Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/40

 simply carpenters, and you're a great investigator. But there's several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How's your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who's the premier of Austro-Hungary?"

Martin struggled, "I don't pretend to know anything—except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He's got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they're simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn't religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don't you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don't you—"

Cliff Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, "Praying in the lab! I'll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!"

"Damn it, listen!" Martin wailed. "I tell you, you fellows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a man—"

So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.

When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, "Look here, old son. We're all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you're so confoundedly honest, why don't you get out?"

He left Martin to agonize, "He's right. I've got to shut up or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What am I going to do?"

Angus Duer's studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were alike offended by Clif's bawdy singing, Clif's howling conversation, Clif's fondness for dropping things in people's soup, and Clif's melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped, "Will you kindly not make so much racket?"