Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [138]
With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, “And I suppose I haven’t a thing to say if they wreck the Department!”
“Not a thing, if the city doesn’t care.”
“Well, I care! I’ll starve before I’ll resign!”
“You’ll starve if you don’t resign, and your wife, too. Now here’s my plan,” said the banker. “You go into private practice here — I’ll finance your getting an office and so on — and when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we’ll all get together again and have you put in as full Director.”
“Ten years of waiting — in NAUTILUS? Nope. I’m licked. I’m a complete failure — at thirty-two! I’ll resign. I’ll wander on,” said Martin.
“I know I’m going to love Chicago,” said Leora.
IV
He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred.”
Martin accepted.
V
When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked out, that’s what happened.” One of the papers had an innocent squib:
Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler for the meat-ax.
Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:
I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your defection, your going back to private practice merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to sustain.
VI
As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:
“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but making money.
“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded boob-trap — scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!
“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends, but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if they AREN’T bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He’s probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it’s taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I’m making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll get Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.
“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of tapestry, they shall have it — and pay for it.
“I never thought I could be such a failure — to become a commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don’t want to be anything else, believe me! I’m through!”
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
CHAPTER 25
Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night,