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

only thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow’s nose out!”

Holabird merrily suggested, “Oh, no, Doctor, it’s been put out long ago. You forget Terry Wickett. He’s under forty.”

“Oh. Him!” murmured Dr. Tubbs.

Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even in this paradise.

“Now,” said Dr. Tubbs, “perhaps you might like to glance around my place here. I pride myself on keeping our card-indices and letter-files as unimaginatively as though I were an insurance agent. But there is a certain exotic touch in these charts.” He trotted across the room to show a nest of narrow drawers filled with scientific blueprints.

Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin ever learn.

He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laughingly admitted:

“You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I keep asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of pathological research for the less fascinating but so very important and fatiguing cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weakness of genus homo that sometimes, when I ought to be attending to practical details, I become obsessed by some probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous am I that I can’t wait to hasten down the hall to my regular laboratory⁠—I must always have a bench at hand and an experiment going on. Oh, I’m afraid I’m not the moral man that I pose as being in public! Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for my first love, Milady Science!”

“I think it’s fine you still have an itch for it,” Martin ventured.

He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had been doing lately. The bench seemed rather unused.

“And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of the Institute⁠—my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins.”

Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help noticing Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy goddess. She rose to shake hands⁠—a firm, competent grasp⁠—and to cry in her glorious contralto, “Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary only because he knows that otherwise I wouldn’t give him his afternoon tea. We’ve heard so much about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I’m almost afraid to welcome you, Dr. Arrowsmith, but I do want to.”

Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the Woolworth Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders⁠—his own wonders, now! In Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so distinguished, he hoped to have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved by his kindness and by Miss Robbins’s recognition. He was in a haze of future glory when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, redheaded, soft-shirted man of thirty-six or -eight.

“Arrowsmith?” the intruder growled. “My name is Wickett, Terry Wickett. I’m a chemist. I’m with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed the Holy Wren was showing you the menagerie.”

“Dr. Holabird?”

“Him⁠ ⁠… Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa Gottlieb let you in. How’s it starting? Which kind are you going to be? One of the polite birds that uses the Institute for social climbing and catches him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?”

Terry Wickett’s croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had ever heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Rippleton Holabird:

“I don’t think you need to worry. I happen to be married already!”

“Oh, don’t let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap, in this man’s town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys the Tart?”

“Huh?”

“Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge.”

“Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?”

“I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?”

“It’s the finest centrifuge I’ve ever seen. Dr. Holabird said⁠—”

“Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs to buy it. He just loves it, Holy Wren does.”

“Why not? It’s the fastest⁠—”

“Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole Vereinigten, and made of the best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows out fuses, and it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask if you’re going to use it⁠ ⁠… And did you love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?”

“I did!”

“Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that, he hasn’t got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb.”

“Look here, Wickett⁠—is it Dr. Wickett?”

“Uh-huh⁠ ⁠… M.D., Ph. D., but a first-rate chemist just the same.”

“Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of your talents should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb and Tubbs and Holabird. I’ve just left a Chicago clinic where everybody is nice and sensible. I’d be glad to recommend you for a job there!”

“Wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d avoid all the gassing at lunch in Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrowsmith, but you look all right to me.”

“Thanks!”

Wickett grinned obscenely⁠—redheaded, rough-faced, wiry⁠—and snorted, “By the way, did Holabird tell you about being wounded in the first month of the war, when he was a field marshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British Army?”

“He did not! He didn’t mention the war!”

“He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb. So long. My lab is right next to yours.”

“Fool!” Martin decided, and, “Well, I can stand him as long as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But⁠—The conceited idiot! Gosh, so Holabird was in the war! Invalided out, I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! ‘Did he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in the blinkin’ war?’ he said, and I came right back at him, ‘I’m sorry to displease you,’ I said, ‘but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.’ The idiot! Well, I won’t let him worry me.”

And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief their greetings. He did