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

his name to a nurse, who flew to the inner offices. Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a quarter-hour in a smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room. By this time he was so awed that he would have permitted the clinic surgeons to operate on him for any ill which at the moment they happened to fancy.

In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer had been efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-assured. He was cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a dish of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt young, rustic, inept.

Angus won him by pondering, “Irving Watters? He was Digam? I’m not sure I remember him. Oh, yes⁠—he was one of these boneheads that are the curse of every profession.”

When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus suggested, “You better come join us here at Rouncefield, as pathologist. Our pathologist is leaving in a few weeks. You could do the job, all right. You’re getting thirty-five hundred a year now? Well, I think I could get you forty-five hundred, as a starter, and some day you’d become a regular member of the clinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you want it. Rouncefield told me to dig up a man.”

With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin returned to Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh returned he did not discharge Martin, but he appointed over him, as full director, Pickerbaugh’s friend, Dr. Bissex, the football coach and health director of Mugford College.

Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five minutes, went out and addressed a Y.M.C.A. meeting, then bustled in and invited Martin to resign.

“I will like hell!” said Martin. “Come on, be honest, Bissex. If you want to fire me, do it, but let’s have things straight. I won’t resign, and if you do fire me I think I’ll take it to the courts, and maybe I can turn enough light on you and His Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you from taking all the guts out of the work here.”

“Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won’t fire you,” said Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to difficult students and to lazy football teams. “Stay with us as long as you like. Only, in the interests of economy, I reduce your salary to eight hundred dollars a year!”

“All right, reduce and be damned,” said Martin.

It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it, but less so when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed by their lease, they could not by whatever mean economies live on less than a thousand a year.

Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form his own faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi Rovine, Father Costello, Ockford, who was going to remain in town and practice, the secretary of the Labor Council, a banker who regarded Tredgold as “fast,” and that excellent fellow the dentist of the school clinic.

“With people like that behind me, I can do something,” he gloated to Leora. “I’m going to stick by it. I’m not going to have the D.P.H. turned into a Y.M.C.A. Bissex has all of Pickerbaugh’s mush without his honesty and vigor. I can beat him! I’m not much of an executive, but I was beginning to visualize a D.P.H. that would be solid and not gaseous⁠—that would save kids and prevent epidemics. I won’t give it up. You watch me!”

His committee made representations to the Commercial Club, and for a time they were certain that the chief reporter of the Frontiersman was going to support them, “as soon as he could get his editor over being scared of a row.” But Martin’s belligerency was weakened by shame, for he never had enough money to meet his bills, and he was not used to dodging irate grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door arguing with impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city dignitary a few days before, had to endure, “Come on now, you pay up, you dead beat, or I’ll get a cop!” When the shame had grown to terror, Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his salary another two hundred dollars.

Martin stormed into the mayor’s office to have it out, and found F. X. Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident that they both knew of the second reduction and considered it an excellent joke.

He reassembled his committee. “I’m going to take this into the courts,” he raged.

“Fine,” said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: “Jenkins, that radical lawyer, would handle the case free.”

The wise banker observed, “You haven’t got anything to take into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has a legal right to reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regulations don’t fix the salary of anybody except the Director and the inspectors. You haven’t a thing to say.”

With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, “And I suppose I haven’t a thing to say if they wreck the Department!”

“Not a thing, if the city doesn’t care.”

“Well, I care! I’ll starve before I’ll resign!”

“You’ll starve if you don’t resign, and your wife, too. Now here’s my plan,” said the banker. “You go into private practice here⁠—I’ll finance your getting an office and so on⁠—and when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we’ll all get together again and have you put in as full Director.”

“Ten years of waiting⁠—in Nautilus? Nope. I’m licked. I’m a complete failure⁠—at thirty-two! I’ll resign. I’ll wander on,” said Martin.

“I know I’m going to love Chicago,” said Leora.

IV

He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred.”

Martin accepted.

V

When the Nautilus papers