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

the bimonthly check came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances to the penny. By not buying the suit he distressingly needed, he could manage it. Then for a month and more he had but two meals a day, and of those meals one was bread and butter and coffee. He washed his own linen in the bathtub and, except for occasional fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.

His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except that he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between uneasy naps in the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the bulky books of gynecology and internal medicine. He had written certain instructions to Leora. He met her on the edge of Wheatsylvania and they had a moment’s talk, a resolute kiss.

News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania. There is a certain interest in other people’s affairs, and the eyes of citizens of whose existence Martin did not know had followed him from his arrival. When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle of the Tozer ogres, Leora’s father and brother were already there, and raging. Old Andrew Jackson cried out upon them. He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in Martin to have “run away from school once, but to go and sneak back this second time was absolutely plumb crazy.” Through his tirade, Martin and Leora smiled confidently.

From Bert, “By God, sir, this is too much!” Bert had been reading fiction. “I object to the use of profanity, but when you come and annoy My Sister a second time, all I can say is, by God, sir, this is too blame much!”

Martin looked meditatively out of the widow. He noticed three people strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the Tozer house with hopeful interest. Then he spoke steadily:

“Mr. Tozer, I’ve been working hard. Everything has gone fine. But I’ve decided I don’t care to live without my wife. I’ve come to take her back. Legally, you can’t prevent me. I’ll admit, without any argument, I can’t support her yet, if I stay in the University. She’s going to study stenography. She’ll be supporting herself in a few months, and meanwhile I expect you to be decent enough to send her money.”

“This is too much,” said Tozer, and Bert carried it on: “Fellow not only practically ruins a girl but comes and demands that we support her for him!”

“All right. Just as you want. In the long run it’ll be better for her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and have my profession, but if you won’t take care of her, I’ll chuck school, I’ll go to work. Oh, I’ll support her, all right! Only you’ll never see her again. If you go on being idiots, she and I will leave here on the night train for the Coast, and that’ll be the end.” For the first time in his centuries of debate with the Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist under Bert’s nose. “And if you try to prevent our going, God help you! And the way this town will laugh at you!⁠ ⁠… How about it, Leora? Are you ready to go away with me⁠—forever?”

“Yes,” she said.

They discussed it, greatly. Tozer and Bert struck attitudes of defense. They couldn’t, they said, be bullied by anybody. Also, Martin was an Adventurer, and how did Leora know he wasn’t planning to live on the money they sent her? In the end they crawled. They decided that this new, mature Martin, this new, hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away everything for each other.

Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her seventy dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-work.

At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train window, Martin realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering Andrew Jackson Tozer did love his daughter, did mourn her going.

III

He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been; a square white and blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise chairs. It looked out on breezy, stubbly waste land reaching to distant glittering railroad tracks. The landlady was a round German woman with an eye for romance. It is doubtful if she ever believed that they were married. She was a good woman.

Leora’s trunk had come. Her stenography books were primly set out on her little table and her pink felt slippers were arranged beneath the white iron bed. Martin stood with her at the window, mad with the pride of proprietorship. Suddenly he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious cement which holds cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he was collapsing. But with knees rigidly straightening, his head back, his lips tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and cried, “Our first home!”

That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was intoxication.

The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vigorous weeds and rough grass of the waste land were radiant under the April sun, and sparrows were cheeping.

“Yes,” said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.

IV

Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administration and Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and quite reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and such sons of Zenith brewers and politicians as were unable to enter even state universities. She trotted daily to the car-line, a neat, childish figure with notebooks and sharpened pencils, to vanish in the horde of students. It was six months before she had learned enough stenography to obtain a place in an insurance office.

Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At least two evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that, while he plunged into his books as he