Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis

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      Chapter VI

      I

      The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid—and enormously in love with Madeline.

      They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin’s Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:

      Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals & education, etc.—I certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn’t I? I cant always be in the wrong can I?

      “My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “‘Can’t always be in the wrong’! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”

      By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses—lay awake for minutes at a time.

      The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging together in the quiet of her living room. It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.

      II

      His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the use of the microscope and filter and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original research—his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

      He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs would die. Unfortunately—he felt—the germs grew joyfully. He was troubled; he was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed his experiment over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing something she ought not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, “The darn’ bugs ought to die in this immune serum, but they don’t. There’s something wrong with the theories.”

      “Young man, do you set yourself up against science?” grated Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. “Do you feel competent, huh, to attack the dogmas of immunology?”

      “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help what the dogma is. Here’s my protocols. Honestly, I’ve gone over and over the stuff, and I get the same results, as you can see. I only know what I observe.”

      Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the nice correct views of science—out they go! I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the underneath principle.”

      Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him “Arrowsmith” or “You” or “Uh.” When he was furious he called him, or any other student, “Doctor.” It was only in high moments that he honored him with “Martin,” and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why that made everything so.

      III

      Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The bored reception clerk—who was interested only in obtaining the names, business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died or who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were properly entered—loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways, past numberless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sitting up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.

      He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a brilliant young surgeon who is about to operate. He was so absorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing filled with private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bedroom in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.

      She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head with an elastic—a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.

      “Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”

      Lazily, “Do you?”

      “I do! If I can interrupt your work—”

      “Doesn’t matter. The damn’ superintendent of nurses put me at scrubbing, and we aren’t ever supposed to scrub floors, because she caught me smoking a cigarette. She’s an old terror. If she found a child like you wandering around here, she’d drag you out by the ear.”

      “My dear young woman, it may interest you to know—”

      “Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may—’ Sounds exactly like our old prof, back home.”

      Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

      “I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been informed that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of—it may interest you to know!—a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly direct me—”

      “Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to get along with this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand up.” She did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. “You go back, turn right, then left. I’m sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to—Honestly, Doctor—if you are a doctor—”

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