Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/106

 "Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you're suspended, at least till you come to your senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb." He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he concluded, "And as for Clawson, his 'joke' regarding this Benoni Carr person—and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy—his 'joke,' as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don't think you will be ready to come back to us."

"All right," said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He remembered with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner jacket.

Martin's money, from his father's tiny estate, came in bimonthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought Clif, whom he found practising eloquence over a beautiful pearl-gray motor hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented. but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, "Well, well, how's the boy? Come out and catchum little drink."

"I could use one."

Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:

"Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva's fired me, for general footlessness. I'm going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God, but I'm tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?"