Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [85]
He gathered a practice small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a golden-oak sideboard with a souvenir match-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed, and Leora sighed:
“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn’t expect me to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not learning his Golden Text.”
II
So did Martin stumble into respectability.
In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant, “Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.”
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them and they were on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to everyone who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ‘bus,” protested Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?”
“What’s the IDEA? To advertise your own town, of course!”
“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a secondhand tin Lizzie?”
“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’t put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody in town notices it!”
While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,” Martin’s clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some public spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” the citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a worker of miracles.
III
He had intimates — the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the garageman — to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young professional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never concealed.
If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the art of remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players, rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirtsleeves, chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,” and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there was news of a “big game on,” the county sports dropped in silently and went to work — the sewing-machine agent