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

“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”

“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.

“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”

“Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.”

“Oh!” It was acute. “Oh, then you⁠—I was such a baby to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought⁠—do you think I’m an awful little silly?”

“No⁠—no⁠—sure not.”

“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought I was just a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”

“No⁠—no⁠—course not. Look, I’ve got to⁠—”

“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether you thought I was a silly to⁠—”

“No! Honest! Really!”

Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat it⁠—his wife only gone for a week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring her up here!” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that little milliner on Prairie Avenue.”

Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they “musn’t ever do that sort of thing again”⁠—and would he meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it all over?

In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past eight.

At five she called up just to remind him⁠—

In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.

“I can go as far as I like with her tonight.

“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.

“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.

“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?

“I will not be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It’s against my religion. I demand the right to be free⁠—

“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I don’t want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss everybody I can.

“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m not going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife! He’s beaten from the beginning.”

He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy cautious Martin of tonight. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.

A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.

He met her at the station.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years old. I’m a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d hate it, if it wasn’t for my precipitation test and you and⁠—why do you always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No, no, darling, can’t you see, that’s the transportation check the conductor gave you!”

This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately articulate and generous lout, he was destined to be ten times better known in America than Sondelius could ever be, a thousand times better known than Max Gottlieb.

He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great Men whose pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the magazines: the advertising men who wrote little books about Pep and Optimism, the editor of the magazine which told clerks how to become Goethes and Stonewall Jacksons by studying correspondence-courses and never touching the manhood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an authority on finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian ethnology, and making oratory pay. These intellectual rulers recognized Pickerbaugh as one of them; they wrote quippish letters to him: and when he answered he signed himself “Pick,” in red pencil.

The Onward March Magazine, which specialized in biographies of Men Who Have Made Good, had an account of Pickerbaugh among its sketches of the pastor who built his own, beautiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans, the lady who had in seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading lives of shame, and the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.

“Meet Ol’ Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has hailed as ‘the two-fisted, fighting poet doc,’ a scientist who puts his remarkable discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a reg’lar old-fashioned Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists that are menacing the foundations of our religion and liberties by their smart-aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving,” chanted the chronicler.

Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a million circulation, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.

“Marty,” he said, “do you feel competent to run this Department?”

“Why, uh⁠—”

“Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all by yourself?”

“Why, uh⁠—”

“Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next congressman from this district!”

“Really?”

“Looks that way. Boy, I’m going to take to the whole nation the