Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [28]
“I don’t see that I need to convince you!” he raged, as he stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled derision. He was an eminent scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure impudence from a probationer — a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and slangy young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke: “I don’t see that I need to convince you.” He was proud of himself for having been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it, concluding, “I just said to her quietly, ‘My dear young woman, I don’t know that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,’ I said, and she wilted.”
But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her — “Take a better man than she is, better man than I’ve ever met, to get away with being insulting to ME!” said the modest young scientist.
He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a sack of straw.
“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then. I was just — Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor.”
“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”
“So was I!”
He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only:
“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”
“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl — that’s what we call ’em in Dakota.”
“Come from Dakota?”
“I come from the most enterprising town — three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants — in the entire state of North Dakota — Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?”
To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.
“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But — I don’t know. I’m not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t think much of the bedside manner.”
“I glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients — the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs — they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you can bluff a bacteria — what is it?— bacterium?”
“No, they’re — What do they call you?”
“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name — Leora Tozer.”
“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”
Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.
He told