Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

anyway, and he doesn’t do a darn thing but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal effect or whatever the fool thing is,” remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the Delft elevator.

Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not enlarging his own practice, Martin mapped every recent case of typhoid within five miles of Delft. He looked into milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He discovered that most of the cases had appeared after the visits of an itinerant seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic. She had had typhoid four years before.

“She’s a chronic carrier of the bugs. She’s got to be examined,” he announced.

He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.

With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher cursed him from the doorstep. He returned with the township police officer and had the seamstress arrested and confined in the segregation ward of the county poor-farm. In her discharges he found billions of typhoid bacilli.

The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-lined whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She had always been well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who brought presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to cook dinner, and sang to the children in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled for persecuting her. “He wouldn’t dare pick on her if she wasn’t so poor,” they said, and they talked of a jail-delivery.

Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he tried to make her understand that there was no other place for her, he brought her magazines and sweets. But he was firm. She could not go free. He was convinced that she had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid, with nine deaths.

The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county. He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.

Leora saved him and the seamstress. “Why not take up a collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where they can keep her if she can’t be cured?” said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium⁠—and was amiably forgotten by everyone for the rest of her life⁠—and his recent enemies said of Martin, “He’s mighty smart, and right on the job.” Hesselink drove over to inform him, “You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you’re settling down to business.”

Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of smallpox and several which he suspected. Some of these lay across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink’s domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. “It’s probably chickenpox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get smallpox in summer,” he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring everyone to be vaccinated, thundering, “There’s going to be all hell let loose here in ten or fifteen days!”

But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against it. The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never taught them to love him and follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk. Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose him from the pulpit.

And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case did prove to be chickenpox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.

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 smallpox; he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gallstones to heartburn as smallpox. They greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t⁠—smallpox?”

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?