examination had hardly ought to be allowed to practice medicine. That’s what my Dad said.”
They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might be but who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick this crib in your pocket—look, here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief.”
“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.
“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God knows—” The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. “—God knows you can’t take it in through your head!”
They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.
“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Clawson.
“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,” grieved the president.
They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his nose—and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.
They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fraternity, piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it—it’s all right—he’ll get through or get hanged!”
He got through.
VI
Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.
During the strain of study for examinations Martin was peculiarly vexing in regard to “laying in the best quality medical terms like the best quality sterilizers—not for use but to impress your patients.” As one, the Digams suggested, “Say, if you don’t like the way we study medicine, we’ll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!”
Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’re simply carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How’s your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who’s the premier of Austro-Hungary?”
Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything—except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they’re simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn’t religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don’t you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don’t you—”
Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying in the lab! I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!”
“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you, you fellows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a man—”
So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.
When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, “Look here, old son. We’re all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you’re so confoundedly honest, why don’t you get out?”
He left Martin to agonize, “He’s right. I’ve got to shut up or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What am I going to do?”
VII
Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s howling conversation, Clif’s fondness for dropping things in people’s soup, and Clif’s melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped, “Will you kindly not make so much racket?”
“I’ll make all the damn’ racket I damn’ please!” Clif asserted, and a feud was on.
Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, “Darn him, he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out of Digam, that’s a cinch, and it won’t be me!”
He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who got out. He said that the Digams were a “bunch of bum sports; don’t even have a decent game of poker,” but he was fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin resigned from the fraternity with him, planned to room with him the coming autumn.
Clif’s blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had no reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was demanding, “How much chuh pay for those shoes—must think you’re a Vanderbilt!” or “D’I see you walking with that Madeline Fox femme—what chuh tryin’ to do?” But Martin was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next year he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not be bothered.
That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in Montana.
He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators, then down and to another pole.
They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple—they removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand. Climbing all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a miracle.
He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? “I’m here!” he gloated.
The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific
