Martin Arrowsmith

“ The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora's old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow's nest, he worried, and said things about her "sloppiness" which he later regretted.
"Why can't you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven't anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can't you even sew on buttons?"
But Clara Tredgold laughed, "Leora, I do think you have the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?" ”

“ ARROWSMITH: A CONTEMPORARY REVIEW FROM THE SPECTATOR, LONDON, 7 MARCH 1925 WE have already seen Mr. Sinclair Lewis display his talents in their full brilliance; but in Martin Arrowsmith he has made a serious effort to subjugate those talents, to use them steadily, to make them instruments to solidify and dignify his theme. In a word, he has tried to write a big novel. That is a cheering ambition, and we are grateful to him. When a writer already famous sets out with all his powers under control to justify that fame, we feel that he is giving us much more than we deserve. ”

“ But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He had an advantage over normal cautious humanity in not caring whether he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talking to Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Marchand, to Inchcape Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted appealing hands. ”

“ CHAPTER XXVIII I Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn’ thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No good. And I’m hanged if I’ll study calculus this evening. Let’s go to the movies. Won’t even change to regular human clothes. Too tired.”
“All right, honey,” said Leora. “But let’s have dinner here. I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon.” ”

“ John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb—ten good pounds he weighed at birth—and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat, this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him. ”

“ His first classes in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked at them—Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a doorknob; the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus Duer visibly intelligent. ”

“ He begins by showing us Martin Arrowsmith as a young medical student at the University of Winnemac. He is differentiated from his fellows by a kind of sullen and unsatisfied desire to find some creative work, some contribution to reality, to occupy and complete his life. There is Angus Muir, on the other hand, who knows from the beginning what he wants of the future; he is making himself proficient in medicine and physiology and surgery; he is ambitious and cold and competent. In many ways he is far more to be admired than Martin ”

“ Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant, "Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt."
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. ”

“ Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant and he enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Professor Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness made a sound curiously like “Oh, hell!” and took{10} the conversation away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore would have suggested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was a “crapehanger” who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of making new ones of his own. ”

“ Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though Martin resented it, when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, "Oh, Lord, there's The Arranger—wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen."
When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she suggested, "Are you such a weak, irresolute, little man that the only way you can keep concentrated is by running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?" ”

“ What you need is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y.M.C.A. and I'll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little agnostic, here you have a chance to see the Almighty's handiwork, and all you grab out of it is a feeling that you're real smart. Buck up, young Arrowsmith. You don't know how funny you are, to a fellow that's got a serene faith!"
To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him, very painfully, upon the head, and amiably resumed work, while Martin danced with irritation. ”

“ Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening, and dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she drew him into the back parlor and "So I'm going off to Washington—and you don't care a bit!" she said, her eyes blurred and languorous and undefended. He held her, muttering, "You darling child, I can't let you go!" As he walked home he thought less of being Director than of Orchid's eyes.
In the morning he groaned, "Doesn't anybody ever learn anything? Must I watch myself and still be a fool, all my life? Doesn't any story ever end?" ”

“ It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”
“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck—”
“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’ and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long—”
They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summer songs to a banjo. ”

“ As Holabird's tweeds made Clay Tredgold's smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer's affairs in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Everyone whom Martin met at the Holabirds' flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody: a goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird's graceful casualness.
The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin demanded, "Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your physiology?" ”

“ Arrowsmith could expect to support a wife—
The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer pointed out, was everybody's bedtime, and except for the five-minute discussion as to whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to supper, and the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef, they clave faithfully to the inquiry as to whether Martin and Leora were engaged. All persons interested, which apparently did not include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not. Bert ushered Martin upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers should not have a chance for a good-night kiss ”

“ Arrowsmith, I really didn't get a chance at dinner to ask you just exactly what you are doing... Oh! Have you seen my dear little children at the Charles Street settlement? I'm sure ever so many of them will become the most fascinating scientists. You must come lecture to them."
That night he fretted to Leora, "Going to be hard to keep up this twittering. But I suppose I've got to learn to enjoy it. Oh, well, think how nice it'll be to give some dinners of our own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I'm a department-head."
Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin's room. ”

“ Arrowsmith seems to know his business perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I advise closing the dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thank you no I shall not stay to dinner I must catch the evening train."
Martin went home to Leora snarling, "That man was just as lovable as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom from bunk he's made me wild to get back to research; away from all these humanitarians that are so busy hollering about loving the dear people that they let the people die! I hated him, but—Wonder what Max Gottlieb's doing this evening? The old German crank! ”

“ She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory smooth and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic pressure determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who naively believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater. ”

“ To himself Martin was protesting, "All right, if you don't want to be friendly, go to the devil!" But he tried again:
"I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don't have anything but routine practice among a lot of farmers?"
"Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there's a lot of you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own jobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city with libraries and medical meetings and everything, you'd develop. ”

“ They had decided that Martin and Leora were free spirits like themselves, and amusing, but they had also decided, long before the Arrowsmiths had by coming to Nautilus entered into authentic existence, that the Group had a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness, and they expected the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and poker every Saturday and Sunday evening. They could not understand why Martin should desire to spend his time in a laboratory, drudging over something called "streptolysin," which had nothing to do with cocktails, motors, steel windmills, or insurance. ”

“ He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of a tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads and arms for a line of men; but what gave him glory was the perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save five children marooned and terrified on a bobbing church pew. The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought about research with salty self-defensive scorn.
“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see him swim that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin. ”

“ I won't have any little bellyaches or T.B. or anything, so please don't lecture me!"
Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.
V. Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything he had missed.
"He's going to have a real education!" he gloated, as they sat on the porch in spring twilight. "He'll learn all this literature and stuff. We haven't done much ourselves—here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives—but maybe we've gone a little beyond our dads, and he'll go way beyond us." ”

“ Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say you are welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome you are! Dr. Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural aptitude for cloistered investigation but that you have been looking over the fields of medical practise and public health before you settled down to the laboratory. I can't tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad preliminary survey. Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision which comes from coördinating all mental domains."
Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey. ”

“ In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his merriment at such of Martin’s ideas as had not been accepted in Pottsburg Christian College, but in the fraternity-house he was a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their profanity. After three years on a backwoods football team he still believed with unflinching optimism that he could sterilize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant. ”

“ I hear you're going to be a gilded department-head, and I'll never be anything but an associate member. Are you going on with me, or are you going to be one of the Holy Wren's pets—hero-scientist?"
"I'm with you, Terry, you old grouch." Martin dropped the cynicism which had always seemed proper between him and Terry. "I haven't got anybody else. Leora and Gustaf are gone and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have got to stick together!" ”

“ I am sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful—for a while. . . . Martin, it iss nice that you will corroborate D'Hérelle. That is science: to work and not to care—too much—if somebody else gets the credit. . . . Shall I tell Tubbs about D'Hérelle's priority, or will you?"
Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.
Tubbs came in to wail, "If you had only published earlier, as I told vou, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in a most embarrassing position before the Board of Trustees. Of course there can be no question now of a new department." ”