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

are! And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you can’t conquer?”

“No, I⁠—”

“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we’ll fight it out?”

“Be glad to.”

For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vacation place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pullman chaircar with his feet up on his suitcase, he pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland’s aged Rolls-Royce.

But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.

Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.

“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and I’ll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place for science⁠—two hours a day on the commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty stories. That leaves⁠—two and six and two make ten, if I’m any authority on higher math⁠—that leaves fourteen hours a day for research (except when you got something special on), with no Director and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won’t be any scientific dinners with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly⁠—if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”

Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.

But the first of these was the more novel to him.

II

Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger’s fast-motoring set.

She let the lady Maecenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for Capitola McGurk.

An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was not a Capitola; she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke spaciously, nor did she take out her sex-passion in talking. She was fine and occasionally gorgeous, with tiger in her, though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and black-lingerie passion as she was from Capitola’s cooling staleness. Hers was sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.

Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that the only time in her life when she had felt useful and independent was when she had been an almshouse cook.

She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante lover.

“Joy,” he observed, “there seems to be an astounding quantity of that Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign uncle⁠—”

“Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive, thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant, and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall marry him. I almost think I love him!”

“Wouldn’t cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?” said Latham Ireland.

III

What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at all. He was no poor man marrying money! Why, he was making ten thousand a year, which was eight thousand more than he needed to live on!

Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury. With tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining in her Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his own sort of party. She came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal Greenwich Village restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the subway⁠—though after dinner he usually forgot that he was being Spartan, and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too much gurgling.

She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played better than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look well in golf clothes.

He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi waiting.

“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.

They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.

“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we’re married I’ll enjoy your limousine.”

“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry you. Really, I’m not! You have no sense of ease!”

They were married the following January, in St. George’s Church, and Martin suffered almost