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

to make her startling hats, to almond-cream her lovely hands, and listen to her husband’s improper stories⁠—and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each other.

With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather approved all unconventionalities⁠—except such economic unconventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a cocktail, alone with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the lightest-footed debutante in Des Moines four years before and who hated now the coming of her second baby; and it was to Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and serene with her porker of a husband, burst out, “If that man would only quit pawing me⁠—reaching for me⁠—slobbering on me! I hate it here! I will have my winter in New York⁠—alone!”

The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora’s old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow’s nest, he worried, and said things about her “sloppiness” which he later regretted.

“Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven’t anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can’t you even sew on buttons?”

But Clara Tredgold laughed, “Leora, I do think you have the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?”

It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs. Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile’s and Jack Brundidge (by day vice-president and sales-manager of the Maize Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently asserted to be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and Leora were driving home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled, “Lee, why can’t you ever take any trouble with what you wear? Here this morning⁠—or yesterday morning⁠—you were going to mend that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven’t done a darn thing the whole day but sit around and read, and then you come out with that ratty embroidery⁠—”

“Will you stop the car!” she cried.

He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.

She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on fighting with you. Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying. I’m tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand⁠—I’m not just a climber⁠—I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I certainly don’t see why we should be inferior to this bunch, in anything. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they’re nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we’re real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much⁠—some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be at the N.P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than we can? Technique!”

They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines of barbed wire.

Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you ever coming to the house again?” he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.

V

Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work is very satisfactory. There’s only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting together with folks and giving a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But perhaps that’ll come to you when you have more responsibility.”

Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls all together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned into wearing yellow tights at a civic pageant.

“Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director,” he fretted. “I wonder if there’s people who become what’s called ‘successful’ and then hate it? Well, anyway, I’ll start a decent system of vital statistics in the department before they get me. I won’t lay down! I’ll fight! I’ll make myself succeed!”

XXIII I

It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man organized was overpowering.

He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all the churches and associations into cooperation; he made the newspapers promise to publish three columns of praise each day.

He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the sin in the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W.C.T.U. booth at which celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour