Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/218

 stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don't. Be almost better to let 'em die than have to live and listen to—

"Leora said I was a 'backwoods hick.' Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books the 'backwoods hick' was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and—Oh, she's right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar, but— And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius—

"Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I'd slave for him—

"Or does he pull the bunk, too?

"Now that's just what I mean. That kind of phrase. 'Pull the bunk'! Horrible!

"Hell! I'll use any kind of phrase I want to! I'm not one of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet he's used to all those highbrows—

"And I'll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won't even be able to go on reading. Still— I don't suppose they read much, but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.

"Rats!"

He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:

"Say, ain't you this new doctor that's come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen you at City Hall."

"Yes. Say, uh, say how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I'm just starting in, and, uh— You get me."

With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

"Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he's one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen's English, and jever hear one of his poems? They're darn' bright. I'll tell you: There's some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it'd be all right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids' teeth. But there's a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to