Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [107]
At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”
He sat in the Sims House office — singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.
“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.
“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid — no, she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh, I’ll be good, but — I’d like to kiss her once, GOOD! She likes me. Those darling lips, like — like rosebuds!
“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like — Lee, sweet, can’t you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!
“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die than have to live and listen to —
“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and — Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar, but — And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius —
“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him —
“Or does he pull the bunk, too?
“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull the bunk’! Horrible!
“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet he’s used to all those highbrows —
“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be able to go on reading. Still — I don’t suppose they read much, but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.
“Rats!”
He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:
“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen you at City Hall.”
“Yes. Say, uh, say, how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just starting in, and, uh — You get me.”
With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:
“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he’s one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen’s English, and jever hear one of his poems? They’re darn’ bright. I’ll tell you: There’s some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’ teeth. But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!
“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot — he ain’t a clam like some of these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn’ if he didn’t wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful’ near throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for