He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.
He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.
“I do love him so when he’s frowsy! Don’t you see, Sandy, I was wise to come! You’re so worn out.Itmight get you, and nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways—about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and day I’ll nurse you—the least whisper and I’ll be awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff— And I’llhaveice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire’s house and steal it out of his highballs! My dear!”
She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room.It did not contain much save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never discovered.
“It’s so sort of— Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix it up somehow.”
But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life had she spent three minutes in arranging flowers. She looked doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and slipped in to him.
She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness, a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, “I like a small bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don’t get so scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is! Some day I’m going to up and say to him: ‘You go to the devil!’ I will so! Darling, we will hike off to France together, just you and I, won’t we!”
She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure—
Mistymountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market full of colored women with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St. Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured paw-paws and breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives who came alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the languor of the isles, and panted before they approached Barbados.
Just beyond was St. Hubert.
None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were raging that the company should have taken them into danger. In the tepid wind they felt the plague.
The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they would stop at Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they would anchor far out in the harbor; and while the passengers bound for St. Hubert would be permitted to go ashore, in the port-doctor’s launch, no one in St. Hubert would be allowed to leave—nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer except the official mail, which the ship’s surgeon would disinfect.
(The ship’s surgeon was wondering, the while, how you disinfected mail—let’s see—sulfur burning in the presence of moisture, wasn’t it?)
The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with wharf-masters, and the tourists were reassured. But Martin murmured to his Commission, “I hadn’t thought of that. Once we go ashore, we’ll be practically prisoners till the epidemic’s over—if it ever does get over—prisoners with the plague around us.”
“Why, of course!” said Sondelius.
They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by afternoon. It was late night, with most of the passengers asleep, when they arrived at Blackwater. As Martin came out on the damp and vacant deck, it seemed unreal, harshly unfriendly, and of the coming battleground he saw nothing but a few shore lights beyond uneasy water.
About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit. The ship’s surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the captain could be heard growling on the bridge; the first officer hastened up to confer with him and disappeared below again; and there was no one to meet them. The steamer waited, rolling in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot miasma.
“And here’s where we’re going to land andstay!” Martin grunted to Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of phage, on the heaving, black-shining deck near the top of the accommodation-ladder.
Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, “Yes, this must be the place, those lights there. Must be fierce.What?Somebody going ashore? Oh, sure, those two doctors. Well, they got nerve. I certainly don’t envy them!”
Martin heard.
From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid round the bow, and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-ladder. In the haze of a lantern held by a steward at the foot of the steps, Martin could see a smart covered launch, manned by darky sailors in naval uniform and glazed black straw hats with ribbons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking man with some sort of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.
The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the ship. While the launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening, he had a long and complaining conference with the commander of the launch, and received a pouch of mail, the only thing to come aboard.
The ship’s surgeon took it from the captain with aversion, grumbling, “Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these darn’ letters in?”
Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.
They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they had not seen all the trip—one of the mysterious passengerswho are never noticed till they come on deck at landing. Apparently she was going ashore. She was pale, her hands twitching.
The captain shouted at them, “All right—all right—all right! You can go now. Hustle, please. I’ve got to get on.... Damn’ nuisance.”
TheSt. Buryanhad not seemed large or luxurious, but it was a castle, steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as Martin crept down the swaying stairs, thinking all at once, “We’re in for it; like going to the scaffold—they lead you along—no chance to resist,” and, “You’re letting your imagination run away with you; quit it now!” and, “Is it too late to make Lee stay behind, on the steamer?” and an agonized, “Oh, Lord, are the stewards handling that phage carefully?” Then he was on the tiny square platform at the bottom of the accommodation-ladder, the ship’s side was high above him, lit by the round ports of cabins, and some one was helping him into the launch.
As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin saw in lantern light how her lips tightened once, then her whole face went blank, like one who waited hopelessly.
Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.
He muttered, while the steamer whistled, “Quick! You can still go back! You must!”
“And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look at the elegant engine it’s got!... Gosh, I’m scared blue!”
As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the filtering of lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced to the swell, the sandy-headed official demanded of Martin:
“You’re the McGurk Commission?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and humorless.
“Are you the port-doctor?” asked Sondelius.
“No, not exactly. I’m Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin’s Parish. We’re all of us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doctor— In fact he died couple of days ago.”
Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate him.
