Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [80]
But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car and three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle on earth. It was their own; they could go when and where they wished.
During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture. Bert had given her so many directions that she had refused to drive the family Overland. When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly like the wild goose — and then in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently he accelerated for corners, to make them more interesting. The sight of anything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred in him a frenzy which could be stilled only by going up and passing it. The village adored, “The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right.” They waited, with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It is possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his office came because of awe at his driving . . . the rest because there was nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at Groningen.
IV
With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.
When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is difficult not to meet everyone on the street every day), they glared. Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.
Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to the sale of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines, washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved if he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensed pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into the store and addressed him piously.
“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be here sent everything to me. My way o’ doing things suits me, and I don’t figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked young string-bean.”
Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, over-crowd his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in a homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on the bell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms in Whispering, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick to Hesselink.”
V
So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were awaiting a love message.
A hoarse and shaky voice: “I want to speak to the doctor.”
“Yuh — yuh — ‘S the doctor speaking.”
“This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road. My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think maybe it is croup and she look awful and — Could you come right away?”
“You bet. Be right there.”
Four miles — he would do it in eight minutes.
He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while Leora beamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, banged and clattered past the station and into the wheat prairie. When he had gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look for the owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farm driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of dented