Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [223]
He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson again.
II
It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grandfathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Bideford, had died in the matter of the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.
Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin’s love for her (he did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).
“Death’s a better game than bridge — you have no partner to help you!” she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.
John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb — ten good pounds he weighed at birth — and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this minuscule aristocrat, this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him.
Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigres.
III
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious “Darling — do you mind — just a second — Plinder, isn’t there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial species — very beautiful, very delicate — and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.
“I’ve GOT to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”
“I know but — Darling, you get so nervous when you’re working like this. Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend people by missing engagements — well, after all, I wish you wouldn’t, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain — not yet!”
Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for him the best bacteriological laboratory he had ever seen — white-tile floor and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath — and a technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or night.
“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work evenings, you won’t have to go clear down to Liberty