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

own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into raging, “Well, I couldn’t make out what you said. And it’s the first time I ever fell down. I won’t stand your talking to me like that!”

“You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your hat and get out!”

“You mean I’m fired as assistant?”

“I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that, no matter how wretched I talk!”

Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and took a step toward Martin’s retreating back. But the class, the small giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more, and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least awkward of them for the rabbits, and went on, curiously quiet.

And Martin, at Barney’s dive, was hotly drinking the first of the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself. With each drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance to become a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did not care. Had Leora been nearer than Wheatsylvania twelve hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for salvation. He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a drink to make it possible to live through the morning when he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the office at once.

The dean lectured:

“Arrowsmith, you’ve been discussed a good deal by the faculty council of late. Except in one or two courses⁠—in my own I have no fault to find⁠—you have been very inattentive. Your marks have been all right, but you could do still better. Recently you have also been drinking. You have been seen in places of very low repute, and you have been intimate with a man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and the University. Various faculty members have complained of your superior attitude⁠—making fun of our courses right out in class! But Dr. Gottlieb has always warmly defended you. He insisted that you have a real flair for investigative science. Last night, however, he admitted that you had recently been impertinent to him. Now unless you immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you for the rest of the year and, if that doesn’t do the work, I shall have to ask for your resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for your humility⁠—you seem to have the pride of the devil, young man!⁠—it might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reformation by apologizing⁠—”

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

“I’m damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I’ve given him my life, and then he tattles on me⁠—”

“That’s absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely⁠—”

“Sure. He merely let me down. I’ll see him in hell before I’ll apologize, after the way I’ve worked for him. And as for Clif Clawson that you were hinting at⁠—him ‘take it on himself to insult anybody’? He just played a joke, and you went after his scalp. I’m glad he did it!”

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scientific life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and hummed and spoke softly:

“Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you’re suspended, at least till you come to your senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb.” He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he concluded, “And as for Clawson, his ‘joke’ regarding this Benoni Carr person⁠—and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy⁠—his ‘joke,’ as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don’t think you will be ready to come back to us.”

“All right,” said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He said goodbye to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He remembered with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner jacket.

Martin’s money, from his father’s tiny estate, came in bimonthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought Clif, whom he found practicing eloquence over a beautiful pearl-gray motor hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, “Well, well, how’s the boy? Come out and catchum little drink.”

“I could use one.”

Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absentminded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:

“Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva’s fired me, for general footlessness. I’m going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God, but I’m tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?”

“You bet. All I’ve got. How much you want?”

“Guess I’ll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite some time.”

“Golly, I haven’t got that much, but prob’ly I can raise it at the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me.”

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been explained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went on to dinner, and Martin