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

“Ye‑es, I suppose it was.”

“I told you it would be! You ought to have come on to Trinidad. Such a fascinating island! And tell me, how is the Roughneck?”

“Who?”

“Oh, you know⁠—that funny Swede that used to dance and everything.”

“He is dead.”

“Oh, I am sorry. You know, no matter what the others said, I never thought he was so bad. I’m sure he had quite a nice cultured mind, when he wasn’t carousing around. Your wife isn’t with you, is she?”

“No⁠—she isn’t with me. I must go down and unpack now.” Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said that the least people could do was to learn some manners.

With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.

“That guy looks awful restless to me!” said Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis, and she answered, with the wit which made her so popular wherever she went, “Yes, don’t he. I reckon he must be in love!”

“Oh, I know him!” said Miss Gwilliam. “He and his wife were on the St. Buryan when I came down. She’s in New York now. He’s some kind of a doctor⁠—not awful successful I don’t believe. Just between ourselves, I don’t think much of him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all the way down.”

Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs.

As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at whatever final report he might make. For a time he hated the criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated their competition; he hated the need of forever looking over his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their criticism, and afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He hurled overboard all the polemics with which he had protected himself: “Men who never have had the experience of trying, in the midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental conditions, do not realize in the security of their laboratories what one has to contend with.”

Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jealous, petty⁠—

No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what easygoing workers called “spiteful.” To them the joyous spite of crushing the almost-good was more natural than creation. Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cumbered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?

“All right!” he rejoiced. “Let ’em come! Maybe I’ll anticipate ’em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got something, from the St. Swithin test, even if I did let things slide for a while. I’ll take my tables to a biometrician. He may rip ’em up. Good! What’s left, I’ll publish.”

He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gottlieb and Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without terror.

At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indignation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs. Dawson, Martin was greeted by reporters who agreeably though vaguely desired to know what were these remarkable things he had been doing to some disease or other, in some island some place.

He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst through them with his hands out, crying, “Oh, my dear fellow! We know all that’s happened. We grieve for you so, and we’re so glad you were spared to come back to us.”

Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb, have said about Holabird, now he wrung his hands and muttered, “It’s good to be home.”

Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue collar, like an actor) could not wait till Martin’s baggage had gone through the customs. He had to return to his duties as Acting Director of the Institute. He delayed only to hint that the Board of Trustees were going to make him full Director, and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would see that Martin had the credit and the reward he deserved.

When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupe (he often explained that his wife and he could afford a chauffeur, but they preferred to spend the money on other things), Martin was conscious of Terry Wickett, leaning against a gnawed wooden pillar of the wharf-house, as though he had been there for hours.

Terry strolled up and snorted, “Hello, Slim. All OK? Lez shoot the stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see the Director and you kissing.”

As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brooklyn, Martin inquired, “How’s Holabird working out as Director? And how is Gottlieb?”

“Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he’s even politer and more ignorant⁠ ⁠… Me, you watch me! One of these days I’m going off to the woods⁠—got a shack in Vermont⁠—going to work there without having to produce results for the Director! They’ve stuck me in the Department of Biochemistry. And Gottlieb⁠—” Terry’s voice became anxious. “I guess he’s pretty shaky⁠—They’ve pensioned him off. Now look, Slim: I hear you’re going to be a gilded department-head, and I’ll never be