Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

not distinguish among them; for days most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the carpenter who had come to put up shelves.

The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one below: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were not particularly noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max Gottlieb and perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers: brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there was a steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no anxiety over money in their voices nor any restlessness of envy and scandalous gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort of work that, since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is eternal, however forgotten the worker’s name.

As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever, referring to himself as “the boy chemist,” speaking of “this gaudy Institute” and “our trusting new lil brother, Arrowsmith”) debating with a slight thin-bearded man⁠—Dr. William T. Smith, assistant in biochemistry⁠—the possibility of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays, as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his notions of cell-chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as “the Edison of medical science,” Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he stood on a mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing paths, were open to his feet.

V

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after their coming.

As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s affairs in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Everyone whom Martin met at the Holabirds’ flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody: a goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird’s graceful casualness.

The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin demanded, “Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your physiology?”

Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a deprecatory “Would you really like to hear about ’em⁠—you needn’t be polite, you know!” he dashed into an exposition of his experiments, drawing sketches on the blank spaces in newspaper advertisements, on the back of a wedding invitation, on the flyleaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin apologetically, learned yet gay.

“We’re working on the localization of brain functions. I think we’ve gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it’s jolly exciting, exploring the brain. Look here!”

His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived and beat under his fingers.

He threw down the paper. “I say, it’s a shame to inflict my hobbies on you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how is your work going? Are you comfortable at the Institute? Do you find you like people?”

“Everybody except⁠—To be frank, I’m jarred by Wickett.”

Generously, “I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But you mustn’t mind him; he’s really an extraordinarily gifted biochemist. He’s a bachelor⁠—gives up everything for his work. And he doesn’t really mean half the rude things he says. He detests me, among others. Has he mentioned me?”

“Why, not especially⁠—”

“I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my experiences in the war, which really isn’t quite altogether true.”

“Yes,” in a burst, “he did say that.”

“I do rather wish he wouldn’t. So sorry to have offended him by going and getting wounded. I’ll remember and not do it again! Such a fuss for a war record as insignificant as mine! What happened was: when the war broke out in ’14 I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end of my magnificent career! Here’s somebody arriving.”

His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the dinner in new enchantment.

So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life outside the laboratory.

All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be. Then it became a game to wait until the end of the month. Evenings, in little restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.

The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield Clinic, but on evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised it to thirty-five hundred.

When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora. In their hotel room they stared at the envelope as though it was likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he stared, and whispered, “Oh, those decent people! They’re paying me⁠—this is for four hundred and twenty dollars⁠—they’re paying me five thousand a year!”

Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house near Gramercy Park, and helped her furnish it with good bits, secondhand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried, “I hope we stay here for fifty years!”

This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith⁠—the thin-bearded biochemist, who had an intelligent taste in music and German beer⁠—an anatomist whom Martin met at a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His son Robert had graduated from City College and gone bustlingly into business. Miriam kept up her music while she guarded