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

company of worthies who would succor him with laughter and talk and many drinks⁠—not too many drinks, of course⁠—and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a moonlight swim. He began his search for the brethren by having a cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a companion. He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.

As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, “And probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he’s simply another Roscoe Geake.”

V

In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men who might have been doctors or school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the row with him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having no good opinions whatever.

Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly flaxen hair⁠—a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight. He was strengthened to endure even the depressing man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:

“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in Erewhon⁠—the swine stole that idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it⁠—the only crime for w’ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis.”

“Umph!” grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.

Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and blunted sword of the law.

“That’s what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out bodies but make a new world!” Martin hungered. “Gosh, I’d follow him through fire! And the way he lays out the crapehangers that criticize public health results! If I could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a couple o’ minutes⁠—”

He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded Sondelius on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor worried, “But how about the danger of free clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?” Martin stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A janitor was closing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great Man was lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:

“Sir, if you aren’t due some place, I wonder if you’d like to come out and have a⁠—a⁠—”

Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, “Have a drink? Well, I think maybe I would. How did the joke about the dog and his fleas go tonight? Do you think they liked it?”

“Oh, sure, you bet.”

The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, “Was it all right⁠—was it? Did they like it? So hot tonight, and I been lecturing nine time a week⁠—Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet [but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay] and⁠—I forget. Was it all right? Did they like it?”

“Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life!”

The prophet crowed, “Come! I buy a drink. As a hygienist, I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee or even ice cream soda. But as one who is fond of talking, I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy. Is there a cool place with some Pilsener here in Detroit⁠—no; where am I tonight?⁠—Minneapolis?”

“I understand there’s a good beer-garden. And we can get the trolley right near here.”

Sondelius stared at him. “Oh, I have a taxi waiting.”

Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxicab he tried to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.

“Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?”

Sondelius ignored him. “Did you see that girl going by? What ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden? Have they any decent cognac? Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know, I mean all the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget being earnest, let us drink, let us sing ‘Der Graf von Luxemburg,’ let us detach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of ‘Die Meistersinger,’ which only I appreciate!”

In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the Cosmos Club, Halle’s investigation of infant mortality, the suitability of combining benedictine and applejack, Biarritz, Lord Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George Gissing, and homard thermidor. Martin looked for a connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with the notorious or with people met abroad. He