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

lonely! Well, when we get back, I’ll take a little time off every day and we’ll⁠—we’ll have walks and go to the movies and everything. And I’ll send you flowers, every morning. Isn’t it a relief to just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize how I’ve prob’ly neglected⁠—Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly dull?”

“Hunka. Really.”

“No, but tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Now bang it, Leora, here when I do have the first chance in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right out frankly and admit how slack I’ve been⁠—And planning to send you flowers⁠—”

“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor, bawling, wretched, storybook wife I am. You’re working up to become perfectly miserable if you can’t enjoy being miserable⁠ ⁠… It would be terrible, when we got back to New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to showing me a good time. You’d go at it like a bull. I’d have to be so dratted grateful for the flowers every day⁠—the days you didn’t forget!⁠—and the way you’d sling me off to the movies when I wanted to stay home and snooze⁠—”

“Well, by thunder, of all the⁠—”

“No, please! You’re dear and good, but you’re so bossy that I’ve always got to be whatever you want, even if it’s lonely. But⁠—Maybe I’m lazy. I’d rather just snoop around than have to work at being well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I fuss over the flat⁠—hang it, wish I’d had the kitchen repainted while we’re away, it’s a nice little kitchen⁠—and I make believe read my French books, and go out for a walk, and look in the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful much; if I could, I’d be as ill-treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I’m no good at educated lies, only at easy little ones like the one I told you last week⁠—I said I hadn’t eaten any candy and didn’t have a stomachache, and I’d eaten half a pound and I was as sick as a pup⁠ ⁠… Gosh, I’m a good wife I am!”

They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brainpan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microorganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his garçon, Max Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:

“Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I’m successful in St. Hubert, I’ll begin to count in science, and we’ll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!”

“Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going places!”

IX

He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.

He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.

“I do love him so when he’s frowsy! Don’t you see, Sandy, I was wise to come! You’re so worn out. It might get you, and nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways⁠—about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and day I’ll nurse you⁠—the least whisper and I’ll be awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff⁠—And I’ll have ice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire’s house and steal it out of his highballs! My dear!”

She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room. It did not contain much save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never discovered.

“It’s so sort of⁠—Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix it up somehow.”

But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life had she spent three minutes in arranging flowers. She looked doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and slipped in to him.

She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness, a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, “I like a small bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don’t get so scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is! Some day I’m going to up and say to him: ‘You go to the devil!’ I will so! Darling, we will hike off to France together, just you and I, won’t we!”

She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure⁠—

XXXIII I

Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market full of colored women with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St. Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured pawpaws and breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives who came alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the languor of the isles, and panted before they approached Barbados.

Just beyond was St. Hubert.

None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were raging that