III
Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company. He had heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man of forty-five, moved as one clad in purple on the loftiest planes of Nautilus society. After the inspection Tredgold urged, “Sit down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about sanitation.”
Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold’s affable eye a sardonic flicker.
“What d’you want to know about sanitation?”
“Oh, all about it.”
“The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of course you haven’t enough washbowls in that second-floor toilet room, and the whole lot of ’em swore you were putting in others immediately. If they like you enough to lie against their own interests, you must be a good boss, and I think I’ll let you get away with it—till my next inspection! Well, got to hustle.”
Tredgold beamed on him. “My dear man, I’ve been pulling that dodge on Pickerbaugh for three years. I’m glad to have seen you. And I think I really may put in some more bowls—just before your next inspection. Goodbye!”
After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a motion-picture theater.
“Give you a lift, Doctor?” cried Tredgold.
On the way he suggested, “I don’t know whether you’re dry, like Pickerbaugh, but if you’d like I’ll run you out to the house and present you with the noblest cocktail conceived since Evangeline County went dry. Does it sound reasonable?”
“I haven’t heard anything so reasonable for years,” said Martin.
The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty feet above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove, which is the Back Bay of Nautilus. It was a Colonial structure, with a sun-parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver drawing-room. Martin tried to look casual as they were wafted in on Mrs. Tredgold’s chatter, but it was the handsomest house he had ever entered.
While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of one likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like a hostess, Tredgold flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed courtesies:
“How long you been here now, Doctor?”
“Almost a year.”
“Try that. Look here, it strikes me you’re kind of different from Salvation Pickerbaugh.”
Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora’s gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something like Pickerbaugh’s best manner:
“Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which there is no other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity of our commonwealth, while I realize that you are getting away with every infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn’t catch you at, yet I desire to pay a tribute to your high respect for sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an assistant more earnest than young Arrowsmith, I should, with your permission, become President of the United States.”
Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, “If that isn’t exactly like Dr. Pickerbaugh!” Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.
“I’m so glad you’re free from this socialistic claptrap of Pickerbaugh’s,” said Tredgold.
The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:
“Oh, I don’t care a hang how socialistic he is—whatever that means. Don’t know anything about socialism. But since I’ve gone and given an imitation of him—I suppose it was probably disloyal—I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts. But mind you, Tredgold, it’s partly the fault of people like your Manufacturers’ Association. You encourage him to rant. I’m a laboratory man—or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact figures.”
“So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams,” said Tredgold.
Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin found himself becoming confidential about “variables,” and Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.
Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize and with that caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, “I know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two doors from the Catholic church? She’s awfully clever, and so cheap.”
Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the easy smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first woman to whom she could talk of God and the price of toweling. They came out from themselves and were not laughed at.
It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded a whooping, wheezing motor horn, and in lumbered a ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.
Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ashford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading barbarian in the blue and silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:
“Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I’m tickled to death you’ve found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrowsmith, I’m simply a poor old insurance salesman. Clay is always telling me what an illiterate boob I am. Look here, Clay darling, do I get a cocktail or don’t I? I seen your lights! I seen you in here telling what a smart guy you are! Come on! Mix!”
Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young Monte Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whiskered Nathaniel Mugford who had founded Mugford College, also came in, uninvited. He wondered at the presence of Martin, found him human, told him he was human, and did his rather competent best to catch up on the cocktails.
Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned from Gustaf Sondelius:
She’d a dark and a roving eye,
And her hair hung down in ringlets,
A nice girl, a decent girl,
But one of the rakish kind.
At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most desperately Smart Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they were driven home, at a speed neither legal nor kind, by Clay Tredgold.