LITMIR.BIZ

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Clif, you cer’nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever need a’ arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I’ll come around and let you talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?”

      The front room of Barney’s was an impressionistic painting in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables with broken chairs. Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses of powerful and appalling raw whiskey, and Clif and Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift. Martin’s confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it! He would invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another whiskey; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was shut off from public hearing in a closet.

      At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and the night Superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious. “This is no time to be calling up a probationer! Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?”

      Martin checked the “I’ll damn’ soon tell you who I am!” which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora’s invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low, and if the night superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless gentlewoman—

      When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers into the security of her presence:

      “Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby tomorrow, twelve-thirty. Must! Important! Fix ’t somehow—your aunt’s sick.”

      “All right, dear. G’ night,” was all she said.

      It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline’s flat, then Mrs. Fox’s voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

      “Yes, yes?”

      “’S Martin.”

      “Who is it? Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?”

      “Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it’s Martin Arrowsmith speaking.”

      “Oh, oh, my dear! The ’phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I couldn’t make out what you were saying. I was so frightened. I thought maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had happened to Maddy’s brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing’s happened!”

      Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no, nothing had happened, but he’d forgotten to tell Madeline something—so shor—so sorry call so late—could he speak Mad just minute—

      Then Madeline was bubbling, “Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here—”

      “Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There’s a—there’s a great friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet—”

      “Who is he?”

      “You’ll see tomorrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet—come meet um at lunch. Going,” with ponderous jocularity, “going to blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand—”

      “Oh, how nice!”

      “—so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College Square. Can you?”

      Vaguely, “Oh, I’d love to but—I have an eleven o’clock, and I don’t like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with her—she’s looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with her pink crepe de chine but that you can walk in—and we sort of thought maybe we might lunch at Ye Kollege Karavanserai—and I’d half planned to go to the movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply dandy, she saw it tonight, and I thought I might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study and not go anywhere at all—”

      “Now listen! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will you come or not?”

      “Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I’ll try to be there. The eleven-forty?”

      “Yes.”

      “At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”

      “At College Square!”

      Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to” were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.

      “What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away? Or did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-tonight looks like a necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician.”

      “Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had praised Clif’s pool-playing and called Barney “old Cimex lectularius”; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all the troubles I have—all the doggone mess a fellow can get into—you’d feel down in the mouth!”

      Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll raise the cash, somehow. If it’s—Been going a little too far with Madeline?”

      “You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”

      “The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was something I could do for you. Oh! Have ’nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin’!”

      By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.

      V

      His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practicing the tactful observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.

      “Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about? Oh, Martin, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and—Did I guess it, darling?”

      “No, there’s someone—Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”

      “Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient.”

      “Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”

      “Oh!”

      “It’s—You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his

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