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

when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking, “Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so we can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?” and he answered:

“It would! Good night!”

Capitola protested to her husband. He listened⁠—at least he seemed to listen⁠—and remarked:

“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They’ve got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll simply shut up the whole Institute, and then you won’t have anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth thirty million dollars⁠—at least a fellow that’s got that much⁠—can’t find a clean pair of pajamas. No, I won’t have a valet! Oh, please now, Capitola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep, will you!”

But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.

III

The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already beautifully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered; and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.

The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering to the wife of an ex-ambassador, “I simply couldn’t duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t hardly think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs any more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”

There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were up to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke, “But I’m afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There were the cooing ladies’ husbands⁠—college graduates, manipulators of oil stocks or of corporation law⁠—who sat ready to give to anybody who desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we really needed was a good substitute for rubber.

There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.

And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capitola’s most useful friends, “Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”

But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard paid compliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of France, to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British love of privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young man with a sense of cooperation might do in modern science.

The guests were conducted through the Institute. They inspected the marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum, and the animal house, at sight of which one sprightly lady demanded of Wickett, “Oh, the poor little guinea pigs and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don’t you think it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just worked with your test-tubes?”

A popular physician, whose practice was among rich women, none of them west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady, “I think you’re absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor wee little beasties to get my knowledge!”

With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went away.

The sprightly lady said, “You see, he didn’t dare stand up to a real argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how wonderful Ross McGurk and Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but I must say I’m disappointed in your laboratories. I’d expected there’d be such larky retorts and electric furnaces and everything but, honestly, I don’t see a single thing that’s interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to do something for us, now that you’ve coaxed us all the way down here. Can’t you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is? Oh, please do! Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these cunnin’ dentist coats that you wear.”

Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furious Leora, who in the taxicab announced that she had desired to taste the champagne-cup which she had observed on the buffet, and that her husband was little short of a fool.

IV

Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of the Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr. Sholtheis should endure the insults; to wonder why Dr. Tubbs, when he wandered into one’s laboratory, should gurgle, “The one thing for you to keep in view in all your work is the ideal of cooperation”; to wonder why so ardent a physiologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.

Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research which had taken his name into scientific journals throughout the world: he had studied the effect of the extirpation of the anterior lobes of a dog’s brain on its ability to find its way through the laboratory. Martin had