Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [128]
None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family, who had volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an example of the benefits of healthful practices.
They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful and powerful that they had recently been presenting refined acrobatic exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them smoked, drank, spit upon pavements, used foul language, or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to them the chief booth on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the Reverend Mr. Sunday.
There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners and leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song recitals, and daily there were lectures, most of them by Pickerbaugh or by his friend Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor of hygiene and most other subjects in Mugford College.
A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the governor of the state, were invited to come and “give their messages,” but it happened, unfortunately, that none of them seemed able to get away that particular week.
The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was a slight misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers’ Association spoke strongly to Pickerbaugh about the sign “Too much pie makes pyorrhea” on the diet booth. But the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was removed at once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery in town.
The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Pickerbaugh had fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which, except that it had no running water and except that the fire laws forbade his using any kind of a flame, was exactly like a real one. All day long he poured a solution of red ink from one test-tube into another, with his microscope carefully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons who wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had caught them swimming about.
Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a nurse’s costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low cursing. They found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid person with stories about pet cats in the fire-house and no tendency to ask questions in bacteriology. It was he who showed them how they could smoke in safety. Behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a broken window which would carry off the smoke of their cigarettes. To this sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman retired a dozen times a day, and thus wore through the week.
One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant coming in not to detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse dying in agony from cigarette paper, stopped before the booth of the Eugenic Family, scratched his head, hastened to the police station, and returned with certain pictures. He growled to Pickerbaugh:
“Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don’t smoke or booze or anything?”
“Absolutely! And look at their perfect health.”
“Hm. Better keep an eye on ’em. I won’t spoil your show, Doc — we fellows at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I won’t run ’em out of town till after the Fair. But they’re the Holton gang. The man and woman ain’t married, and only one of the kids is theirs. They’ve done time for selling licker to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went into education, used to be the badger game. I’ll detail a plain-clothes man to keep ’em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods. Good luck! Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when you get to