Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [30]
He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he leaves all these detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please don’t bully me so!”
“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about the way most of these damned profs don’t even know what he’s up to —”
Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admonitions.
She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.
“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,” he blurted.
“I loved it.”
“And I was so technical, and so noisy — Oh, I AM a chump!”
“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I haven’t any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I’m intelligent enough to hear what they really think and — Good night!”
They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced, Madeline.
He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bed-ridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village, the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora, always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat household tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the colored world.
It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell me about you. I’ve always known you. I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re going to marry me —”
They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant restaurant. Her first words were:
“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and — Oh, my dear, I do like you!”
Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.
IV
He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not bring it off. He thought of Madeline’s pathetic enthusiasms: her “Provencal pleasaunce” and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty. But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora.