Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [212]
She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played better than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look well in golf clothes.
He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi waiting.
“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.
They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we’re married I’ll enjoy your limousine.”
“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry you. Really, I’m NOT! You have no sense of ease!”
They were married the following January, in St. George’s Church, and Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers, the bishop, the relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top hat which Joyce had commanded, as he did over having Rippleton Holabird wring his hand with a look of, “At last, dear boy, you have come out of barbarism and become One of Us.”
Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused, and asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding at all. The best man was Dr. William Smith, with his beard trimmed for the occasion, and distressing morning clothes and a topper which he had bought in London eleven years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a cousin of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to recognize the Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Groton and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winnemac and nothing at all, he became suspicious.
In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, “Dear, you were brave! I didn’t know what a damn’ fool that cousin of mine was. Kiss me!”
Thenceforth . . . except for a dreadful second when Leora floated between them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale cold breast . . . they were happy and in each other found adventurous new ways.
IV
For three months they wandered in Europe.
On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly money thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I’ve put ten thousand dollars to your credit in London — oh, yes, and fifty thousand in New York — and if you’d like, when you have to do things for me, I’d be glad if you’d draw on it. No! Wait! Can’t you see how easy and decent I want to make it all? You won’t hurt me to save your own self-respect?”
V
They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several things before that), but Joyce did go with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris, Copenhagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners received Her Husband, knew of him, desired to be violent with him about phage, and showed him their work of years. Some of them were hasty and graceless, she thought. Her Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and conversation . . . but of course go on with his science . . . a pity he could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British scientists they met. But even in America there were honorary degrees. . . .
While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered Women.
VI
Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora, who, in her indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fame, was neither woman nor wife but only her own self, Martin knew nothing whatever about Women. He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his wishes, to understand