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

‘⁠—turning my hand from the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?”

“Of course!”

II

He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.

Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.

Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.

“Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and sixty-six here⁠—no, wait, it’s three hundred and sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we’ll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!”

He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station agent, who was also telegraph operator.

The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year⁠—against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.

Proper recommendations were desired.

Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.

Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, “I have received very pleasant letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment; kindly wire.”

Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving Wheatsylvania⁠—the tedium of Bert Tozer’s nagging⁠—the spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms⁠—the inevitability of turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and following again that weary, flat, unbending trail⁠—the superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin⁠—the round which left him no time for his dusty laboratory⁠—leaving it all for the achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.

“Leora, we’re going! We’re really going!”

III

Bert Tozer said:

“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the Family.”

Ada Quist said:

“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around here you’ll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are going to get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of it I suppose we’ll have to take care of you at our house when you come sneaking back do you think we could get your house at the same rent you paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead it would save money well I’ve always said since we were in school together you couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.”

Mr. Tozer said:

“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you’d be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it. Haven’t we tried to treat you nice? I don’t like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone, now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets so cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of listen to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?”

Pete Yeska said:

“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us⁠ ⁠… Well, come back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the smallpox. I never will forget that! I was saying to the old woman just the other day, when she had an earache, ‘Ain’t got smallpox, have yuh, Bess!’ ”

Dr. Hesselink said:

“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over tonight⁠—Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away⁠—you don’t know how I feel!”

Henry Novak said:

“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to leave us? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.’ ”

The wheat-buyer at Delft said:

“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going away? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of