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

Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm colors and fine gestures⁠—when he was not frenzied with work⁠—was grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning to take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors and to osmotic pressure determinations. XXXVIII I

Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove elegantly in his coupe. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and Holabird’s coffee was salted.

There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur.

His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, “Mart, do you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud of you? Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may be presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the training we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.’ What a lovely woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she’d mind telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?”

Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check the laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet who produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an aching head against softness and think how clever he was.

“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for you, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can do,” said Joyce.

Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.

A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on them.

“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beautiful things. If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big Establishment, too, maybe.”

Terry was surprisingly complaisant.

“I’ll tell you, Slim⁠—if you want to know. Personally I’d hate to have to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise. I figure that different folks like different things, and awful few of ’em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I don’t think I’ll come to dinner. I’ve gone and bought a dress-suit⁠—bought it! got it in my room⁠—damn landlady keeps filling it with mothballs⁠—but I don’t think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being clever.”

It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman’s husband, he would do well to remember who was Director.

Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of the Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination, when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on him in his laboratory.

“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia, meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of complete abolition through Noguchi’s work, and I have no doubt their hospital, with its enormous resources and splendidly cooperating minds, will be the first to find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they’re hot after the cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit another great epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat them on the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.”

Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming merely her supported husband⁠—a butler of the boudoir.

He assented, not very pleasantly.

He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases which might be influenza and might be bad colds⁠—no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms were;