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 chicken-pox. 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 small-pox; he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t—small-pox?”
More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rend 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? ‘—turning my hand from the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?”