“You’re Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work in Africa, in German East—was out there myself. And you’re Dr. Arrowsmith? I read your plague phage paper. Muchimpressed. Now I have just the chance to say before we go ashore— You’ll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G., has lost his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes—afraid to burn Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of what you may want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to me in my parish—if I’m still alive. Stokes, my name is.... Damn it, boy, whatareyou doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela?... Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won’t even cremate the bodies—some religious prejudice among the blacks—obee or something.”
“I see,” said Martin.
“How many cases plague you got now?” said Sondelius.
“Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats.... I’m so sleepy!... Well, welcome, gentlemen—” He flung out his arms in a dry hysteria. “Welcome to the Island of Hesperides!”
Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most of the town was dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no face along the dim waterfront—warehouses, tram station, mean hotels—and they ground against a pier, they went ashore, without attention from customs officials. There were no carriages, and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists landing from theSt. Buryan, whatever the hour, were dead now or hidden.
The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering with her suit-case—she had said no word, and they never saw her again. The Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-police who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Martin weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty balconied streets to the San Marino Hotel.
Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips, stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the hotel, when they stood before it, a weary caravan laden with bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a window before she would admit them.
As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stirring of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following an open wagon in which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.
“And I might have saved all of them, with phage,” he whispered to himself.
His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he babbled to the manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed that Leora might not have seen the Things in that slow creaking wagon.
“I’d have choked her before I let her come, if I’d known,” he was shuddering.
The woman apologized, “I must ask you gentlemen to carry your things up to your rooms. Our boys— They aren’t here any more.”
What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased vanity, Martin had bought in New York, he never knew. He was too busy guarding the cases of phage, and worrying, “Maybe this stuff would save everybody.”
Now Stokes of St. Swithin’s was a reticent man and hard, but when they had the last bag up-stairs, he leaned his head against a door, cried, “My God, Arrowsmith, I’m so glad you’ve got here,” and broke from them, running.... One of the negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the English of the Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly, said, “Sar, have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys will now go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes have told I to bring.”
Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said, “Thank you very much, boys. Here’s a quid between you. Now get some sleep.”
They saluted and were not.
Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could for half an hour.
Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flaring, green and crimson morning, yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that about them was a strange land, as yet unseen, and before them the work that in distant New York had seemed dramatic and joyful and that stank now of the charnel house.
A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a negress who, before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door.
Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked old, now he was young and boisterous.
“Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let meat those rats! This Inchcape—to try to master them with strychnin! A noble melon! Leora, when you divorce Martin, you marry me, heh? Give me the salt. Yey, I sleep fine!”
The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room. Now he was diverted by what he considered its foreignness: the lofty walls of wood painted a watery blue, the wide furnitureless spaces, the bougainvillæa at the window, and in the courtyard the merciless heat and rattling metallic leaves of palmettoes.
Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a balconied Chinese shop, and the violent-colored skylight of the Blue Bazaar.
He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world, but there was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius became dumb, though he had his moment. He waddled back to his room, dressed himself in surah silk last worn on the East Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a sun-helmet which secretly he had bought for Martin.
In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more to the tropics than to his own harsh Northern meadows. But his pleasure in looking foreign was interrupted by the entrance of the Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones, lean but apple-cheeked, worried and hasty.
“Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we have to do I’m afraid we can’t give you the attention you doubtless expect,” he said indignantly.
Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who spoke of a non-existent cousin who was a Harley Street specialist, and who explained that all they wanted was a laboratory for Martin and, for himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How many times, in how many lands, had Gustaf Sondelius flattered pro-consuls, and persuaded the heathen to let themselves be saved!
Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically human; he looked as though he really thought Leora was pretty; he promised that he might perhaps let Sondelius tamper with his rats. He would return that afternoon and conduct them to the house prepared for them, Penrith Lodge, on the safe secluded hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed gallantly) he thought that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge a topping bungalow, with three rather decent servants. The butler, though a colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.
Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was a pounding and it opened on Martin’s classmate at Winnemac, Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley.
Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had tried to save him during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection. He recalled him confusedly. The man came in, vast and lumbering. His eyes were staring and altogether mad, and his voice was parched:
“Hello, Mart. Yump, it’s old Ira. I’m in charge of all the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if you only knew the wickedness of the natives, and the way they lie and sing indecent songs and commit all manner of vileness! And the Church of England lets them wallow in their sins! Only us to save them. I heard you were coming. I have been laboring, Mart. I’ve nursed the poor plague-stricken devils, and I’ve told them how hellfire is roaring about them. Oh, Mart, if you knew how my heart bleeds to see these ignorant fellows going unrepentant to eternal torture! After all these years I know you can’t still be a scoffer. I come to you with open hands, begging you not merely to comfort the sufferers but to snatch their souls from the burning lakes of sulfur to which, in His everlasting mercy, the Lord of Hosts hath condemned those that blaspheme against His gospel, freely given—”
Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too discontented, while Martin could only splutter, “Now how do you suppose that maniac ever got here? This is going to be awful!”
Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured out for their first sight of the town.... A Scientific Commission, yet all the while they were only boisterous Gustaf and doubtful Martin and casual Leora.
The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike pneumonic, there is no danger from direct contact with people developing the disease, so long as vermin were kept away, but they did not believe it. They were afraid of one another, and the more afraid of strangers. The Commission found a street dying with fear. House-shutters were closed, hot slatted patches in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty trolley-car with a frightened motorman who peered down at them and sped up lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drug-stores were open, but from their shady depths the shopkeeperslooked out timidly, and when the Commission neared a fish-stall, the one customer fled, edging past them.
Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild ungathered hair, ran by them shrieking, “My little boy—”
They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long corrugated-iron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names of the commissioners who had built it—by voting bonds for the building. It should have been buzzing with jovial buyers and sellers, but in all the gaudy booths there were only one negress with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray rags squatting before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The rest was emptiness, and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding papers.
Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public square, and here was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient death.
The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees, which shut out the faint-hearted breeze and cooped in the heat—stale lifeless heat, in whose misery the leering silence was the more dismaying. Through a break in the evil mangoes they beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.
“It’s too hot to walk. Perhaps we’d better go back to the hotel,” said Leora.
In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford, whose familiarity made it the more grotesque in this creepy world, and took them to Penrith Lodge, on the cool hills behind Blackwater.
They traversed a packed native section of bamboo hovels, and shops that were but unpainted, black-weathered huts, without doors, without windows, from whose recesses dark faces looked at them resentfully. They passed, at their colored driver’s most jerky speed, a new brick structure in front of which stately negro policemen with white gloves, white sun-helmets, and scarlet coats cut by white belts, marched with rifles at the carry.
Inchcape Jones sighed, “Schoolhouse. Turned it into pest-house. Hundred cases in there. Die every hour. Have to guard it—patients get delirious and try to escape.”
After them trailed an odor of rotting.
Martin did not feel superior to humanity.
With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants and the cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge lay high on a crest, looking across the ugly flat of the town to the wash of sea. At its windows the reed jalousies whispered and clattered, and the high bare rooms were enlivened by figured Carib scarfs.... It had belonged to the port-doctor, dead these three days.
Inchcape Jones assured the doubtful Leora that she would nowhere else be so safe; the house was rat-proofed, and the doctor had caught the plague at the pier, had died without ever coming back to this well-beloved bungalow in which he, the professional bachelor, had given the most clamorous parties in St. Hubert.
Martin had with him sufficient equipment for a small laboratory, and he established it in a bedroom with gas and running water. Next to it was his and Leora’s bedroom, then an apartment which Sondelius immediately made homelike by dropping his clothes and his pipe ashes all over it.
There were two colored maids and an ex-soldier butler, who received them and unpacked their bags as though the plague did not exist.
Martin was perplexed by their first caller. He was a singularly handsome young negro, quick-moving, intelligent of eye. Like most white Americans, Martin had talked a great deal about the inferiority of negroes and had learned nothing whatever about them. He looked questioning as the young man observed:
“My name is Oliver Marchand.”
“Yes?”
“Dr. Marchand— I have my M.D. from Howard.”
“Oh.”
“May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask before I hurry off— I have three cases from official families isolated at the bottom of the hill—oh, yes, in this crisis they permit a negro doctor to practise even among the whites! But— Dr. Stokes insists that D’Hérelle and you are right incalling bacteriophage an organism. But what about Bordet’s contention that it’s an enzyme?”
Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Marchand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague of race-fear, draw diagrams.
Marchand sighed, “I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any way I can? It is a great privilege to know you.”
He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.
“I never thought a negro doctor— I wish people wouldn’t keep showing me how much I don’t know!” said Martin.
While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones’s administration, which proved to be almost anything that could be wrong.
A plague epidemic to-day, in a civilized land, is no longer an affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting “Bring out your dead.” The fight against it is conducted like modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers. The ancient horror bears a face of efficiency. There are offices, card indices, bacteriological examinations of patients and of rats. There is, or should be, a lone director with superlegal powers. There are large funds, education of the public by placard and newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of disinfectors, isolation of patients lest vermin carry the germs from them to others.
In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To have the existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he had had to fight the merchants controlling the House of Assembly, who had howled that a quarantine would ruin them, and who now refused to give him complete power and tried to manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was somewhat worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means of a committee.
Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not cajole people. The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not help win over the public to take precautions against rats and ground squirrels. He had tried to fumigate a few warehouses with sulfur dioxid, but the owners complained that the fumes stained fabrics and paint; and the Board of Health bade himwait—wait a little while—wait and see. He had tried to have the rats examined, to discover what were the centers of infection, but his only bacteriologists were the overworked Stokes and Oliver Marchand; and Inchcape Jones had often explained, at nice dinner-parties, that he did not trust the intelligence of negroes.
He was nearly insane; he worked twenty hours a day; he assured himself that he was not afraid; he reminded himself that he had an honestly won D.S.O.; he longed to have some one besides a board of Red Leg merchants give him orders; and always in the blur of his sleepless brain he saw the hills of Surrey, his sisters in the rose-walk, and the basket-chairs and tea-table beside his father’s tennis-lawn.
Then Sondelius, that crafty and often lying lobbyist, that unmoral soldier of the Lord, burst in and became dictator.
He terrified the Board of Health. He quoted his own experiences in Mongolia and India. He assured them that if they did not cease being politicians, the plague might cling in St. Hubert forever, so that they would no more have the amiable dollars of the tourists and the pleasures of smuggling.
He threatened and flattered, and told a story which they had never heard, even at the Ice House; and he had Inchcape Jones appointed dictator of St. Hubert.
Gustaf Sondelius stood extremely close behind the dictator.
He immediately started rat-killing. On a warrant signed by Inchcape Jones, he arrested the owner of a warehouse who had declared that he was not going to havehispiles of cocoa ruined. He marched his policemen, stout black fellows trained in the Great War, to the warehouse, set them on guard, and pumped in hydrocyanic acid gas.
The crowd gathered beyond the police line, wondering, doubting. They could not believe that anything was happening, for the cracks in the warehouse walls had been adequately stuffed and there was no scent of gas. But the roof was leaky. The gas crept up through it, colorless, diabolic, and suddenly a buzzard circling above the roof tilted forward, fell slantwise, and lay dead among the watchers.
A man picked it up, goggling.
“Dead, right enough,” everybody muttered. They looked at Sondelius, parading among his soldiers, with reverence.
His rat-crew searched each warehouse before pumping in the gas, lest some one be left in the place, but in the third onea tramp had been asleep, and when the doors were anxiously opened after the fumigation, there were not only thousands of dead rats but also a dead and very stiff tramp.
“Poor fella—bury him,” said Sondelius.
There was no inquest.
Over a rum swizzle at the Ice House, Sondelius reflected, “I wonder how many men I murder, Martin? When I was disinfecting ships at Antofagasta, always afterward we find two or three stowaways. They hide too good. Poor fellas.”
Sondelius arbitrarily dragged bookkeepers and porters from their work, to pursue the rats with poison, traps, and gas, or to starve them by concreting and screening stables and warehouses. He made a violent red and green rat map of the town. He broke every law of property by raiding shops for supplies. He alternately bullied and caressed the leaders of the House of Assembly. He called on Kellett, told stories to his children, and almost wept as he explained what a good Lutheran he was—and consistently (but not at Kellett’s) he drank too much.
The Ice House, that dimmest and most peaceful among saloons, with its cool marble tables, its gilt-touched white walls, had not been closed, though only the oldest topers and the youngest bravos, fresh out from Home and agonizingly lonely for Peckham or Walthamstow, for Peel Park or the Cirencester High Street, were desperate enough to go there, and of the attendants there remained only one big Jamaica barman. By chance he was among them all the most divine mixer of the planter’s punch, the New Orleans fizz, and the rum swizzle. His masterpieces Sondelius acclaimed, he alone placid among the scary patrons who came in now not to dream but to gulp and flee. After a day of slaughtering rats and disinfecting houses he sat with Martin, with Martin and Leora, or with whomever he could persuade to linger.
To Gustaf Sondelius, dukes and cobblers were alike remarkable, and Martin was sometimes jealous when he saw Sondelius turning to a cocoa-broker’s clerk with the same smile he gave to Martin. For hours Sondelius talked, of Shanghai and epistemology and the painting of Nevinson; for hours he sang scurrilous lyrics of the Quarter, and boomed, “Yey, how I kill the rats at Kellett’s wharf to-day! I don’t t’ink one little swizzle would break down too many glomeruli in an honest man’s kidneys.”
