Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [87]
“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don’t have anything but routine practice among a lot of farmers?”
“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot of you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own jobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city with libraries and medical meetings and everything, you’d develop. Well, I don’t know of anything to prevent your studying at home! You consider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but I notice you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How much do you read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied. My people pay me an excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me by election to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmers think a lot harder and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well! I don’t see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!”
“Hell, I don’t!” Martin mumbled. As he drove back he raged at Hesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled into uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics, nothing of history, nothing of music or painting. Except in hasty bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of Robert Service, and the only prose besides medical journalism at which he looked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis papers and Wild West stories in the magazines.
He reviewed the “intelligent conversation” which, in the desert of Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif’s largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He could recall nothing save the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and the councils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad’s barber-shop.
He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were “going to get educated, if it kills us.” He went at it as he had gone at bacteriology.
He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or at least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of “The Golden Bowl” which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the Tozers’; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drove the prairie roads, he was marching into jungle villages — sun helmets, orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and sun-scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate, yet it is possible that in those long intense evenings of reading with Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max Gottlieb’s world — enchanting sometimes and tragic always.
But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr. Hesselink.
IV
Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.
In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a decent office and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics and founding institutions and making inconvenient speeches and trying new drinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of everything by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington, and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and Cape Romanzoff. Manson on Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius’s admirable method of killing rats with hydrocyanic