Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis
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absurd and worthless. He had, with blurry cunning, saved most of the hundred dollars he had taken from Clif; he had lived—very badly, on grease—swimming stews and soda-reeking bread—by what he earned along the way. Suddenly, on no particular day, in no particular town in Wisconsin, he stalked to the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora, “Coming 2:43 tomorrow Wednesday Sandy.”
III
He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He changed trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin lines of fence-wire. He felt free, in release from the little fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation from the shaky nerves of midnight study and midnight booziness. He remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana and regained that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crimson, and by night, when he stepped from the choking railroad coach and tramped the platform at Sauk Centre, he drank the icy air and looked up to the vast and solitary winter stars. The fan of the Northern Lights frightened and glorified the sky. He returned to the coach with the energy of that courageous land. He nodded and gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he sprawled on the seat and talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank bitter coffee and ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station restaurant; and so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to the squatty shelters, the two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the oil-tank, and the red box of a station with its slushy platform, which composed the outskirts of Wheatsylvania. Against the station, absurd in a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have looked a little mad as he stared at her from the vestibule, as he shivered with the wind. She lifted to him her two open hands, childish in red mittens. He ran down, he dropped his awkward bag on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers, they were lost in a kiss.
Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her wind-cooled cheeks.
The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had stood like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but now the light from the snowfields glared in on them and left them exposed and self-conscious.
“What—what’s happened?” she fluttered. “No letters. I was so frightened.”
“Off bumming. The dean suspended me—being fresh to profs. D’ y’ care?”
“Course not, if you wanted to—”
“I’ve come to marry you.”
“I don’t see how we can, dearest, but—All right. There’ll be a lovely row with Dad.” She laughed. “He’s always so surprised and hurt when anything happens that he didn’t plan out. It’ll be nice to have you with me in the scrap, because you aren’t supposed to know that he expects to plan out everything for everybody and—Oh, Sandy, I’ve been so lonely for you! Mother isn’t really a bit sick, not the least bit, but they go on keeping me here. I think probably somebody hinted to Dad that folks were saying he must be broke, if his dear little daughter had to go off and learn nursing, and he hasn’t worried it all out yet—it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer about a year to worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You’re here!”
After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed blankly empty. He could have walked around the borders of Wheatsylvania in ten minutes. Probably to Leora one building differed from another—she appeared to distinguish between the general store of Norblom and that of Frazier & Lamb—but to Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping aimlessly along the wide Main Street were featureless and inappreciable. Then “There’s our house, end of the next block,” said Leora, as they turned the corner at the feed and implement store, and in a panic of embarrassment Martin wanted to halt. He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a failure who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.
“Say—say—say—have you told ’em about me?” he stammered.
“Yes. Sort of. I said you were a wonder in medic school, and maybe we’d get married when you finished your internship, and then when your wire came, they wanted to know why you were coming, and why it was you wired from Wisconsin, and what color necktie you had on when you were sending the wire, and I couldn’t make ’em understand I didn’t know. They discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss things. All through supper. Solemn. Oh, Sandy, do curse and swear some at meals.”
He was in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy house. A large plate-glass window with a colored border had recently been cut through the wall, as a sign of prosperity, and the garage was new and authoritative.
He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer opened the door, and stared at him plaintively—a thin, faded, unhumorous woman. She bowed as though he was not so much unwelcome as unexplained and doubtful.
“Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?” she peeped.
It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but no books, and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there must have been, Martin never remembered them. The bed in his room was lumpy but covered with a chaste figured spread, and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a cover embroidered in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious motto.
He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed no unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one was in the parlor, which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam pillows; then, from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying about him and trying to think of something polite to say.
“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”
“Oh, yes, it was—Well, it was pretty crowded.”
“Oh, was it crowded?”
“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”
“Were there? I suppose—Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you—was it very cold in the Cities—in Minneapolis and St. Paul?”
“Yes, it was pretty cold.”
“Oh, was it cold?”
Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where Leora could be. She came in serenely, with coffee and a tremendous Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glistening brown sugar, and she had them talking, almost easily, about the coldness of winter and the value of Fords when into the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer, and they drooped again to politeness.
Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as his wife, and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted. He was astonished by everything in the world that did not bear on his grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the United Brethren Church, and the careful conduct of an Overland car. It was not astounding that he should have become almost rich, for he accepted nothing that was not natural and convenient to Andrew Jackson Tozer.
He hinted a desire to know whether Martin “drank,” how prosperous he was, and how he could possibly have come all this way from the urbanities of Winnemac. (The Tozers were born in Illinois, but they had been in Dakota since childhood, and they regarded Wisconsin as the farthest, most perilous rim of the Eastern horizon.) They were so blank, so creepily polite, that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant subjects as being suspended. He dandled an impression that he was an earnest young medic who in no time at all would be making large and suitable sums of money for the support of their Leora, but as he was beginning to lean back in his chair he was betrayed by the appearance of Leora’s brother.
Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of the Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the Tozer Grain and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-president of the Star Creamery, was not in the least afflicted by the listening dubiousness of his parents. Bertie was a very articulate and modern man of affairs. He had buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook behind his left ear. He believed in town-boosting, organized motor tours, Boy Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I.W.W.’s; and his most dolorous regret was that Wheatsylvania was too small—as yet—to have a Y.M.C.A. or a Commercial Club. Plunging in