He was cheerful, but never with the reproving and infuriating cheerfulness of an Ira Hinkley. He mocked himself, Martin, Leora, and their work. At home dinner he never cared what he ate (though he did care what he drank), which at Penrith Lodge was desirable, in view of Leora’s efforts to combine the views of Wheatsylvania with the standards of West Indian servants and the absence of daily deliveries. He shouted and sang—and took precautions for working among rats and the agile fleas: the high boots, the strapped wrists, and the rubber neck-band which he had invented and which is known in every tropical supply shop to-day as the Sondelius Anti-vermin Neck Protector.
It happened that he was, without Martin or Gottlieb ever understanding it, the most brilliant as well as the least pompous and therefore least appreciated warrior against epidemics that the world has known.
Thus with Sondelius, though for Martin there were as yet but embarrassment and futility and the fear of fear.
Topersuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a test in which half of them might die, so that all plague might—perhaps—be ended forever, was impossible. Martin argued with Inchcape Jones, with Sondelius, but he had no favor, and he began to meditate a political campaign as he would have meditated an experiment.
He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though he still resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation, to give up the possible saving of millions for the immediate saving of thousands. Inchcape Jones, a little rested now under Sondelius’s padded bullying and able to slip into a sane routine, drove Martin to the village of Carib, which, because of its pest of infected ground squirrels, was proportionately worse smitten than Blackwater.
They sped out of the capital by white shell roads agonizing to the sun-poisoned eyes; they left the dusty shanties of suburban Yamtown for a land cool with bamboo groves and palmettos, thick with sugar-cane. From a hilltop they swung down a curving road to a beach where the high surf boomed in limestone caves. It seemed impossible that this joyous shore could be threatened by plague, the slimy creature of dark alleys.
The motor cut through a singing trade wind which told of clean sails and disdainful men. They darted on where the foam feathers below Point Carib and where, round that lone royal palm on the headland, the bright wind hums. They slipped into a hot valley, and came to the village of Carib and to creeping horror.
The plague had been dismaying in Blackwater; in Carib it was the end of all things. The rat-fleas had found fat homes in the ground squirrels which burrowed in every garden about the village. In Blackwater there had from the first been isolation of the sick, but in Carib death was in every house, andthe village was surrounded by soldier police, with bayonets, who let no one come or go save the doctors.
Martin was guided down the stinking street of cottages palm-thatched and walled with cow-dung plaster on bamboo laths, cottages shared by the roosters and the goats. He heard men shrieking in delirium; a dozen times he saw that face of terror—sunken bloody eyes, drawn face, open mouth—which marks the Black Death; and once he beheld an exquisite girl child in coma on the edge of death, her tongue black and round her the scent of the tomb.
They fled away, to Point Carib and the trade wind, and when Inchcape Jones demanded, “After that sort of thing, can you really talk of experimenting?” then Martin shook his head, while he tried to recall the vision of Gottlieb and all their little plans: “half to get the phage, half to be sternly deprived.”
It came to him that Gottlieb, in his secluded innocence, had not realized what it meant to gain leave to experiment amid the hysteria of an epidemic.
He went to the Ice House; he had a drink with a frightened clerk from Derbyshire; he regained the picture of Gottlieb’s sunken, demanding eyes; and he swore that he would not yield to a compassion which in the end would make all compassion futile.
Since Inchcape Jones could not understand the need of experimentation, he would call on the Governor, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.
Though Government House was officially the chief residence of St. Hubert, it was but a thatched bungalow a little larger than Martin’s own Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt more easy, and he ambled up to the broad steps, at nine of the evening, as though he were dropping in to call on a neighbor in Wheatsylvania.
He was stopped by a Jamaican man-servant of appalling courtesy.
He snorted that he was Dr. Arrowsmith, head of the McGurk Commission, and he was sorry but he must see Sir Robert at once.
The servant was suggesting, in his blandest and most annoying manner, that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Surgeon General, when a broad red face and a broad red voice projected themselves over the veranda railing, with a rumble of, “Send him up, Jackson, and don’t be a fool!”
Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the verandah, at a small round table littered with coffee and liqueurs and starred with candles. She was a slight, nervous insignificance; he was rather puffy, very flushed, undoubtedly courageous, and altogether dismayed; and at a time when no laundress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was luminous.
Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply soft shirt which Leora had been meanin’ to wash.
Martin explained what he wanted to do—what he must do, if the world was ever to get over the absurdity of having plague.
Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he understood, but at the end he bellowed:
“Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front, with a dud show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office clerk asked me to risk the whole thing to try out some precious little invention of his own, can you imagine what I’d answer? There isn’t much I can do now—these doctor Johnnies have taken everything out of my hands—but as far as possible I shall certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from coming in and using us as a lot of sanguinary—sorry, Evelyn—sanguinary corpses. Good night, sir!”
Thanks to Sondelius’s crafty bullying, Martin was able to present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor, the temporarily suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones, several hearty members of the House of Assembly, and Sondelius himself, attending in the unofficial capacity which all over the world he had found useful for masking a cheerful tyranny. Sondelius even brought in the negro doctor, Oliver Marchand, not on the ground that he was the most intelligent person on the island (which happened to be Sondelius’s reason) but because he “represented the plantation hands.”
Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin’s unemotional experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all experiments should be, by devices not entirely clear to him, carried on in the laboratory without disturbing the conduct of agreeable epidemics, but he could never resist a drama like the innocent meeting of the Special Board.
The meeting was set for a week ahead ... with scores dying every day. While he waited for it Martin manufactured more phage and helped Sondelius murder rats, and Leora listened to the midnight debates of the two men and tried to make them acknowledge that it had been wise to let her come. Inchcape Jones offered to Martin the position of Government bacteriologist, but he refused lest he be sidetracked.
The Special Board met in Parliament House, all of them trying to look not like their simple and domestic selves but like judges. With them appeared such doctors of the island as could find the time.
While Leora listened from the back of the room, Martin addressed them, not unaware of the spectacle of little Mart Arrowsmith of Elk Mills taken seriously by the rulers of a tropic isle headed by a Sir Somebody. Beside him stood Max Gottlieb, and in Gottlieb’s power he reverently sought to explain that mankind has ever given up eventual greatness because some crisis, some war or election or loyalty to a Messiah which at the moment seemed weighty, has choked the patient search for truth. He sought to explain that he could—perhaps—save half of a given district, but that to test for all time the value of phage, the other half must be left without it ... though, he craftily told them, in any case the luckless half would receive as much care as at present.
Most of the Board had heard that he possessed a magic cure for the plague which, for unknown and probably discreditable reasons, he was withholding, and they were not going to have it withheld. There was a great deal of discussion rather unconnected with what he had said, and out of it came only the fact that everybody except Stokes and Oliver Marchand was against him; Kellett was angry with this American, Sir Robert Fairlamb was beefily disapproving, and Sondelius admitted that though Martin was quite a decent young man, he was a fanatic.
Into their argument plunged a fury in the person of Ira Hinkley, missionary of the Sanctification Brotherhood.
Martin had not seen him since the first morning in Blackwater. He gaped as he heard Ira pleading:
“Gentlemen, I know almost the whole bunch of you areChurch of England, but I beg you to listen to me, not as a minister but as a qualified doctor of medicine. Oh, the wrath of God is upon you— But I mean: I was a classmate of Arrowsmith in the States. I’m onto him! He was such a failure that he was suspended from medical school. A scientist! And his boss, this fellow Gottlieb, he was fired from the University of Winnemac for incompetence! I know ’em! Liars and fools! Scorners of righteousness! Has anybody but Arrowsmith himself told you he’s a qualified scientist?”
The face of Sondelius changed from curiosity to stolid Scandinavian wrath. He arose and shouted:
“Sir Robert, this man is crazy! Dr. Gottlieb is one of the seven distinguished living scientists, and Dr. Arrowsmith is his representative! I announce my agreement with him, complete. As you must have seen from my work, I’m perfectly independent of him and entirely at your service, but I know his standing and I follow him, quite humbly.”
The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest of reasons—in St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the holy ecstasies of negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood chapels—but they voted only to “give the matter their consideration,” while still men died by the score each day, and in Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest from the ancient clawing pain.
Outside, as the Special Board trudged away, Sondelius blared at Martin and the indignant Leora, “Yey, a fine fight!”
Martin answered, “Gustaf, you’ve joined me now. The first darn’ thing you do, you come have a shot of phage.”
“No. Slim, I said I will not have your phage till you give it to everybody. I mean it, no matter how much I make fools of your Board.”
