Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [110]
Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates, but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were proteges of Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since they were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.
Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so thick a rind that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin’s frequent refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he did not wish to come. He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection, diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by urging, “Come on now, Mart, let’s hear some of those crazy ideas of yours!”
His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife. Mrs. Watters had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe that she was the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked Martin’s damns, Leora’s smoking, and both their theories of bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief, humorous, and introduced by a strident “Now don’t be silly,” and she expected that to settle the matter.
Martin groaned, “Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it’s easier to become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting.”
But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by Orchid.
III
He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on “What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics” for the Sunday Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.
He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.
People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, “They’re coming to hear ME, and I haven’t got a darn’ thing to say to ’em!” It made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, “You’ll find plenty room right up the side aisles, young man.”
“I’m the speaker for the afternoon.”
“Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance, if you please, Doctor.”
In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian intellectuality.
They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women to meet him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and dismayingly they expected him to say something intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched doorway into the auditorium. Millions of faces were staring at his apologetic insignificance — faces in the curving lines of pews, faces in the low balcony, eyes which followed him and doubted him and noted that his heels were run down.
The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.
The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to look brazenly at the massed people who were looking at him, while he sat nude and exposed and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor made announcement of the Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little Lads’ Marching Club. They sang a brief