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

of flowers, dukes and divorcees being interviewed, and bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the St. Buryan was unromantic and its ferry-like casualness was discouraging.

Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy for Leora.

Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch. He stared up at the black wall of the steamer’s side. As they mounted the gangplank he was conscious that he was cutting himself off from the safe, familiar land, and he was embarrassed by the indifference of more experienced-looking passengers, staring down from the rail. Aboard, it seemed to him that the forward deck looked like the backyard of an old-iron dealer, that the St. Buryan leaned too much to one side, and that even in the dock she swayed undesirably.

The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast off. Terry stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and Leora and Sondelius above, their stomachs pressed against the rail, had slid past him, then he abruptly clumped away.

Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the perilous plague; that there was no possibility of leaving the ship till they should reach some distant island. This narrow deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home. Also, in the breeze across the wide harbor he was beastly cold, and in general God help him!

As the St. Buryan was warped out into the river, as Martin was suggesting to his Commission, “How about going downstairs and seeing if we can raise a drink?” there was the sound of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure running⁠—but so feebly, so shakily⁠—and they realized that it was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his thin arm in greeting, not finding them at the rail, and turning sadly away.

VII

As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck.

Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was cold, and in a ladylike manner she was sick, but she was not at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him, from the West Indian guidebook which she had earnestly bought.

Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea with the Captain, scouse with the fo’c’sle, and intellectual conferences with the Negro missionary in the steerage. He was to be heard⁠—always he was to be heard: singing on the promenade deck, defending Bolshevism against the boatswain, arguing oil-burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the children in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer a volume of navigation to study between parties.

He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the St. Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her on a seemingly lonely adventure.

Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a churchwarden, her grandfather had been a solid farmer. That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public⁠—if only she learned how to sing.

She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-managers she was accustomed to meet at the country club, and what was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good form. His stories about generals and that sort of people could be discounted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engineers? He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.

When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his ludicrous up-and-down Swedish singsong that it was a fine evening, she remarked, “Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up to something smart again today? Or have you been giving somebody else a chance to talk, for once?”

She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured American womanhood has a right to expect from all males, even foreigners.

Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, “Slim⁠—if I may call you so, like Terry⁠—I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There is no use saving fools. It’s a great mistake to be natural. One should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would have respect even from artistic New Jersey spinsters⁠ ⁠… How strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out to be shot in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!”

Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen arguing with the ship’s doctor about sutures in Negro skulls, and he invented a game of deck cricket. But one evening when he sat reading in the “social hall,” stooped over, wearing betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin walked past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was growing old.

VIII

As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter of course. He pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily decided that he had neglected her, and weightily he started right in to be a good husband.

“Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely you must have been in New York.”

“But I haven’t.”

“Don’t be foolish! Of course you’ve been