Fora year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage experiments. His work—his hands, his technique—became more adept, and his days more steady, less fretful.
He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathematics into physical chemistry; began to understand the mass action law; became as sarcastic as Terry about what he called the “bedside manner” of Tubbs and Holabird; read much French and German; went canoeing on the Hudson on Sunday afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale of Holabird’s pride, Gladys the Centrifuge.
He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Institute only because of Gottlieb’s intervention. But it may be that Tubbs and Holabird hoped he would again blunder into publicity-bringing miracles, for they were both polite to him at lunch—polite and wistfully rebuking, and full of meaty remarks about publishing one’s discoveries early instead of dawdling.
It was more than a year after Martin’s anticipation by D’Hérelle when Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with suggestions:
“I’ve been thinking, Arrowsmith,” said Tubbs.
He looked it.
“D’Hérelle’s discovery hasn’t aroused the popular interest I thought it would. If he’d only been here with us, I’d have seen to it that he got the proper attention. Practically no newspaper comment at all. Perhaps we can still do something. As I understand it, you’ve been going along with what Dr. Gottlieb would call ‘fundamental research.’ I think it may now be time for you to use phage in practical healing.I want you to experiment with phage in pneumonia, plague, perhaps typhoid, and when your experiments get going, make some practical tests in collaboration with the hospitals. Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity. Let’s reallycuresomebody!”
Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused to obey. And he was touched as Tubbs went on:
“Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense of scientific precision when I insist on practical results. I— Somehow I don’t see the really noble and transforming results coming out of this Institute that we ought to be getting, with our facilities. I’d like to do something big, my boy, something fine for poor humanity, before I pass on. Can’t you give it to me? Go cure the plague!”
For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness of whiskers.
That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the quest for the fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about fighting pneumonia, before attacking the Black Death. And when Gottlieb learned of it, he was absorbed in certain troubles of his own.
Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection of phage, and by feeding them with it he prevented the spread of pneumonia. He found that phage-produced immunity could be as infectious as a disease.
He was pleased with himself, and expected pleasure from Tubbs, but for weeks Tubbs did not heed him. He was off on a new enthusiasm, the most virulent of his whole life: he was organizing the League of Cultural Agencies.
He was going to standardize and coördinate all mental activities in America, by the creation of a bureau which should direct and pat and gently rebuke and generally encourage chemistry and batik-making, poetry and Arctic exploration, animal husbandry and Bible study, negro spirituals and business-letter writing. He was suddenly in conference with conductors of symphony orchestras, directors of art-schools, owners of itinerant Chautauquas, liberal governors, ex-clergymen who wrote tasty philosophy for newspaper syndicates, in fact all the proprietors of American intellectuality—particularly including a millionaire named Minnigen who had recently been elevating the artistic standards of the motion pictures.
Tubbs was all over the Institute inviting the researchers to join him in the League of Cultural Agencies with its fascinating committee-meetings and dinners. Most of them grunted, “The Old Man is erupting again,” and forgot him, but one ex-major went out every evening to confer with serious ladies who wore distinguished frocks, who sobbed over “the loss of spiritual and intellectual horse-power through lack of coördination,” and who went home in limousines.
There were rumors. Dr. Billy Smith whispered that he had gone in to see Tubbs and heard McGurk shouting at him, “Your job is to run this shop and not work for that land-stealing, four-flushing, play-producing son of evil, Pete Minnigen!”
The morning after, when Martin ambled to his laboratory, he discovered a gasping, a muttering, a shaking in the corridors, and incredulously he heard:
“Tubbs has resigned!”
“No!”
“They say he’s gone to his League of Cultural Agencies. This fellow Minnigen has given the League a scad of money, and Tubbs is to get twice the salary he had here!”
Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Martin, and the bio-physics assistant, research was halted. There was a surging of factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of scientists who desired to be the new Director of the Institute.
Rippleton Holabird, Yeo the carpenter-like biologist, Gillingham the joky chief in bio-physics, Aaron Sholtheis the neat Russian Jewish High Church Episcopalian, all of them went about with expressions of modest willingness. They were affectionate with everybody they met in the corridors, however violent they were in private discussions. Added to them were no few outsiders, professors and researchers in other institutes, who found it necessary to come and confer about rather undefined matters with Ross McGurk.
Terry remarked to Martin, “Probably Pearl Robbins and your garçon are pitching horseshoes for the Directorship. My garçon ain’t—the only reason, though, is because I’ve just murdered him. At that, I think Pearl would be the bestchoice. She’s been Tubbs’s secretary so long that she’s learned all his ignorance about scientific technique.”
Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office-seekers, and the most hungry. The war over, he missed his uniform and his authority. He urged Martin:
“You know how I’ve always believed in your genius, Martin, and I know how dear old Gottlieb believes in you. If you would get Gottlieb to back me, to talk to McGurk— Of course in taking the Directorship I would be making a sacrifice, because I’d have to give up my research, but I’d be willing because I feel, really, that somebody with a Tradition ought to carry on the control. Tubbs is backing me, and if Gottlieb did— I’d see that it was to Gottlieb’s advantage. I’d give him a lot more floor-space!”
Through the Institute it was vaguely known that Capitola was advocating the election of Holabird as “the only scientist here who is also a gentleman.” She was seen sailing down corridors, a frigate, with Holabird a sloop in her wake.
But while Holabird beamed, Nicholas Yeo looked secret and satisfied.
The whole Institute fluttered on the afternoon when the Board of Trustees met in the Hall, for the election of a Director. They were turned from investigators into boarding-school girls. The Board debated, or did something annoying, for draining hours.
At four, Terry Wickett hastened to Martin with, “Say, Slim, I’ve got a straight tip that they’ve elected Silva, dean of the Winnemac medical school. That’s your shop, isn’t it? Wha’s like?”
“He’s a fine old— No! He and Gottlieb hate each other. Lord! Gottlieb’ll resign, and I’ll have to get out. Just when my work’s going nice!”
At five, past doors made of attentive eyes, the Board of Trustees marched to the laboratory of Max Gottlieb.
Holabird was heard saying bravely, “Of course with me, I wouldn’t give my research up for any administrative job.” And Pearl Robbins informed Terry, “Yes, it’s true— Mr. McGurk himself just told me—the Board has elected Dr. Gottlieb the new Director.”
“Then they’re fools,” said Terry. “He’ll refuse it, with wilence. ‘Dot dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit committee meetings!’ Fat chance!”
When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into Gottlieb’s laboratory and found the old man standing by his bench, more erect than they had seen him for years.
“Is it true—they want you to be Director?” panted Martin.
“Yes, they have asked me.”
“But you’ll refuse? You won’t let’em gum up your work!”
“Vell.... I said my real work must go on. They consent I should appoint an Assistant Director to do the detail. You see— Of course nothing must interfere with my immunology, but dis gives me the chance to do big t’ings and make a free scientific institute for all you boys. And those fools at Winnemac that laughed at my idea of a real medical school, now maybe they will see— Do you know who was my rival for Director—do you know who it was, Martin? It was that man Silva! Ha!”
In the corridor Terry groaned, “Requiescat in pace.”
To the dinner in Gottlieb’s honor (the only dinner that ever was given in Gottlieb’s honor) there came not only the men of impressive but easy affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but the few scientists whom Gottlieb admired.
He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When he reached the speakers’ table, the guests rose to him, shouting. He peered at them, he tried to speak, he held out his long arms as if to take them all in, and sank down sobbing.
There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs and Dean Silva bewailing their inability to be present; telegrams from college presidents; and all of these were read to admiring applause.
But Capitola murmured, “Just the same, we shall miss dear Dr. Tubbs. He was so forward-looking. Don’t play with your fork, Ross.”
So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.
Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epidemiologist, the Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier.Gottlieb explained to Martin that, though of course Sholtheis was a fool, yet he was the only man in sight who combined at least a little scientific ability with a willingness to endure the routine and pomposity and compromises of executive work.
By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers, Gottlieb obviously felt that he excused himself for having become a manager.
He could not confine his official work to an hour a day. There were too many conferences, too many distinguished callers, too many papers which needed his signature. He was dragged into dinner-parties; and the long, vague, palavering luncheons to which a Director has to go, and the telephoning to straighten out the dates of these tortures, took nervous hours. Each day his executive duties crawled into two hours or three or four, and he raged, he became muddled by complications of personnel and economy, he was ever more autocratic, more testy; and the loving colleagues of the Institute, who had been soothed or bullied into surface peace by Tubbs, now jangled openly.
While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the office recently occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb clung to his own laboratory and to his narrow office as a cat clings to its cushion under a table. Once or twice he tried to sit and look impressive in the office of the Director, but he fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins’s snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of forward-looking virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.
To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds of farmers and practical nurses and suburban butchers who had paid large fares from Oklahoma or Oregon to get recognition for the unquestionable cures which they had discovered: oil of Mississippi catfish which saved every case of tuberculosis, arsenic pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They came with letters and photographs amid the frayed clean linen in their shabby suit-cases—at any opportunity they would stoop over their bags and hopefully bring out testimonials from their Pastors; they begged for a chance to heal humanity, and for themselves only enough money to send The Girl to musical conservatory. So certain, so black-crapely beseeching were they that no reception-clerk could be trained to keep them all out.
Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry for them. They did take his working hours, they did scratch his belief that he was hard-hearted, but they implored him with such wretched timorousness that he could not get rid of them without making promises, and admitting afterward that to have been more cruel would have been less cruel.
It was the Important People to whom he was rude.
The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to prevent Gottlieb from going on with the ever more recondite problems of his inquiry into the nature of specificity, and his inquiry prevented him from giving enough attention to the Institute to keep it from falling to pieces. He depended on Sholtheis, passed decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since in any case Gottlieb would get all the credit for a successful Directorship, kept up his own scientific work and passed the decisions to Miss Pearl Robbins, so that the actual Director was the handsome and jealous Pearl.
There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable world. Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly assured Ross McGurk of the merits of Gottlieb and of her timorous devotion to him, she so purred to the flattery of Rippleton Holabird, she so blandly answered the hoarse hostility of Terry Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for his work, that the Institute reeled with intrigue.
