Читать книгу Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 29

V

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men, and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes—his corduroys and soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat—at his vocabulary and his taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way of saying, “Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest thinker” irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb’s dark patience.

“Oh, let me alone!” he hurled at her. “You’re the nicest thing the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemotherapy—Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you’re right about slang. I’ll cut out all this junk about ‘feeding your face’ and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled collar! I won’t!”

He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the roof.

She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns—they were ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were “so prosaic, so conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place.” She compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provencal.” But to Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.

“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,” he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.

Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, “Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put down.”

“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She wailed, “Oh, Mart, I’m so sick of myself, tonight. I’m always trying to make people think I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a bluff.”

“What is it, dear?”

“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him—only he was right—he as good as told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to get out of the graduate school. I’m not doing a thing, he said, and if I don’t have my Ph.D., then I won’t be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I’d better land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her.”

His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who—”

“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, tonight. I’m no good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don’t suppose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!”

“They do not! If they did—I’d like to see anybody that tried laughing—”

“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it. The poetic Madeline. With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a—I’m a—Martin, I’m a tin-horn sport! I’m everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you needn’t tell me. I know what he thinks. And—I’ll have to go home with Mother, and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back! That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”

Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was whispering:

“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re going to marry me and—Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and couple in hospital, then we’ll be married and—By thunder, with you helping me, I’m going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going to have everything!”

“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your scientific work—”

“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research. But thunder, I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but afterwards—Oh, Madeline!”

Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.