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

over every sentence he had said or heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting. V

As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he began to blurt “Hello,” but he checked it in a croak, scowled, and stumbled on.

“Oh, Mart,” Angus called. He was dismayingly even. “Remember speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you thought I’d been rude. I’m sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten headache. Look. I’ve got four tickets for As It Listeth, in Zenith, next Friday evening⁠—original New York cast! Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance. Suppose she might like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?”

“Why⁠—gosh⁠—I’ll phone her⁠—darn nice of you to ask us⁠—”

It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

“Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

“Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

“Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?

“Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody⁠—wants to keep us all friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some day when we’re hick G.P.s and he’s a Great and Only.

“Why did I crawl down so meekly?

“I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it⁠—Me personally, I don’t care two hoots for all this trotting around⁠—Though of course it isn’t so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody⁠—Oh, I don’t know!”

VI

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods⁠—graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York⁠—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depicting “Jack Vanduzen’s Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day” was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, “Oh, I don’t care. I’ll slip in through a window. If you’re there in the morning, the Old Cat can’t prove you got in late.” Shaking her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein’s Alt Nuremberg Café for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking mottos and papier-mâché armor.

Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was probably inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring her for his own uses.

“I hope you enjoyed the play,” he condescended to her.

“Oh, yes⁠—”

“Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women.”

With unexpected defiance from Leora: “When anybody says that, it means they’re not shy, and they despise women.”

“Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I don’t know how. Won’t you give me a lesson?” Angus’s aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say, “Don’t be jealous, idiot. I’m magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist.” But she was flustered by Angus’s sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.

Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be going⁠—Leora really had to be back⁠—The trolleys ran infrequently after midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, “G’ night! Thanks!”

Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill mournfulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them, and there was a woman’s scream breaking down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting⁠—that in the briefness of life he should lose one moment of her living presence.

“I’m going in after her; see she gets there safe,” he said.

The frigid edge