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

geniuses for detail had labored through the volume and marked with red pencil the problems most often set in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the questions they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their temples in the endeavor to give the right answer before Angus Duer should read it to them out of the textbook.

In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty Pfaff.

Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had to pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him the annoyed affection they might have had for a secondhand motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the examination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with them.

The night before his special examination they kept him at it till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity. They repeated lists⁠—lists⁠—lists to him; they shook their fists in his mournful red round face and howled, “Damn you, will you remember that the bicuspid valve is the same as the mitral valve and not another one?” They ran about the room, holding up their hands and wailing, “Won’t he never remember nothing about nothing?” and charged back to purr with fictive calm, “Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to this, quietly, will yuh, and try,” coaxingly, “do try to remember one thing, anyway!”

They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.

When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had forgotten everything he had learned.

“There’s nothing for it,” said the president of Digamma Pi. “He’s got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yesterday. It’s a lulu. It’ll cover enough of the questions so he’ll get through.”

Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: “Gee, I don’t like to cheat. I don’t think a fellow that can’t get through an examination had hardly ought to be allowed to practice medicine. That’s what my Dad said.”

They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might be but who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick this crib in your pocket⁠—look, here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief.”

“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.

“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God knows⁠—” The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. “⁠—God knows you can’t take it in through your head!”

They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.

“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Clawson.

“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,” grieved the president.

They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his nose⁠—and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.

They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fraternity, piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it⁠—it’s all right⁠—he’ll get through or get hanged!”

He got through.

VI

Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.

During the strain of study for examinations Martin was peculiarly vexing in regard to “laying in the best quality medical terms like the best quality sterilizers⁠—not for use but to impress your patients.” As one, the Digams suggested, “Say, if you don’t like the way we study medicine, we’ll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!”

Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’re simply carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How’s your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who’s the premier of Austro-Hungary?”

Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything⁠—except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they’re simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn’t religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don’t you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don’t you⁠—”

Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying in the lab! I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!”

“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you,