Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/277

 they both knew of the second reduction and considered it an excellent joke.

He reassembled his committee. "I'm going to take this into the courts," he raged.

"Fine," said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: "Jenkins, that radical lawyer, would handle the case free."

The wise banker observed, "You haven't got anything to take into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has a legal right to reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regulations don't fix the salary for anybody except the Director and the inspectors. You haven't a thing to say."

With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, "And I suppose I haven't a thing to say if they wreck the Department!"

"Not a thing, if the city doesn't care."

"Well, I care! I'll starve before I'll resign!"

"You'll starve if you don't resign, and your wife, too. Now here's my plan," said the banker. "You go into private practise here—I'll finance your getting an office and so on—and when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we'll all get together again and have you put in as full Director."

"Ten years of waiting—in Nautilus? Nope. I'm licked. I'm a complete failure—at thirty-two! I'll resign. I'll wander on," said Martin.

"I know I'm going to love Chicago," said Leora.

He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, "they could not at the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred."

Martin accepted.

When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, "Resigned? He got kicked out, that's what happened." One of the papers had an innocent squib: