Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [88]
Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, the plague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world must mobilize — literally; that public health authorities must supersede generals and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and his exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.
Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or health but Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, and it was an important thing for him, that conversion.
He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick, essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr. Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid of avoidable disease and produce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public health officials.
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.
He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so much tuberculosis.
This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being ill. They fumed, “Who does he think he is? We call him in for doctoring, not for bossing. Why, the damn’ fool said we ought to burn down our houses — said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’t stand for nobody talking to me like that!”
Everything became clear to Martin — too clear. The nation must make the best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all there was to it. As to how the officials were to become perfect executives, and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he had no suggestions but only a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idiotic day of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have happened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like Sondelius! It makes me tired!”
Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good. I won’t have any little bellyaches or T.B. or anything, so please don’t lecture me!”
Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.
V
Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything he had missed.
“He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they sat on the porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this literature and stuff. We haven’t done much ourselves — here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives — but maybe we’ve gone a little beyond our dads, and he’ll go way beyond us.”
He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue morning sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousled and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid, and came home to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk. All evening he read to her, not history now and Henry James but “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” which both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held her hand and crowed:
“Golly, we — No, not ‘golly.’ Well, what CAN you say except ‘golly’? Anyway: Some day we’ll save up enough money for a couple months in Italy and all those places. All those old narrow streets and old castles! There must be scads of ’em that are couple hundred years old or older! And we’ll take the boy . . . Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn him! . . . And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like a regular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh, we’ll be a fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any more morals