Yeo was not speaking to Sholtheis. Terry threatened Holabird to “paste him one.” Gottlieb constantly asked Martin for advice, and never took it. Joust, the vulgar but competent bio-physicist, lacking the affection which kept Martin and Terry from reproaching the old man, told Gottlieb that he was a “rotten Director and ought to quit,” and was straightway discharged and replaced by a muffin.
Max Gottlieb had ever discoursed to Martin of “the jests of the gods.” Among these jests Martin had never beheld one so pungent as this whereby the pretentiousness and fussy unimaginativeness which he had detested in Tubbs should have made him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb should have made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing worse than a too managed and standardized institution should be one that was not managed and standardized at all. He would once have denied it with violence, but nightly now he prayed for Tubbs’s return.
If the business of the Institute was not more complicatedthereby, certainly its placidity was the more disturbed by the appearance of Gustaf Sondelius, who had just returned from a study of sleeping sickness in Africa and who noisily took one of the guest laboratories.
Gustaf Sondelius, the soldier of preventive medicine whose lecture had sent Martin from Wheatsylvania to Nautilus, had remained in his gallery of heroes as possessing a little of Gottlieb’s perception, something of Dad Silva’s steady kindliness, something of Terry’s tough honesty though none of his scorn of amenities, and with these a spicy, dripping richness altogether his own. It is true that Sondelius did not remember Martin. Since their evening in Minneapolis he had drunk and debated and flamboyantly ridden to obscure but vinuous destinations with too many people. But he was made to remember, and in a week Sondelius and Terry and Martin were to be seen tramping and dining, or full of topics and gin at Martin’s flat.
Sondelius’s wild flaxen hair was almost gray, but he had the same bull shoulders, the same wide brow, and the same tornado of plans to make the world aseptic, without neglecting to enjoy a few of the septic things before they should pass away.
His purpose was, after finishing his sleeping sickness report, to found a school of tropical medicine in New York.
He besieged McGurk and the wealthy Mr. Minnigen who was Tubbs’s new patron, and in and out of season he besieged Gottlieb.
He adored Gottlieb and made noises about it. Gottlieb admired his courage and his hatred of commercialism, but his presence Gottlieb could not endure. He was flustered by Sondelius’s hilarity, his compliments, his bounding optimism, his inaccuracy, his boasting, his oppressive bigness. It may be that Gottlieb resented the fact that though Sondelius was only eleven years younger—fifty-eight to Gottlieb’s sixty-nine—he seemed thirty years younger, half a century gayer.
When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to overcome it by being more noisy and complimentary and enthusiastic than ever. On Gottlieb’s birthday he gave him a shocking smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he called at Gottlieb’s flat, which was often, Gottlieb had to put on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocremusicians.... That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.
Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry for concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in these days of an Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his work.
And Martin was doing it.
After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had gone on to bubonic plague, to the possibilities of preventing it and curing it with phage.
To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience in plague epidemics, one would have believed that Martin found the Black Death delightful. To have beheld him infecting lean snaky rats with the horror, all the while clucking to them and calling them pet names, one would have known him mad.
He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with plague; that after phage-feeding,Bacillus pestisdisappeared from carrier rats which, without themselves being killed thereby, harbored and spread chronic plague; and that, finally, he could cure the disease. He was as absorbed and happy and nervous as in the first days of the X Principle. He worked all night.... At the microscope, under a lone light, fishing out with a glass pipette drawn fine as a hair one single plague bacillus.
To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore, while he worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather boots, straps about his sleeves. These precautions thrilled him, and to the others at McGurk they had something of the esoteric magic of the alchemists. He became a bit of a hero and a good deal of a butt. No more than hearty business men in offices or fussy old men in villages are researchers free from the tedious vice of jovial commenting. The chemists and biologists called him “The Pest,” refused to come to his room, and pretended to avoid him in the corridors.
As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as the drama of science obsessed him, he thought very well of himself and found himself taken seriously by the others. Hepublished one cautious paper on phage in plague, which was mentioned in numerous scientific journals. Even the harassed Gottlieb was commendatory, though he could give but little attention and no help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether cool. He showed for Martin’s somewhat brilliant work only enough enthusiasm to indicate that he was not jealous; he kept poking in to ask whether, with his new experimentation, Martin was continuing his quest for the fundamental nature of all phage, and his study of physical chemistry.
Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been known, and that assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.
Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical medicine. He was looking for new trouble. He had been through several epidemics, and he viewed plague with affectionate hatred. When he understood Martin’s work he gloated, “Hey, Yesus! Maybe you got the t’ing that will be better than Yersin or Haffkine or anybody! Maybe you cure all the world of plague—the poor devils in India—millions of them. Let me in!”
He became Martin’s collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very skilful, valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved irregularity; by principle he never had his meals at the same hours two days in succession, and by choice he worked all night and made poetry, rather bad poetry, at dawn.
Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the thing he most liked in Leora was her singular ability to be cheerfully non-existent even when she was present. At first he was annoyed by Sondelius’s disturbing presence, however interesting he found his fervors about plague-bearing rats (whom Sondelius hated not at all but whom, with loving zeal, he had slaughtered by the million, with a romantic absorption in traps and poison gas). But the Sondelius who was raucous in conversation could be almost silent at work. He knew exactly how to hold the animals while Martin did intrapleural injections; he made cultures ofBacillus pestis; when Martin’s technician had gone home at but a little after midnight (the garçon liked Martin and thought well enough of science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six hours daily sleep and sometimes seeing his wife and children in Harlem), then Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and needles, and lumbered up to the animal house to bring down victims.
The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin’s master to his slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all his Pickerbaughian love of sensationalism, cared so little about mastery or credit, that neither of them considered that there had been a change. They borrowed cigarettes from each other; they went out at the most improbable hours to have flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they handled test-tubes charged with death.
FromYunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound—creeping, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.
In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.
Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.
Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.
Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S.Pendown Castle, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present cargo of lumber.
On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the messroom steward on thePendown Castledied of what the skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and ruffled.
So thePendown Castlecame to Blackwater, the capital and port of St. Hubert.
It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports a hundred thousand people— English planters and clerks, Hindu road-makers, negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.
Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had often relished to lash came on him shaving, and straightway the lather was fantastically smeared with blood.
To-day, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and rubber trees and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin chapels, colored washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots of silk-cotton trees, steamy heat and royal palms and the immortelle that fills the valleys with crimson; to-day it is all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled cane-quotations, against the unsparing sun.
Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster houses and incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus and balconied stores whose dark depths open without barrier from the stifling streets, has the harbor to one side and a swamp to the other. But behind it are the Penrith Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is Government House, looking to the winking sails.
Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of St. Hubert, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.
Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of messroom stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till the port had gone seven times round; but he was an execrable governor and a worried governor. The man whose social rank was next to his own—the Hon. Cecil Eric George Twyford, a lean, active, high-nosed despot who owned and knew rod by snake-writhing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St. Swithin’s Parish— Twyford said that His Excellency was a “potty and snoring fool,” and versions of the opinion came not too slowly to Fairlamb. Then, to destroy him complete, the House of Assembly, which is the St. Hubert legislature,was riven by the feud of Kellett the Red Leg and George William Vertigan.
The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who had come to St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred years before. Most of them were still fishermen and plantation-foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a man small-mouthed and angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy to owner of a shipping company, and while his father still spread his nets on the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of the House of Assembly and a hound for economy—particularly any economy which would annoy his fellow legislator, George William Vertigan.
George William, who was sometimes known as “Old Jeo Wm” and sometimes as “The King of the Ice House” (that enticing and ruinous bar), had been born behind a Little Bethel in Lancashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the hugest stores in St. Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into Venezuela; he was as full of song and incaution and rum as Kellett the Red Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.
Between them, Kellett and George William split the House of Assembly. There could be, to a respectable person, no question as to their merits: Kellett the just and earnest man of domesticity whose rise was an inspiration to youth; George William the gambler, the lusher, the smuggler, the liar, the seller of shoddy cottons, a person whose only excellence was his cheap good nature.
Kellett’s first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance removing the melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who was the official rat-catcher of St. Hubert.
George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward privily to Sir Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and perhaps spread disease, and His Excellency must veto the bill. Sir Robert was troubled. He called in The Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be called Mister, not Doctor).
Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man, without bowels. He had come out from Home only two years before, and he wanted to go back Home, to that particular part of Home represented by tennis-teas in Surrey. He remarked to Sir Robert that rats and their ever faithful fleas do carry diseases—plague and infectious jaundice and rat-bite fever and possibly leprosy—but these diseases did not andtherefore could not exist in St. Hubert, except for leprosy, which was a natural punishment of outlandish Native Races. In fact, noted Inchcape Jones, nothing did exist in St. Hubert except malaria, dengue, and a general beastly dullness, and if Red Legs like Kellett longed to die of plague and rat-bite fever, why should decent people object?
So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St. Hubert, and of His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney rat-catcher and his jiggling young colored assistant were commanded to cease to exist. The rat-catcher became a chauffeur. He drove Canadian and American tourists, who stopped over at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and Trinidad, along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve with a second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation regarding the flowers. The rat-catcher’s assistant became a respectable smuggler and leader of a Wesleyan choir. And as for the rats themselves, they flourished, they were glad in the land, and each female produced from ten to two hundred offspring every year.
They were not often seen by day. “The rats aren’t increasing; the cats kill ’em,” said Kellett the Red Leg. But by darkness they gamboled in the warehouses and in and out of the schooners along the quay. They ventured countryward, and lent their fleas to a species of ground squirrels which were plentiful about the village of Carib.
A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when thePendown Castlecame in from Montevideo and moored by the Councillor Pier, it was observed by ten thousand glinty small eyes among the piles.
As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with the deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew of thePendown Castleput rat-shields on the mooring hawsers, but they did not take up the gang-plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered ashore to find among its kin in Blackwater more unctuous fare than hardwood lumber. ThePendownsailed amiably for home, and from Avonmouth came to Surgeon General Inchcape Jones a cable announcing that the ship was held, that others of the crew had died ... and died of plague.
In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-scorching fire.
Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lightermanhad been smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with delirium and buboes. Inchcape Jones said that it could not be plague, because there never was plague in St. Hubert. His confrère, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it couldn’t be plague, but it damn’ wellwasplague.
Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical officer of St. Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic reaches of St. Swithin, where he belonged, but snooped all over the island, annoying Inchcape Jones. He was an M.B. of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush; he had had blackwater fever and cholera and most other reasonable afflictions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was not a nice man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a nasty, unsporting serve—the sort of serve you’d expect from an American.
And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied himself as an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have him creeping about the docks, catching rats, making cultures from the bellies of their fleas, and barging in—sandy-headed and red-faced, thin and unpleasant—to insist that they bore plague.
“My dear fellow, there’s always someBacillus pestisamong rats,” said Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.
When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that it be openly admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.
“Even if it was plague, which is not certain,” said Inchcape Jones, “there’s no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody. It was a sporadic case. There won’t be any more.”
There was more, immediately. In a week three other waterfront workers and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with something which, even Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was uncomfortably like the description of plague in “Manson’s Tropical Diseases”: “a prodromal stage characterized by depression, anorexia, aching of the limbs,” then the fever, the vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes in the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased being chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost as grim as Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied, and St. Hubert did notknow ... did not know.
To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the rather dull and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and restaurant called the Ice House.
It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the shop where the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of Oxford sells carved tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible likeness of a head shrunken by headhunters. Except for the balcony, where one lunches and looks down on squatting breech-clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English children at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moorish grills, a touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy, amazingly long mahogany bar, slot machines, and marble-topped tables beyond your own.
Here, at the cocktail-hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted white rulers of St. Hubert who haven’t quite the caste to belong to the Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the merchants who have no grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inchcape Joneses, the Italians and Portuguese who smuggle into Venezuela.
Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding apéritifs which are made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling swizzle-sticks of the darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles become peaceful, and have another swizzle, and grow certain again (as for twenty-four hours, since the last cocktail-hour, they have not been certain) that next year they will go Home. Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn coolness, stop drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home ... the Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the Ice House they think of Piccadilly or the heights of Quebec, of Indiana or Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire.... They never go Home. But always they have new reassuring cocktail-hours at the Ice House, until they die, and the other lost men come to their funerals and whisper one to another that theyaregoing Home.
Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of the Blue Bazaar, was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick, ruddy man, the sort of Englishman one sees in the Midlands, the sort that is either very Non-Conformist or very alcoholic, and George William was not Non-Conformist. Each day fromfive to seven he was tilted against the bar, never drunk, never altogether sober, always full of melody and kindliness; the one man who did not long for Home, because outside the Ice House he remembered no home.
When it was whispered that a man had died of something which might be plague, George William announced to his court that if it were true, it would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly well right. But every one knew that the West Indian climate prevented plague.
The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reassured.
It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice House a rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.
No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this death—and this—and another. No one liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; every one fled from every one else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous than its brother, the Plague.
Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability of too-large public gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine’s prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, “Honestly, there’s only been a few deaths, and I think it’s all passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely because they’ve had several cases—why, it’s barbarous! And it’s been conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants would take the strongest measures against the administration. It would ruin the tourist and export business.”
But Stokes of St. Swithin’s secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about it?
Theremay have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have been mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science of value only as it was handy to advertising their business of healing; there may have been the obscure and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius for privacy. Certainly he who had lived to study the methods of immunizing mankind against disease had little interest in actually using those methods. He was like a fabulous painter, so contemptuous of popular taste that after a lifetime of creation he should destroy everything he had done, lest it be marred and mocked by the dull eyes of the crowd.
The letter from Dr. Stokes was not his only intimation that plague was striding through St. Hubert, that to-morrow it might be leaping to Barbados, to the Virgin Islands ... to New York. Ross McGurk was an emperor of the new era, better served than any cloistered satrap of old. His skippers looked in at a hundred ports; his railroads penetrated jungles; his correspondents whispered to him of the next election in Colombia, of the Cuban cane-crop, of what Sir Robert Fairlamb had said to Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones on his bungalow porch. Ross McGurk, and after him Max Gottlieb, knew better than did the Lotus Eaters of the Ice House how much plague there was in St. Hubert.
Yet Gottlieb did not move, but pondered the unknown chemical structure of antibodies, interrupted by questions as to whether Pearl Robbins had enough pencils, whether it would be quite all right for Dr. Holabird to receive the Lettish scientific mission this afternoon, so that Dr. Sholtheis might attend the Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the Host.
He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular in Washington, Gustaf Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmithwho could not (whether because he was too big or too small) quite attain Gottlieb’s concentrated indifference.
It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something which might eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb, “Can you stand by, with the stuff of salvation in your hands, and watch thousands of these unfortunate people dying in St. Hubert, and what is more, are you going to let the dreaded plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My dear man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and act!”
Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too diffidently, that this was the opportunity for the Institute to acquire world-fame.
Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb’s own imagination aroused enough to visualize the far-off misery of the blacks in the canefields, he summoned Martin and remarked:
“It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you, Martin, to use the phage with only half your patients and keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions but without the phage, then you could make an absolute determination of its value, as complete as what we have of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, and then I would send you down to St. Hubert. What do you t’ink?”
Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast between patients treated and untreated, and so, perhaps, end all plague forever; he would harden his heart and keep clear his eyes.
“We will get Sondelius to go along,” said Gottlieb. “He will do the big boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the newspapers which, I am now told, a Director must obtain.”
Sondelius did not merely consent—he insisted.
Martin had never seen a foreign country—he could not think of Canada, where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as foreign to him. He could not comprehend that he was really going to a place of palm trees and brown faces and languid Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius was out ordering linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealedin tiny ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but conferences and powers were considering him.
There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise Martin and Sondelius as to their methods. For it the President of the University of Wilmington gave up a promising interview with a millionaire alumnus, Ross McGurk gave up a game of golf, and one of the three university scientists arrived by aeroplane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather young man in a wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of Erlenmeyer flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin was confronted by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found that he was no longer concealed in the invisibility of insignificance but regarded as a leader who was expected not only to produce miracles but to explain beforehand how important and mature and miraculous he was.
He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees as they sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza Hall— Gottlieb a little removed, also trying to look grave and supreme. But Sondelius rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous, and suddenly Martin was not shy, nor was he respectful to his one-time master in public health.
Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hubert, to enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin’s serum and Haffkine’s prophylactic, and to give Martin’s phage to everybody in St. Hubert, all at once, all with everybody.
Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gottlieb speaking.
He knew, he flung at them, that humanitarian feeling would make it impossible to use the poor devils of sufferers as mere objects of experiment, but he must have at least a few real test cases, and he was damned, even before the Trustees he was damned, if he would have his experiment so mucked up by multiple treatment that they could never tell whether the cures were due to Yersin or Haffkine or phage or none of them.
The Trustees adopted his plan. After all, while they desired to save humanity, wasn’t it better to have it saved by a McGurk representative than by Yersin or Haffkine or the outlandish Sondelius?
It was agreed that if Martin could find in St. Hubert a district which was comparatively untouched by the plague, he should there endeavor to have test cases, one half injected withphage, one half untreated. In the badly afflicted districts, he might give the phage to every one, and if the disease slackened unusually, that would be a secondary proof.
Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked for aid, would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius police authority, the Trustees did not know. The Surgeon General, a chap named Inchcape Jones, had replied to their cables: “No real epidemic not need help.” But McGurk promised that he would pull his numerous wires to have the McGurk Commission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A., M.D.) welcomed by the authorities.
Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimentation was heartless, yet he listened to Martin’s close-reasoned fury with the enthusiasm which this bull-necked eternal child had for anything which sounded new and preferably true. He did not, like Almus Pickerbaugh, regard a difference of scientific opinion as an attack on his character.
He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and McGurk, but he was won back when the Trustees murmured that though they really did wish the dear man wouldn’t fool with sera, they would provide him with apparatus to kill all the rats he wanted.
Then Sondelius was happy:
“And you watch me! I am the captain-general of rat-killers! I yoost walk into a warehouse and the rats say, ‘There’s that damn’ old Uncle Gustaf—what’s the use?’ and they turn up their toes and die! I am yoost as glad I have you people behind me, because I am broke— I went and bought some oil stock that don’t look so good now—and I shall need a lot of hydrocyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me! Now I go and telegraph I can’t keep a lecture engagement next week—huh! me to lecture to a women’s college, me that can talk rat-language and know seven beautiful deadly kind of traps!”
Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy making phage and receiving unsolicited advice from all the Institute staff to think of the dangers of a plague epidemic, but when he went to bed, when his brain was still revolving withplans, he pictured rather too well the chance of dying, unpleasantly.
When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a death-haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and faces (a place, probably, where they spoke funny languages and didn’t have movies or tooth-paste), she took the notion secretively away with her, to look at it and examine it, precisely as she often stole little foods from the table and hid them and meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the pleased expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she did not add to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three days, she spoke:
“I’m going with you.”
“You are not!”
“Well.... I am!”
“It’s not safe.”
“Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage into me, and then I’ll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a husband who cures things, I have! I’m going to blow in a lot of money for thin dresses, though I bet St. Hubert isn’t any hotter than Dakota can be in August.”
“Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will immunize against the plague—you bet I’ll be mighty well injected with it myself!—but I don’tknow, and even if it were practically perfect, there’d always be some people it wouldn’t protect. You simply can’t go, sweet. Now I’m terribly sleepy—”
Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten, but her eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice; age-old wail of the soldiers’ women:
“Sandy, don’t you know I haven’t any life outside of you? I might’ve had, but honestly, I’ve been glad to let you absorb me. I’m a lazy, useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you comfortable. If you were off there, and I didn’t know you were all right, or if you died and somebody else cared for your body that I’ve loved so—haven’t I loved it, dear?— I’d go mad. I mean it—can’t you see I mean it— I’d go mad! It’s just— I’m you, and I got to be with you. And Iwillhelp you! Make your media and everything. You know how often I’ve helped you. Oh, I’m not much good at McGurk, with all your awful’ complicated jiggers, but I did help you at Nautilus— Ididhelp you, didn’t I?—and maybe in St.Hubert”—her voice was the voice of women in midnight terror—“maybe you won’t find anybody that can help you even my little bit, and I’ll cook and everything—”
“Darling, don’t make it harder for me. Going to be hard enough in any case—”
“Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don’t you dare use those old stuck-up expressions that husbands have been drooling out to wives forever and ever! I’m not a wife, any more’n you’re a husband. You’re a rotten husband! You neglect me absolutely. The only time you know what I’ve got on is when some doggone button slips—and how they can pull off when a person has gone over ’em and sewed ’em all on again is simply beyond me!—and then you bawl me out. But I don’t care. I’d rather have you than any decent husband.... Besides. I’m going.”
