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

it would require two hundred, by which time the Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test useless.

To Martin’s duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the strange city of Nautilus.

“Do you manage to keep busy all day?” he encouraged her, and, “Any place you’d like to go this evening?”

She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and automatically contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried about her amusement.

IV

The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have greeted with “That’s a damn silly remark!”

He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paintbrushes, curling her legs in a fantastic knot.

Absurdly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you⁠—suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d’you think she ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?”

“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn’t to wrong his wife.”

“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?” He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark eyes demanding.

“Well, if she didn’t know⁠—But it isn’t that. I believe marriages really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some day Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover⁠—” She was so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! “⁠—and of course I want to keep myself for him. It would spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”

But her smile was caressing.

He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what he could get. He began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy. And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an afternoon with the child. Her mute examination of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, “Been home all day? Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see ’em? Whatever you’d like.”

He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!”

He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.

In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family. Then she spoke:

“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been looking lately. I don’t think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes⁠—”

When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper’s curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.

Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and he “hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.” No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.

But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.

If the elder Pickerbaughs were there⁠—Martin could hear himself saying, “Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about⁠—” Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.

On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.

“Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but pride himself.

“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven. Won’t you sit down and cool off a little?”

“Well⁠—” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley’s opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.

“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said Martin.

“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of smallpox and winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”

“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.

He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel a hundred years old: