”
He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by the window.
“Well?” she said.
“It’s fine—gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner tomorrow evening.”
“What’s he like?”
“Oh, he’s awfully optimistic—he puts things over—he—Oh, Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?”
His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.