Gottlieb opposed it, Sondelius roared about it, Martin worried about it, but Leora went, and—his only act of craftiness as Director of the Institute— Gottlieb made her “Secretary and Technical Assistant to the McGurk Plague and Bacteriophage Commission to the Lesser Antilles,” and blandly gave her a salary.
The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that Sondelius take his first injection of phage. He refused.
“No, I will not touch it till you get converted to humanity, Martin, and give it to everybody in St. Hubert. And you will! Wait till you see them suffering by the thousand. You have not seen such a thing. Then you will forget science and try to save everybody. You shall not inject me till you will inject all my negro friends down there too.”
That afternoon Gottlieb called Martin in. He spoke with hesitation:
“You’re off for Blackwater to-morrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hm. You may be gone some time. I— Martin, you are my oldest friend in New York, you and the good Miriam. Tell me: At first you and Terry t’ought I should not take up the Directorship. Don’t you now t’ink I was wise?”
Martin stared, then hastily he lied and said that which was comforting and expected.
“I am glad you t’ink so. You have known so long what Ihave tried to do. I haf faults, but I t’ink I begin to see a real scientific note coming into the Institute at last, after the popoolarity-chasing of Tubbs and Holabird.... I wonder how I can discharge Holabird, that pants-presser of science? If only he dit not know Capitola so well—socially, they call it! But anyway—
“There are those that said Max Gottlieb could not do the child job of running an institution. Huh! Buying note-books! Hiring women that sweep floors! Or no—the floors are swept by women hired by the superintendent of the building,nicht wahr? But anyway—
“I did not make a rage when Terry and you doubted. I am a great fellow for allowing every one his opinion. But it pleases me— I am very fond of you two boys—the only real sons I have—” Gottlieb laid his withered hand on Martin’s arm. “It pleases me that you see now I am beginning to make a real scientific Institute. Though I have enemies. Martin, you would t’ink I was joking if I told you the plotting against me—
“Even Yeo. I t’ought he was my friend. I t’ought he was a real biologist. But just to-day he comes to me and says he cannot get enough sea-urchins for his experiments. As if I could make sea-urchins out of thin air! He said I keep him short of all materials. Me! That have always stood for— I do not care what theypayscientists, but always I have stood, against that fool Silva and all of them, all my enemies—
“You do not know how many enemies I have, Martin! They do not dare show their faces. They smile to me, but they whisper— I will show Holabird—always he plot against me and try to win over Pearl Robbins, but she is a good girl, she knows what I am doing, but—”
He looked perplexed; he peered at Martin as though he did not quite recognize him, and begged:
“Martin, I grow old—not in years—it is a lie I am over seventy—but I have my worries. Do you mind if I give you advice as I have done so often, so many years? Though you are not a schoolboy now in Queen City—no, at Winnemac it was. You are a man and you are a genuine worker. But—
“Be sure you do not let anything, not even your own good kind heart, spoil your experiment at St. Hubert. I do not make funniness about humanitarianism as I used to; sometimes now I t’ink the vulgar and contentious human race mayyet have as much grace and good taste as the cats. But if this is to be, there must be knowledge. So many men, Martin, are kind and neighborly; so few have added to knowledge. You have the chance! You may be the man who ends all plague, and maybe old Max Gottlieb will have helped, too,hein, maybe?
“You must not be just a good doctor at St. Hubert. You must pity, oh, so much the generation after generation yet to come that you can refuse to let yourself indulge in pity for the men you will see dying.
“Dying.... It will be peace.
“Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own death, keep you from making this plague experiment complete. And as my friend— If you do this, something will yet have come out of my Directorship. If but one fine thing could come, to justify me—”
When Martin came sorrowing into his laboratory he found Terry Wickett waiting.
“Say, Slim,” Terry blurted, “just wanted to butt in and suggest, now for St. Gottlieb’s sake keep your phage notes complete and up-to-date, and keep ’em in ink!”
“Terry, it looks to me as if you thought I had a fine chance of not coming back with the notes myself.”
“Aw, what’s biting you!” said Terry feebly.
The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the day before the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones declared that the island was quarantined. People might come in, but no one could leave. He did this despite the fretting of the Governor, Sir Robert Fairlamb, and the protests of the hotel-keepers who fed on tourists, the ex-rat-catchers who drove the same, Kellett the Red Leg who sold them tickets, and all the other representatives of sound business in St. Hubert.
Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for injection, Martin made personal preparations for the tropics. He bought, in seventeen minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two newshirts, and, as St. Hubert was a British possession and as he had heard that all Britishers carry canes, a stick which the shop-keeper guaranteed to be as good as genuine malacca.
They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on a winter morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamerSt. Buryanof the McGurk Line, which carried machinery and flour and codfish and motors to the Lesser Antilles and brought back molasses, cocoa, avocados, Trinidad asphalt. A score of winter tourists made the round trip, but only a score, and there was little handkerchief-waving.
The McGurk Line pier was in South Brooklyn, in a district of brown anonymous houses. The sky was colorless above dirty snow. Sondelius seemed well content. As they drove upon a wharf littered with hides and boxes and disconsolate steerage passengers, he peered out of their crammed taxicab and announced that the bow of theSt. Buryan—all they could see of it—reminded him of the Spanish steamer he had taken to the Cape Verde Isles. But to Martin and Leora, who had read of the drama of departure, of stewards darting with masses of flowers, dukes and divorcees being interviewed, and bands playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” theSt. Buryanwas unromantic and its ferry-like casualness was discouraging.
Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy for Leora.
Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch. He stared up at the black wall of the steamer’s side. As they mounted the gang-plank he was conscious that he was cutting himself off from the safe, familiar land, and he was embarrassed by the indifference of more experienced-looking passengers, staring down from the rail. Aboard, it seemed to him that the forward deck looked like the backyard of an old-iron dealer, that theSt. Buryanleaned too much to one side, and that even in the dock she swayed undesirably.
The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast off. Terry stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and Leora and Sondelius above him, their stomachs pressed against the rail, had slid past him, then he abruptly clumped away.
Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the perilous plague; that there was no possibility of leaving theship till they should reach some distant island. This narrow deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home. Also, in the breeze across the wide harbor he was beastly cold, and in general God help him!
As theSt. Buryanwas warped out into the river, as Martin was suggesting to his Commission, “How about going downstairs and seeing if we can raise a drink?” there was the sound of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure running—but so feebly, so shakily—and they realized that it was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his thin arm in greeting, not finding them in the line at the rail, and turning sadly away.
As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck.
Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was cold, and in a ladylike manner she was sick, but she was not at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him, from the West Indian guide-book which she had earnestly bought.
Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea with the Captain, scouse with the fo’c’sle, and intellectual conferences with the negro missionary in the steerage. He was to be heard—always he was to be heard: singing on the promenade deck, defending Bolshevism against the boatswain, arguing oil-burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the children in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer a volume of navigation to study between parties.
He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of theSt. Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her on a seemingly lonely adventure.
Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a church-warden, her grandfather had been a solid farmer. That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and shewas not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public—if only she learned how to sing.
She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-managers she was accustomed to meet at the country club, and what was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good form. His stories about generals and that sort of people could be discounted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engineers? He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.
When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his ludicrous up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine evening, she remarked, “Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up to something smart again to-day? Or have you been giving somebody else a chance to talk, for once?”
She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured American womanhood has a right to expect from all males, even foreigners.
Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, “Slim—if I may call you so, like Terry— I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There is no use saving fools. It’s a great mistake to be natural. One should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would have respect even from artistic New Jersey spinsters.... How strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out to be shot in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!”
Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen arguing with the ship’s doctor about sutures in negro skulls, and he invented a game of deck cricket. But one evening when he sat reading in the “social hall,” stooped over, wearing betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin walked past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was growing old.
As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she hadbeen a matter of course. He pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily decided that he had neglected her, and weightily he started right in to be a good husband.
“Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely you must have been in New York.”
“But I haven’t.”
“Don’t be foolish! Of course you’ve been lonely! Well, when we get back, I’ll take a little time off every day and we’ll—we’ll have walks and go to the movies and everything. And I’ll send you flowers, every morning. Isn’t it a relief to just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize how I’ve prob’ly neglected— Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly dull?”
“Hunka. Really.”
“No, buttellme.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Now hang it, Leora, here when Idohave the first chance in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right out frankly and admit how slack I’ve been— And planning to send you flowers—”
“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor, bawling, wretched, story-book wife I am. You’re working up to become perfectly miserable if you can’t enjoy being miserable.... It would be terrible, when we got back to New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to showing me a good time. You’d go at it like a bull. I’d have to be so dratted grateful for the flowers every day—the days you didn’t forget!—and the way you’d sling me off to the movies when I wanted to stay home and snooze—”
“Well, by thunder, of all the—”
“No, please! You’re dear and good, but you’re so bossy that I’ve always got to be whateveryouwant, even if it’s lonely. But— Maybe I’m lazy. I’d rather just snoop around than have to work at being well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I fuss over the flat—hang it, wish I’d had the kitchen repainted while we’re away, it’s anicelittle kitchen—and I make believe read my French books, and go out for a walk, and look in the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful’ much; if I could, I’d be as ill-treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I’m no good at educated lies, only at easy little oneslike the one I told you last week— I said I hadn’t eaten any candy and didn’t have a stomach-ache, and I’d eaten half a pound and I was sick as a pup.... Gosh, I’m a good wife I am!”
They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brain-pan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microörganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his garçon, Max Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:
“Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I’m successful in St. Hubert, I’ll begin to count in science, and we’ll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!”
“Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Goingplaces!”