Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [122]
“Marty” he said, “do you feel competent to run this Department?”
“Why, uh —”
“Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all by yourself?”
“Why, uh —”
“Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next congressman from this district!”
“Really?”
“Looks that way. Boy, I’m going to take to the whole nation the Message I’ve tried to ram home here!”
Martin got out quite a good “I congratulate you.” He was so astonished that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.
“I’ve just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans of the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe they picked me because they haven’t anybody else to run this year. Ha, ha, ha!”
Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not exactly the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:
“I said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall have the high privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules and regulations for the guidance, in every walk of life, of this great nation of a hundred million people. However, gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the impulse that prompts me to consider, in all modesty, your unexpected and probably undeserved honor is the fact that it seems to me that what Congress needs is more forward-looking scientists to plan and more genu-ine trained business men to execute the improvements demanded by our evolving commonwealth, and also the possibility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of the pre-eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall completely control —’”
But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans really did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.
II
While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as a tyrant and a radical.
There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than that of old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus. It was tiled and drained and excellently lighted; the milking machines were perfect; the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed inspectors and the tuberculin test. He had fought the dairy-men’s union and kept his dairy open-shop by paying more than the union scale. Once, when Martin attended a meeting of the Nautilus Central Labor Council as Pickerbaugh’s representative, the secretary of the council confessed that there was no plant which they would so like to unionize and which they were so unlikely to unionize as Klopchuk’s Dairy.
Now Martin’s labor sympathies were small. Like most laboratory men, he believed that the reason why workmen found less joy in sewing vests or in pulling a lever than he did in a long research was because they were an inferior race, born lazy and wicked. The complaint of the unions was the one thing to convince him that at last he had found perfection.
Often he stopped at Klopchuk’s merely for the satisfaction of it. He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had a persistent sore throat. He examined the man, made cultures, and found hemolytic streptococcus. In a panic he hurried back to the dairy, and after cultures he discovered that there was streptococcus in the udders of three cows.
When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through all the smaller towns in the congressional district and had returned to Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine of the infected milker and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no more infection should be found.
“Nonsense! Why, that’s the cleanest place in the city,” Pickerbaugh scoffed. “Why borrow trouble? There’s no sign of an epidemic of strep.”
“There darn’ well will be! Three cows infected. Look at what’s happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I’ve asked Klopchuk to come in and talk it over.”
“Well, you know how busy I am, but —”
Klopchuk appeared