NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS
OUR MR. WRENN
THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
THE JOB
FREE AIR
MAIN STREET
BABBITT
ARROWSMITH
ARROWSMITH
_By_
SINCLAIR LEWIS
_Author of_ Main Street, Babbitt, _etc._
TORONTO
GEORGE J. McLEOD, LIMITED
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
Copyright, 1924, 1925, by
The Designer Publishing Company, Inc.
_The first edition of_ ARROWSMITH _consists of 500 copies on handmade
paper, numbered and signed by the author_.
Second printing [first trade edition], January, 1925
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
_To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the
bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for
his help in the planning of the fable itself--for his realization
of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a
scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of
companionship while working on the book, in the United States, in
the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontainebleau. I wish I
could reproduce our talks along the way, and the laboratory
afternoons, the restaurants at night, and the deck at dawn as we
steamed into tropic ports._
SINCLAIR LEWIS
ARROWSMITH
CHAPTER I
I
The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio
wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried
near the Monongahela--the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the
grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking
with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her
brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.
She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered,
“Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your
Uncle Ed, I guess he’d take us in.”
“Nobody ain’t going to take us in,” she said. “We’re going on jus’ long
as we can. Going West! They’s a whole lot of new things I aim to be
seeing!”
She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire,
alone.
That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.
II
Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was
reading “Gray’s Anatomy.” His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills,
in the state of Winnemac.
There was a suspicion in Elk Mills--now, in 1897, a dowdy red-brick
village, smelling of apples--that this brown-leather adjustable seat
which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent
pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a
barber’s chair. There was also a belief that its proprietor must once
have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The
Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.
Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York
Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen,
become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and
while the Doc was on a country call he took charge--though what there
was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy,
not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually
white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The
squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him
from any appearance of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which
artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to
listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and
quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of independence,
and a hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had
been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.
Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian
immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that
he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little
Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as
“Jewish,” and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of
Primitive Britain, Celt, Phœnician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.
It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin
was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to become a Great
Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging stone-bruises, dissecting
squirrels, and explaining the astounding and secret matters to be
discovered at the back of the physiology, but he was not completely free
from an ambition to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the
son of the Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar
without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the
section on the lymphatic system, and he muttered the long and perfectly
incomprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty room.
It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vickerson, facing
on Main Street above the New York Clothing Bazaar. On one side of it was
the foul waiting-room, on the other, the Doc’s bedroom. He was an aged
widower; for what he called “female fixings” he cared nothing; and the
bedroom with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was
cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sanitation.
This central room was at once business office, consultation-room,
operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and
fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoölogical
collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and
fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills--a skeleton with
one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would
acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the
unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skeleton’s
jaw.
On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished board.
Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on a slimy
oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of
memoranda of debts which the Doc was always swearing he would “collect
from those dead-beats right now,” and which he would never, by any
chance, at any time, collect from any of them. A year or two--a decade
or two--a century or two--they were all the same to the plodding doctor
in the bee-murmuring town.
The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was
oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing
instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fish-hook,
an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a
frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.
The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc
Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of shoe-boxes
in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to questioning and adventure for
Martin Arrowsmith.
III
The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway
was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin
would not have to help him into bed.
But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the hall to his
bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the Doc open the lower part
of the washstand, where he kept his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long
gurgle the invisible Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the
doors shut. Still good. Only one drink. If he came into the
consultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing
in the bedroom. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened
again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.
The Doc’s step was much livelier when he loomed into the office, a gray
mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a form vast and unreal and
undefined, like a cloud taking for the moment a likeness of humanity.
With the brisk attack of one who wishes to escape the discussion of his
guilt, the Doc rumbled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:
“What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat
would drag in something if I left the door unlocked.” He gulped
slightly; he smiled to show that he was being humorous--people had been
known to misconstrue the Doc’s humor.
He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was talking
about:
“Reading old Gray? That’s right. Physician’s library just three books:
‘Gray’s Anatomy’ and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great
doctor. Locate in Zenith and make five thousand dollars year--much as
United States Senator! Set a high goal. Don’t let things slide. Get
training. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin.
Knowledge! I’m plug doc--got chick nor child--nobody--old drunk. But
you--leadin’ physician. Make five thousand dollars year.
“Murray woman’s got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for her. Wants
somebody hold her hand. Road’s damn’ disgrace. Culvert’s out, beyond the
grove. ’Sgrace.
“Endocarditis and--
“Training, that’s what you got t’ get. Fundamentals. Know chemistry.
Biology. I nev’ did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she’s got gastric ulcer.
Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both
eat too much.
“Why they don’t repair that culvert-- And don’t be a booze-hoister like
me, either. And get your basic science. I’ll splain.”
The boy, normal village youngster though he was, given to stoning cats
and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained something of the intoxication
of treasure-hunting as the Doc struggled to convey his vision of the
pride of learning, the universality of biology, the triumphant exactness
of chemistry. A fat old man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his
grammar was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his
rival, good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin a
vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and stink and of
seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had ever beheld.
The Doc’s voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair, blurry of eye
and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to bed, but the Doc insisted:
“Don’t need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don’t appreciate but-- Old man
now. Giving you all I’ve learned. Show you collection. Only museum in
whole county. Scientif’ pioneer.”
A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the specimens in the
brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and chunks of mica; the
embryo of a two-headed calf, the gall-stones removed from a respectable
lady whom the Doc enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood
before the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.
“Looka that butterfly. Name is _porthesia chrysorrhœa_. Doc Needham
couldn’t tell you that! He don’t know what butterflies are called! He
don’t care if you get trained. Remember that name now?” He turned on
Martin. “You payin’ attention? You interested? _Huh?_ Oh, the devil!
Nobody wants to know about my museum--not a person. Only one in county
but-- I’m an old failure.”
Martin asserted, “Honest, it’s slick!”
“Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It’s an appendix. First
one ever took out ’round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the
first ’pendectomy in _this_ neck of the woods, you bet! And first
museum. It ain’t--so big--but it’s start. I haven’t put away money like
Doc Needham, but I started first c’lection-- I started it!”
He collapsed in a chair, groaning, “You’re right. Got to sleep. All in.”
But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on
his desk, and looked back doubtfully. “Want to give you something--start
your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old
man?”
He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had
used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he
sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered
into his bedroom.