Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [77]
“Heh!” said Ada. “He may fool some folks but he can’t fool me. Anybody can learn things in books, but when it comes to practicing ’em — Let me tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-tenth of the savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis has, you’ll live longer than I expect!”
Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his Zenith training had made him so “gosh-awful smart that he sticks up his nose at us poor hicks of dirt-farmers,” Martin’s scarf was rather badly tied.
All of his own wit and some of Ada’s Bert repeated at the supper table.
“You oughtn’t to ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty cute about the necktie — I guess Mart does think he’s some punkins,” chuckled Mr. Tozer.
Leora took Martin aside after supper. “Darlin’, can you stand it? We’ll have our own house, soon as we can. Or shall we vamoose?”
“I’m by golly going to stand it!”
“Um. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful — they’ll hang you.”
He ambled to the front porch. He determined to view the rooms behind the Eagle office. Without a retreat in which to be safe from Bert he could not endure another week. He could not wait for the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they had become to him dread and eternal figures whose enmity would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this Wheatsylvania which was the only perceptible world.
He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping the plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him. The man was one Wise, a Russian Jew known to the village as “Wise the Polack.” In his shack near the railroad he sold silver stock and motor-factory stock, bought and sold farmlands and horses and muskrat hides. He called out, “That you, Doc?”
“Yup!”
Martin was excited. A patient!
“Say, I wish you’d walk down a ways with me. Couple things I’d like to talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place and sample some new cigars I’ve got.” He emphasized the word “cigars.” North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoretically dry.
Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious so long now!
Wise’s shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it and open wheat country. It was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise winked — he was a confidential, untrustworthy wisp of a man — and murmured, “Think you could stand a little jolt of first-class Kentucky bourbon?”
“Well, I wouldn’t get violent about it.”
Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a warped drawer of his desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank, wiping the mouth of the bottle with circling palms. Then Wise, abruptly:
“Look here, Doc. You’re not like these hicks; you understand that sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn’t intend to. Well, make a long story short, I guess I’ve sold too much mining stock, and they’ll be coming down on me. I’ve got to be moving — curse it — hoped I could stay settled for couple of years, this time. Well, I hear you’re looking for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two rooms at the back besides this one. I’ll rent it to you, furniture and the whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you’ll pay me one year in advance. Oh, this ain’t phony. Your brother-inlaw knows all about my ownership.”
Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young doctor who would soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial Citizens in Wheatsylvania? He returned home, and under the parlor lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping forward with open mouth.
“You’d be safe renting it for a year, but that ain’t the point,” said Bert.
“It certainly isn’t! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they’ve almost made up their minds to let you have their place? Make me a fool, after all the trouble I’ve taken?” groaned Mr. Tozer.
They went over it and over it till almost ten o’clock,