Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [227]
“Would you really like to see me Director?”
“Of course! All that — Oh, you know; I don’t just mean the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish good.”
“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men about whose work I don’t know a blame’ thing?”
“Oh, don’t be so superior! Someone has to do these things. And that’d be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!”
“And give up my own chance?”
“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department just the same. And even if you did give up — You are so stubborn! It’s lack of imagination. You think that because you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there’s nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I persuaded you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf, the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No imagination! You’re precisely like these business men you’re always cursing because they can’t see anything in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!”
“And you really would have me give up my work —”
He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.
He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, “You know I’m the last person to speak of money, but really, it’s you who have so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you would make so much more that — Forgive me!”
She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.
He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first chance I’ve had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it ‘devotion to science!’ Well, I’ve got to decide right now —”
He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irritated by its snobbishness of discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:
“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute — and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this pompous fakery of giving orders and —”
“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud of you?”
“Um. Well — NO, not if he’s to be proud of me for being a stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker —”
“Please don’t be vulgar.”
“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”
“I wish I had some way of showing you — Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from it.”
“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we — if he could afford it, he’d probably be right here, in town, with garcons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird, by God — and no Director Arrowsmith!”
“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”
“Now, by God, let me tell you —”
“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”
“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”
“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every