Arrowsmith

Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was reading Gray’s Anatomy. His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.

There was a suspicion in Elk Mills⁠—now, in 1897, a dowdy redbrick village, smelling of apples⁠—that this brown-leather adjustable seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a barber’s chair. There was also a belief that its proprietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.

Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call he took charge⁠—though what there was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of independence,

Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.

They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless red cultures of Bacillus prodigiosus, and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inoculation of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two days be stiff and dead.

Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.

The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.

(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbruder and ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days! Die goldene Zeit!

She peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.

“Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”

Lazily, “Do you?”

“I do! If I can interrupt your work⁠—”

“Doesn’t matter. The damn superintendent of nurses put me at scrubbing, and we aren’t ever supposed to scrub floors, because she caught me smoking a cigarette. She’s an old terror. If she found a child like you wandering around here, she’d drag you out by the ear.”

“My dear young woman, it may interest you to know⁠—”

“Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may⁠—’ Sounds exactly like our old prof, back home.”

Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

“I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been informed that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of⁠—it may interest you to know!⁠—a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly direct me⁠—”

“Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to get along with this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand up.” She did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat.

He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. “Madeline! Brought you two together because⁠—Don’t know whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could, because I’ve⁠—I’m not making any excuses for myself. I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and I want to know⁠—”

Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she touched Leora’s shoulder, and quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for you. You’ve got a job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up. I suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish⁠—I’m a hussy. But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t care. You’re mine!”

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.

She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me⁠—because I tag after you and She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her.”

That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylococcus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the Lower Manhattan Hospital, a carbuncle which was healing with unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of bacteria had appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the flask to the incubator.

He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his laboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was handy to his memory before he absentmindedly wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria⁠—of staphylococci.

“Now what the hell!” he cried. “Why, the broth’s as clear as when I seeded it! Now what the⁠—Think of this fool accident coming up just when I was going to start something new!”

He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor, to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light, made certain that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a slide from the flask contents and examined it under the microscope. He discovered nothing but shadows of what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.

He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes, reflectively rubbed his neck⁠—his blouse was off, his collar on the floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered: