Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [229]
Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth or lower was the same to him, and till Martin was hardened to cold and fatigue, Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and with great melody and skill he washed their clothes.
He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together season on season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin that the laboratory scheme should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and undomestic researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the expenses of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own independent work — whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a disproof of the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university professor, were coming next autumn.
“It’s kind of a mis’able return to monasteries,” grumbled Terry, “except that we’re not trying to solve anything for anybody but our own fool selves. Mind you! When this place becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks begin to creep in here, then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We’ll move farther back in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we’ll take another shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr. Holabird.”
For the first time Martin’s work began definitely to draw ahead of Terry’s.
His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as Terry’s, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the essential nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer — and no doubt less human — he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for decades.
It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.
Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.
And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.
He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.
“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed him. “Let’s walk down by the lake.”
In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her shoulders.
She cried, “Darling, I HAVE missed you! You’re wrong about lots of things, but you’re right about this — you must work and not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don’t they look wildernessy? You see, I’ve come to stay! I’ll build a house near here; perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land — probably some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can’t you just SEE it: a wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings —”
“And visitors coming?”
“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”
Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people — and there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You ARE lovely! But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you