Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [127]
“Will you stop the car!” she cried.
He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.
She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on fighting with you. Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying. I’m tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand — I’m not just a climber — I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I certainly don’t see why we should be inferior to this bunch, in ANYTHING. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they’re nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we’re real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much — some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be at the N.P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than we can? Technique!”
They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines of barbed wire.
Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you ever coming to the house again?” he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.
V
Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work is very satisfactory. There’s only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting together with folks and giving a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But perhaps that’ll come to you when you have more responsibility.”
Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls all together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned into wearing yellow tights at a civic pageant.
“Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director,” he fretted. “I wonder if there’s people who become what’s called ‘successful’ and then hate it? Well, anyway, I’ll start a decent system of vital statistics in the department before they get me. I won’t lay down! I’ll fight! I’ll make myself succeed!”
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
CHAPTER 23
It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man organized was overpowering.
He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all the churches and associations into co-operation; he made the newspapers promise to publish three columns of praise each day.
He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the sin in the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W.C.T.U. booth at which celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour by injecting ground-up cigarette paper into it. The