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

and shawled women, tousled men in trousers over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.

With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking the dripping engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press of people, swinging their clubs, shouting, “Get back there, you!” The fire-line was sacred. Only the factory-owner and the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed factory-hand was stopped by a police sergeant.

“My tools are in there!” he shrieked.

“That don’t make no never-minds,” bawled the strutting sergeant. “Nobody can’t get through here!”

But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders, the crowd opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid the huge gray car. At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was The Doctor⁠—Martin Arrowsmith.

The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.

“Where’s the fireman got hurt?” he snapped.

“Over in that shed,” cried the police sergeant, running beside the ambulance.

“Drive over closer. Nev’ mind the smoke!” Martin barked at the driver.

A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.

“He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over. Fine kid. Is he a goner?” the lieutenant begged.

Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breathing. Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of strychnin and held a vial of ammonia to his nose. “He’ll come around. Here, you two, getum into the ambulance⁠—hustle!”

The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang together, and together they mumbled, “All right, Doc.”

To Martin came the chief reporter of the Advocate-Times. In years he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most cynical man in the world. He had interviewed senators; he had discovered graft in charity societies and even in prizefights. There were fine wrinkles beside his eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his opinion of man’s honor and woman’s virtue was but low. Yet to Martin, or at least to The Doctor, he was polite.

“Will he pull through, Doc?” he twanged.

“Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart’s still going.”

Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard, through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd. He owned and commanded the city, he and the driver. They ignored traffic regulations, they disdained the people, returning from theaters and movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying gray hood. Let ’em get out of the way! The traffic officer at Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the Midnight Express⁠—urrrrrr⁠—blang-blang-blang-blang⁠—and cleared the noisy corner. People were jammed against the curb, threatened by rearing horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the ambulance, blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging easily on his perilous seat.

At the hospital, the hall-man cried, “Shooting case in the Arbor, Doc.”

“All right. Wait’ll I sneak in a drink,” said Martin placidly. On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and test-tubes.

“Huh! That stuff! Poking ’round labs! This is real sure-enough life,” he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision of Max Gottlieb waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.

II

The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic with photographs and ties and undarned socks. They spent hours sitting on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the dinners which they hoped to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with whom, one by one, they fell in love.

Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he developed the Intern’s Walk, that quick corridor step with the stethoscope conspicuous in the pocket, he did not, he could not, develop the bedside manner. He was sorry for the bruised, yellowed, suffering patients, always changing as to individuals and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was endlessly stimulating to his pride.

The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called “the Arbor.” His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him, prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers called out, “Evenin’, Doc,” and holdup men stood back in doorways to let him pass. Martin had power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led into incessant adventure.

He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and afterward, when he thought of how he might have dined with Leora, he was sorry he had refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reeking with gas and revived would-be suicides. He drank Trinidad rum with a Congressman who advocated prohibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers, and a striker assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency abdominal operation at three o’clock in the morning. The operating-room⁠—white tile walls and white tile floor and glittering frosted-glass skylight⁠—seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and the large incandescents glared on the glass instrument cases, the cruel little knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange rubber gloves, made his swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh exposed between towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin looked on unmoved as the first blood menacingly followed the cut. And a month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on a police-station table.

He landed from