Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗

birches, there is the adventurousness of the frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and told each other they were going to conquer the world.

He complained, “These damn medics⁠—”

“Oh, Martin, do you think ‘damn’ is a nice word?” said Madeline.

He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.

“Well⁠—these darn studes, they aren’t trying to learn science; they’re simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowledge that’ll enable them to cash in. They don’t talk about saving lives but about ‘losing cases’⁠—losing dollars! And they wouldn’t even mind losing cases if it was a sensational operation that’d advertise ’em! They make me sick! How many of ’em do you find that’re interested in the work Ehrlich is doing in Germany⁠—yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and now! Gottlieb’s just taken an awful fall out of Wright’s opsonin theory.”

“Has he, really?”

“Has he! I should say he had! And do you get any of the medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, ‘Oh, sure, science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,’ and then they begin to argue about whether they can make more money if they locate in a big city or a town, and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow and lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought to hear Irve Watters. He’s just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in medicine, is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner, near a trolley car junction, with a phone number that’ll be easy for patients to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate I believe I’ll be a ship’s doctor. You see the world that way, and at least you aren’t racing up and down the boat trying to drag patients away from some rival doc that has an office on another deck!”

“Yes, I know; it’s dreadful the way people don’t have ideals about their work. So many of the English grad students just want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship the way I do.”

It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think that she was a superior person quite as much as himself, but he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:

“At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical, doesn’t one! Think how much more money⁠—no, I mean how much more social position and power for doing good a successful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter, and don’t know what’s going on in the world. Look at a surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb⁠—somebody pointed him out to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I certainly thought he could stand a haircut.”

Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, religious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plantains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm of his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked, “Yes, I see now, I see,” without stating what it was she saw. “Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine⁠—such integrity.”

“Honest? Do you think I have?”

“Oh, indeed I do, and I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful future. And I’m so glad you aren’t commercial, like the others. Don’t mind what they say!”

He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understanding spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman⁠—fresh color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the right mate for him. Under his training she would learn the distinction between vague “ideals” and the hard sureness of science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man, to be, in fact, “worthy of her.”

“Oh, Madeline,” he mourned, “you’re so darn lovely!”

She glanced at him, timidly.

He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her. It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of her jaw, while she struggled and begged, “Oh, don’t!” They did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis, that the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their voices and without impatience now she heard his denunciation of Professor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to her remarks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brumfit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boardinghouse she sighed, “I wish I could ask you to come in, but it’s almost suppertime and⁠—Will you call me up some day?”

“You bet I will!” said Martin, according to the rules for amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.

He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now reproving, now warm with trust in him. “I love her! I love her! I’ll phone her⁠—Wonder if I dare call her up as early as eight in the morning?”

But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus to think of ladies’ eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the publicity of her boardinghouse porch, crowded with coeds, red cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year’s final examinations.

V

At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book;