Arrowsmith (Unabridged). Sinclair Lewis
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collar! I won’t!”
He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the roof.
She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns — they were ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were “so prosaic, so conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place.” She compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provençal.” But to Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.
“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,” he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.
Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, “Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put down.”
“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She wailed, “Oh, Mart, I’m so sick of myself, tonight. I’m always trying to make people think I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a bluff.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him — only he was right — he as good as told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to get out of the graduate school. I’m not doing a thing, he said, and if I don’t have my Ph.D., then I won’t be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I’d better land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her.”
His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who — ”
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, tonight. I’m no good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don’t suppose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!”
“They do not! If they did — I’d like to see anybody that tried laughing — ”
“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it. The poetic Madeline. With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a — I’m a — Martin, I’m a tin-horn sport! I’m everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you needn’t tell me. I know what he thinks. And — I’ll have to go home with Mother, and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back! That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”
Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was whispering:
“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re going to marry me and — Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and couple in hospital, then we’ll be married and — By thunder, with you helping me, I’m going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going to have everything!”
“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your scientific work — ”
“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research. But thunder, I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but afterwards — Oh, Madeline!”
Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.
VI
He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my baby will be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working. I shall pray you’ll be happy — oh, I’ll pray so hard! You young people don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped me — Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet happiness!”
She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry, soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.
At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit, myself, but Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don’t you think you could, just once?”
The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Clawson, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a painful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Methodist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”
They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy gloating at Martin’s captivity.
VII
For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if Madeline had once admitted she was an ordinary young woman who occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why should you be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to grow up and listen to reason.”
In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.
A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriological laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that summer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment Station grounds.
“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she complained. “I don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion of him.”
“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded mature, and not too pleasant.
“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t get some gentlemanly job for vacation, instead of hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn’t you work on a newspaper, where you’d have to dress decently and meet nice people?”
“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won’t work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I’ll go to Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every night.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s like Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a roughneck? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blossoms.... Or maybe a great scientist like you, that’s so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”
“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for weeks now, you’re dead right.”
“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but — Will you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?”
“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”
“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing