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

as great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the essential nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer⁠—and no doubt less human⁠—he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for decades.

It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.

Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.

And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.

He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.

“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed him. “Let’s walk down by the lake.”

In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her shoulders.

She cried, “Darling, I have missed you! You’re wrong about lots of things, but you’re right about this⁠—you must work and not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don’t they look wildernessy? You see, I’ve come to stay! I’ll build a house near here; perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land⁠—probably some horrid tightfisted old farmer owns it. Can’t you just see it: a wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings⁠—”

“And visitors coming?”

“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”

Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people⁠—and there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You are lovely! But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you can’t stay. No.”

“And our son is to be left without your care?”

“He⁠—Would he have my care if I died?⁠ ⁠… He is a nice kid, too! I hope he won’t be a Rich Man!⁠ ⁠… Perhaps ten years from now he’ll come to me here.”

“And live like this?”

“Sure⁠—unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We have meat practically every day now!”

“I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you’ve told me, he rather fancies that sort of girl!”

“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one thing that could break me.”

“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”

“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you⁠—You look here now, Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks! Yesterday an ‘esoteric healer’ came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re insane. We’re farmers.”

“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You’ve left common sense. I am common sense. I believe in bathing! Goodbye!”

“Now you look here. By golly⁠—”

She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.

As the chauffeur maneuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other, through tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered that he had been doing an experiment⁠—

IV

On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States.

“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we shall see you a cabinet-member⁠—the first Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the country!”

That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural Agencies. Among the Men of Measured Merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical College.

Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million ardently listening lovers of science.

That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending midweek prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and with modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:

“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall they be forgot.”

That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.

That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a depression in a garden marked the grave of Leora.

That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He’s never going to see how egotistical it is to think he’s the only man living who’s always right!”

That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy