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

of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.

“We got to say good night better than that!” he grumbled. “With that damn Duer⁠—”

“Ssssssh! They’d simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want to get me fired?”

“Would you care, if it was because of me?”

“Yes⁠—no⁠—well⁠—but they’d probably fire you from medic school, my lad. If⁠—” His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: “We can’t talk here. We’ll slip up to my room⁠—roommate’s away for the week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody’s in sight upstairs, I’ll come back.”

He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

“You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn’t have a chance! Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!”

“I wasn’t⁠—Yes, I was, but I don’t dare! To have to sit there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I’ll always be jealous. It’s you that have got to trust me. I’m not easygoing; never will be. Oh, trust me⁠—”

Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in; they forgot that Angus was waiting. “Oh, curse Angus⁠—let him go home!” was Martin’s only reflection, as his eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.

“Good night, dear love⁠—my love forever,” he exulted.

In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter’s uniform, who was shouting:

“I’ve caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we’ll find out what you’ve been up to!”

They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman’s clasp he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.

From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin sound of disgust. “Oh, come on! Let’s get out of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?”

The watchman bellowed, “Oh, I’m scum, am I? I’ll show you!”

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking to the least experienced a message of death. He gasped only, “He dared to touch me!” A penknife was somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.

As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a policeman’s night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim but he had pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He hit the watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus’s wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an alley, across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on the steps, and were safe.

Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. “My God, I wish I’d killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold me here on the car. I thought I’d got over that. Once when I was a kid I tried to kill a fellow⁠—God, I wish I’d cut that filthy swine’s throat!”

As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed, “There’s an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some white mule. Come on. It’ll straighten you up.”

Angus was shaky and stumbling⁠—Angus the punctilious. Martin led him into the lunchroom where, between catsup bottles, they had raw whisky in granite-like coffee cups. Angus leaned his head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into obliteration, and Martin steered him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible than Angus Duer. “Well, he’ll be a good friend of mine now, for always. Fine!”

Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped; “You were frightfully stewed last night, Arrowsmith. If you can’t handle your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely.”

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.

VIII I

And always Martin’s work went on⁠—assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations⁠—sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb’s cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wallpaper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few pages more than he could drudge