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

There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save trouble by resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he go to the citizens begging for support. He did his work, and leaned on Leora’s assurance, and tried to ignore his detractors. He could not.

News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his tyranny, his ignorance, his callowness. An old woman died after treatment at the clinic, and the coroner hinted that it had been the fault of “our almighty health-officer’s pet cub assistant.” Somewhere arose the name “the Schoolboy Czar” for Martin, and it stuck.

In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Parents’ and Teachers’ Association, in one frank signed protest sent to the Mayor, Martin was blamed for too strict an inspection of milk, for insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for permitting garbage to lie untouched, for persecuting the overworked garbage collectors; and when a case of smallpox appeared in the Bohemian section, there was an opinion that Martin had gone out personally and started it.

However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his wickedness, once they lost faith in him they lost it completely and with joy, and they welcomed an apparently spontaneously generated rumor that he had betrayed his benefactor, their beloved Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing Orchid.

At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fashionable churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church touched up a sermon about Sin in High Places by a reference to “one who, while like a Czar he pretends to be safeguarding the city from entirely imaginary dangers, yet winks at the secret vice rampant in hidden places; who allies himself with the forces of graft and evil and the thugs who batten on honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a manly man among men, and say, ‘I have a clean heart and clean hands.’ ”

It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought that this referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to F. X. Jordan, but wise citizens saw that it was a courageous attack on that monster of treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrowsmith.

In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended him: Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church and Rabbi Rovine. They were, it happened, very good friends, and not at all friendly with the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church. They bullied their congregations; each of them asserted, “People come sneaking around with criticisms of our new Director of Health. If you want to make charges, make them openly. I will not listen to cowardly hints. And let me tell you that this city is lucky in having for health-officer a man who is honest and who actually knows something!”

But their congregations were poor.

Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his unpopularity.

“It isn’t just Jordan’s plotting and Tredgold’s grousing and Pugh’s weak spine. It’s my own fault. I can’t go out and soft-soap the people and get their permission to help keep them well. And I won’t tell them what a hell of an important thing my work is⁠—that I’m the one thing that saves the whole lot of ’em from dying immediately. Apparently an official in a democratic state has to do those things. Well, I don’t! But I’ve got to think up something or they’ll emasculate the whole Department.”

One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he could crush, or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remembered Pickerbaugh’s farewell: “Now, my boy, even if I’m way off there in Washington, this Work will be as close to my heart as it ever was, and if you should really need me, you just send for me and I’ll drop everything and come.”

Martin wrote hinting that he was much needed.

Pickerbaugh replied by return mail⁠—good old Pickerbaugh!⁠—but the reply was, “I cannot tell you how grieved I am that I cannot for the moment possibly get away from Washington but am sure that in your earnestness you exaggerate strength of opposition, write me freely, at any time.”

“That’s my last shot,” Martin said to Leora. “I’m done. Mayor Pugh will fire me, just as soon as he comes back from his fishing trip. I’m a failure again, darling.”

“You’re not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice steak, and what shall we do now⁠—time for us to be moving on, anyway⁠—I hate staying in one place,” said Leora.

“I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe I could get a job at Hunziker’s. Or go back to Dakota and try to work up a practice. What I’d like is to become a farmer and get me a big shotgun and drive every earnest Christian citizen off the place. But meantime I’m going to stick here. I might win yet⁠—with just a couple of miracles and a divine intervention. Oh, God, I am so tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this evening? Honest, I’ll quit early⁠—before eleven, maybe.”

He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research, and he took a day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with an editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. As he left Nautilus he was confused. He had caught himself rejoicing that he was free of Wheatsylvania and bound for great Nautilus. Time bent back, progress was annihilated, and he was mazed with futility.

The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only one change. Martin had to wait for his train. He remembered that Angus Duer was in Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic⁠—a private organization of medical specialists, sharing costs and profits.

The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story building constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of marble, gold, and rubies. The clinic reception-room, focused on a vast stone fireplace, was like the drawing-room of an oil magnate, but it was not a place of leisure. The young woman at the door demanded Martin’s symptoms and address. A page in buttons sped with