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

announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked out, that’s what happened.” One of the papers had an innocent squib:

Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler for the meat-ax.

Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:

I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your defection, your going back to private practice merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to sustain.

VI

As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:

“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but making money.

“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded boob-trap⁠—scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!

“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends, but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if they aren’t bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He’s probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it’s taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!

“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I’m making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll get Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.

“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of tapestry, they shall have it⁠—and pay for it.

“I never thought I could be such a failure⁠—to become a commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don’t want to be anything else, believe me! I’m through!”

XXV I

Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed children and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaugh and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.

He admired Angus’s firmness of purpose and stability of habit.

Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily and fenced like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-thirty; he never took more than one drink a day; and he never read anything or said anything which would not contribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young Surgeon. His underlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive precisely on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool, and appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for a smile.

Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and ardent tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to Angus for abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any operation of the head or neck, providing he was himself quite sure the operation was necessary, but he was never able to rise to the clinic’s faith that any portions of the body without which people could conceivably get along should certainly be removed at once.

The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth of his brain, he made blood counts, did urinalyses and Wassermanns and infrequent necropsies, and all the while he was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid the blattings of Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had lived, had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.

After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of bookshops and print-shops and theaters and concerts. They read novels and history and travel; they talked, at dinners given by Rouncefield or Angus, to journalists, engineers, bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian play, and heard Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb’s beloved Rabelais. Martin learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the first time to a hairdresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in French. She had called Martin a “lie-hunter,” a “truth-seeker.” They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that