III
Bert Tozer said:
“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the Family.”
Ada Quist said:
“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around here you’ll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are going to get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of it I suppose we’ll have to take care of you at our house when you come sneaking back do you think we could get your house at the same rent you paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead it would save money well I’ve always said since we were in school together you couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.”
Mr. Tozer said:
“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you’d be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it. Haven’t we tried to treat you nice? I don’t like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone, now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets so cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of listen to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?”
Pete Yeska said:
“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us … Well, come back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the smallpox. I never will forget that! I was saying to the old woman just the other day, when she had an earache, ‘Ain’t got smallpox, have yuh, Bess!’ ”
Dr. Hesselink said:
“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over tonight—Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away—you don’t know how I feel!”
Henry Novak said:
“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to leave us? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.’ ”
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going away? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn fool than the Lord meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove over and—Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d like to be state senator, and if you’ll stay—I got quite a little influence—believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for you!”
Alec Ingleblad said:
“You’re a lucky guy!”
All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.
For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. “I feel like getting off and going back. Didn’t we used to have fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects the health work again, I’ll go back and run ’em both out of business! And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways.”
But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world existed save the yellow Pintsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of a radiant model city and the praise of Sondelius—perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.