Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis
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in the shadows, himself a shadow.
He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor, yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant on his breast.
III
On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the other departments go to their rooms to peer into their books. But also as an academic graduate, with a training in the basic sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom had but a high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room Lutheran college among the cornfields.
For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operating, of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more immediate, macabre fear, he thought of the dissecting-room and the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by hooks, like rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of brine in the dark basement; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul the cadavers out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and to scold them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.
There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him—He halted in Gottlieb’s private laboratory, a small, tidy apartment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.
If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously precise chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and delicate were the scientist’s thin hands among the papers. He looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.
“Vell? Yes?”
“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a medic freshman, Winnemac B.A. I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry—”
“No. It is not time for you.”
“Honest, I know I could do it now.”
“There are two kinds of students the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind—they are very few!—they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year.”
“But honestly, with my chemistry—”
“Have you taken physical chemistry?”
“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”
“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry—that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year.”
Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, “Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?”
“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart’s dress—and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?”
“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:
“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemistry. I’ll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he’ll look foolish in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won’t take sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room. . . . I want to take bacteriology—now!”
He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.
“I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What is Truth?” he puzzled.
IV
Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other medics, calling them “Billy” and “Ike” and “the Parson,” and regarding them as he had regarded animals in biology. The dissecting-room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of hard plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor seemed to cling about him outside the dissecting-room; but he smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he was exploring arteries with youthful and altogether unholy joy.
His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known to the class by a similar but different name.
Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of the Sanctification Bible and Missions School. He had played football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was a bright and happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed away sin and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to have a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the debaucheries of card-playing.
Martin found himself viewing “Billy,” their cadaver—an undersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his petrified, vealy face—as a machine, fascinating, complex, beautiful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble belief in man’s divinity and immortality. He might have kept his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would not let him alone. Ira believed that he could bring even medical students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and unlovely hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.
“Mart, my son,” he roared, “do you realize that in this, what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?”
“Huh! Souls. I haven’t found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do you believe that junk?”
Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laughter, slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored, “Brother, you’ve got to do better than that to get Ira’s goat! You think you’ve got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts. You haven’t—you’ve only got indigestion. What you need is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y.M.C.A. and I’ll take