Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [230]
“And our son is to be left without your care?”
“He — Would he have my care if I died? . . . He is a nice kid, too! I hope he won’t be a Rich Man! . . . Perhaps ten years from now he’ll come to me here.”
“And live like THIS?”
“Sure — unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We have meat practically every day now!”
“I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you’ve told me, he rather fancies that sort of girl!”
“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one thing that could break me.”
“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”
“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you — You look here now, Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks! Yesterday an ‘esoteric healer’ came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re insane. We’re farmers.”
“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You’ve left common sense. I AM common sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!”
“Now you look here. By golly —”
She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.
As the chauffeur maneuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other, through tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered that he had been doing an experiment —
IV
On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States.
“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we shall see you a cabinet-member — the first Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the country!”
That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural Agencies. Among the Men of Measured Merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical College.
Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million ardently listening lovers of science.
That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and with modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:
“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall they be forgot.”
That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.
That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a depression in a garden marked the grave of Leora.
That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He’s never going to see how egotistical it is to think he’s the only man living who’s always right!”
That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out on the water.
“I feel as if I were really beginning to work now,” said Martin. “This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We’ll plug along on it for two or three years, and maybe we’ll get something permanent — and probably we’ll fail!”
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Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
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