Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [226]
“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals — the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes — that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.
“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this co-ordination, which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been made. We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we’re going to make them as practical and supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help bring Science out of the monastery to serve Mankind.”
By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what the League was trying to do.
Holabird went on:
“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered at Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve been too much under the influence of Wickett, and now that he’s gone and you’ve seen more of life and of Joyce’s set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh! without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a broader view.
“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I’m safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven’t yet found any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I daresay in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”
Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion and Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.
Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort of unexpected —”
The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, co-ordinate, standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin’s silence. At parting he chanted, “Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decision tomorrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But that’s a detail. . . . Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy! You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve widened your interests so much, this past year!”
In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.
“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps helped, just a little?”
Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur — His Own Sort!— facing the winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed, appreciative manner, but he was