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

asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just laziness. You like to daydream around labs. Why should you be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to grow up and listen to reason.”

In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.

A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriological laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that summer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment Station grounds.

“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she complained. “I don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion of him.”

“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded mature, and not too pleasant.

“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t get some gentlemanly job for vacation, instead of hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn’t you work on a newspaper, where you’d have to dress decently and meet nice people?”

“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won’t work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I’ll go to Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every night.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s like Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a roughneck? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blossoms⁠ ⁠… Or maybe a great scientist like you, that’s so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”

“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for weeks now, you’re dead right.”

“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but⁠—Will you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?”

“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”

“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck⁠—”

“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’ and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long⁠—”

They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing heartbreaking summer songs to a banjo.

In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft flesh and for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.

VI I

The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances⁠—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid⁠—and enormously in love with Madeline.

They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin’s Elk Mills but more sunbaked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:

Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals & education, etc.⁠—I certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn’t I? I cant always be in the wrong can I?

“My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “ ‘Can’t always be in the wrong’! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”

By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin schoolteacher with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses⁠—lay awake for minutes at a time.

The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging together in the quiet of her living room. It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all schoolteachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.

II

His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the use of the microscope and filter and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original research⁠—his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

He had immunized