She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was called at midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well. It was so violent a change that it made her more interesting than being an invalid—people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms. She went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “I hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with that’s done her a mite of good.”
He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a goldenoak sideboard with a souvenir match-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed, and Leora sighed:
“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn’t expect me to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not learning his Golden Text.”
II
So did Martin stumble into respectability.
In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant, “Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.”
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them, and they were on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to every one who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ’bus,” protested Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?”
“What’s the idea? To advertise your own town, of course!”
“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a second-hand tin lizzie?”