Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [33]
“Now LISTEN! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will you come or not?”
“Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I’ll try to be there. The eleven-forty?”
“Yes.”
“At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”
“AT COLLEGE SQUARE!”
Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to” were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.
“What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away? Or did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-tonight looks like a necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician.”
“Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had praised Clif’s pool-playing and called Barney “old Cimex lectularius”; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all the troubles I have — all the doggone mess a fellow can get into — YOU’D feel down in the mouth!”
Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll raise the cash, somehow. If it’s — Been going a little too far with Madeline?”
“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”
“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was SOMETHING I could do for you. Oh! Have ‘nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin’!”
By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.
V
His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practicing the tactful observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.
“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about? Oh, Martin, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and — Did I guess it, darling?”
“No, there’s someone — Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”
“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”
“Oh!”
“It’s — You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment. “Especially there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl — Miss Tozer,