Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [97]
He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon fleeing from them, but at their laughter he was black furious.
Leora comforted him with cool hands. “It’ll pass over,” she said. But it did not pass.
By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love through all the world. He had, they mirthfully related, declared that anybody who kept hogs would die of small-pox; he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ‘t — small-pox?”
More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rends tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls their treasure.
When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the other half clamored, “Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics on the brain!” That a number of children quite adequately died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.
Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly, “I’m licked. I’ve got to get out. Nothing more I can do here. Take years before they’d trust me again. They’re so damned HUMOROUS! I’m going to go get a real job — public health.”
“I’m so glad! You’re too good for them here. We’ll find some big place where they’ll appreciate your work.”
“No, that’s not fair. I’ve learned a little something. I’ve failed here. I’ve antagonized too many people. I didn’t know how to handle them. We could stick it out, and I would, except that life is short and I think I’m a good worker in some ways. Been worrying about being a coward, about running away, ‘turning my —’ What is it? ‘— turning my hand from the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?”
“Of course!”
II
He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.
Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh Director of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.
Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.
Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and sixty-six here — no, wait, it’s three hundred and sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we’ll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!”
He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station agent, who was also telegraph operator.
The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year — against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.
Proper recommendations were desired.
Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.
Dr. Pickerbaugh informed