As they stood before Parliament House, a small motor possessing everything but comfort and power staggered up to them, and from it vaulted a man lean as Gottlieb and English as Inchcape Jones.
“You Dr. Arrowsmith? My name is Twyford, Cecil Twyford of St. Swithin’s Parish. Tried to get here for the Special Board meeting, but my beastly foreman had to take the afternoon off and die of plague. Stokes has told me your plans. Quite right. All nonsense to go on having plague. Board refused? Sorry. Perhaps we can do something in St. Swithin’s. Goo’ day.”
All evening Martin and Sondelius were full of language. Martin went to bed longing for the regularity of working all night and foraging for cigarettes at dawn. He could not sleep, because an imaginary Ira Hinkley was always bursting in on him.
Four days later he heard that Ira was dead.
Till he had sunk in coma, Ira had nursed and blessed his people, the humble colored congregation in the hot tin chapel which he had now turned into a pest-house. He staggered from cot to cot, under the gospel texts he had lettered on the whitewashed wall, then he cried once, loudly, and dropped by the pine pulpit where he had joyed to preach.
One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third man was down with plague and one doctor to attend them all, he now gave phage to the entire village; a long strain of injections, not improved by the knowledge that one jaunty flea from any patient might bring him the plague.
The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find and make precise notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which was occurring nowhere except here at Carib.
He came home raving to Leora, “I’ll show ’em! Now they’ll let me try test conditions, and then when the epidemic’s over we’ll hustle home. It’ll be lovely to be cold again! Wonder if Holabird and Sholtheis are any more friendly now? Be pretty good to see the little ole flat, eh?”
“Yes, won’t it!” said Leora. “I wish I’d thought to have the kitchen painted while we’re away.... I think I’ll put that blue chair in the bedroom.”
Though there was a decrease in the plague at Carib, Sondelius was worried, because it was the worst center for infected ground squirrels on the island. He made decisions quickly. One evening he explained certain things to Inchcape Jones and Martin, rode down their doubts, and snorted:
“Only way to disinfect that place is to burn it—burn th’ whole thing. Have it done by morning, before anybody can stop us.”
With Martin as his lieutenant he marshaled his troop of rat-catchers—ruffians all of them, with high boots, tied jacket sleeves, and ebon visages of piracy. They stole food fromshops, tents and blankets and camp-stoves from the Government military warehouse, and jammed their booty into motor trucks. The line of trucks roared down to Carib, the rat-catchers sitting atop, singing pious hymns.
They charged on the village, drove out the healthy, carried the sick on litters, settled them all in tents in a pasture up the valley, and after midnight they burned the town.
The troops ran among the huts, setting them alight with fantastic torches. The palm thatch sent up thick smoke, dead sluggish white with currents of ghastly black through which broke sudden flames. Against the glare the palmettos were silhouetted. The solid-seeming huts were instantly changed into thin bamboo frameworks, thin lines of black slats, with the thatch falling in sparks. The flame lighted the whole valley; roused the terrified squawking birds, and turned the surf at Point Carib to bloody foam.
With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense enough, Sondelius’s troops made a ring about the burning village, shouting insanely as they clubbed the fleeing rats and ground squirrels. In the flare of devastation Sondelius was a fiend, smashing the bewildered rats with a club, shooting at them as they fled, and singing to himself all the while the obscene chantey of Bill the Sailor. But at dawn he was nursing the sick in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies how to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way discussing methods of poisoning ground squirrels in their burrows.
Sondelius returned to Blackwater, but Martin remained in the tent village for two days, giving them the phage, making notes, directing the amateur nurses. He returned to Blackwater one mid-afternoon and sought the office of the Surgeon General, or what had been the office of the Surgeon General till Sondelius had come and taken it away from him.
Sondelius was there, at Inchcape Jones’s desk, but for once he was not busy. He was sunk in his chair, his eyes bloodshot.
“Yey! We had a fine time with the rats at Carib, eh? How is my new tent willage?” he chuckled, but his voice was weak, and as he rose he staggered.
“What is it? What is it?”
“I t’ink— It’s got me. Some flea got me. Yes,” in a shaky but extremely interested manner, “I was yoost thinking I will go and quarantine myself. I have fever all right, and adenitis.My strength— Huh! I am almost sixty, but the way I can lift weights that no sailor can touch— And I could fight five rounds! Oh, my God, Martin, I am so weak! Not scared! No!”
But for Martin’s arms he would have collapsed.
He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora’s nursing. “I who have isolated so many—it is my turn,” he said.
Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager clean cottage—the family had died there, all of them, but it had been fumigated. They procured a nurse and Martin himself attended the sick man, trying to remember that once he had been a doctor, who understood ice-bags and consolation. One thing was not to be had—mosquito netting—and only of this did Sondelius complain.
Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his skin, how swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice as he babbled:
“Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best one is the tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea and mountains. He made the fruit to grow so well that man need not work—and then He laughed, and stuck in volcanoes and snakes and damp heat and early senility and the plague and malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever played on man was inventing the flea.”
His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a feeble croaking, and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.
He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with infinite pain, tears in his eyes at his own weakness:
“I want you to see how an agnostic can die!
“I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls, and Holy Week at Sevilla. And one good last drunk! I am very peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but life was a good game. And— I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my people the phage! Save all of them— God, I did not think they could hurt me so!”
His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.
Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist Inchcape Jones’s demand that he give the phage to every one, still do what he had been sent to do.
“I’m not a sentimentalist; I’m a scientist!” he boasted.
They snarled at him in the streets now; small boys called him names and threw stones. They had heard that he was wilfully withholding their salvation. The citizens came in committees to beg him to heal their children, and he was so shaken that he had ever to keep before him the vision of Gottlieb.
The panic was increasing. They who had at first kept cool could not endure the strain of wakening at night to see upon their windows the glow of the pile of logs on Admiral Knob, the emergency crematory where Gustaf Sondelius and his curly gray mop had been shoveled into the fire along with a crippled negro boy and a Hindu beggar.
Sir Robert Fairlamb was a blundering hero, exasperating the sick while he tried to nurse them; Stokes remained the Rock of Ages—he had only three hours’ sleep a night, but he never failed to take his accustomed fifteen minutes of exercise when he awoke; and Leora was easy in Penrith Lodge, helping Martin prepare phage.
It was the Surgeon General who went to pieces.
Robbed of his dependence on the despised Sondelius, sunk again in a mad planlessness, Inchcape Jones shrieked when he thought he was speaking low, and the cigarette which was ever in his thin hand shook so that the smoke quivered up in trembling spirals.
Making his tour, he came at night on a sloop by which a dozen Red Legs were escaping to Barbados, and suddenly he was among them, bribing them to take him along.
As the sloop stood out from Blackwater Harbor he stretched his arms toward his sisters and the peace of the Surrey hills, but as the few frightened lights of the town were lost, he realized that he was a coward and came up out of his madness, with his lean head high.
He demanded that they turn the sloop and take him back. They refused, howling at him, and locked him in the cabin. They were becalmed; it was two days before they reached Barbados, and by then the world would know that he had deserted.
Altogether expressionless, Inchcape Jones tramped from the sloop to a waterfront hotel in Barbados, and stood for a longtime in a slatternly room smelling of slop-pails. He would never see his sisters and the cool hills. With the revolver which he had carried to drive terrified patients back into the isolation wards, with the revolver which he had carried at Arras, he killed himself.
Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed Surgeon General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal assignment of Martin to St. Swithin’s Parish, as medical officer with complete power. This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twyford, made his experiment possible.
He was invited to stay at Twyford’s. His only trouble was the guarding of Leora. He did not know what he would encounter in St. Swithin’s, while Penrith Lodge was as safe as any place on the island. When Leora insisted that, during his experiment, the cold thing which had stilled the laughter of Sondelius might come to him and he might need her, he tried to satisfy her by promising that if there was a place for her in St. Swithin’s, he would send for her.
Naturally, he was lying.
“Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she’s not going to run risks!” he vowed.
He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier butler, with Dr. Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.
In St. Swithin’s Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken canefields. Here Cecil Twyford, that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre and interpreted every law.
His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot humming plain. The house was old and low, of thick stone and plaster walls; the paneled rooms were lined with the china, the portraits, and the swords of Twyfords for three hundred years; and between the wings was a walled garden dazzling with hibiscus.
Twyford led Martin through the low cool hall and introduced him to five great sons and to his mother, who, since his wife’s death, ten years ago, had been mistress of the house.
“Have tea?” said Twyford. “Our American guest will be down in a moment.”
He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn that since for generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at a seemly hour, no panic should prevent their going on drinking it at that hour.
When Martin came into the garden, when he saw the old silver on the wicker table and heard the quiet voices, the plague seemed conquered, and he realized that, four thousand miles southwest of the Lizard, he was in England.
They were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when the American guest came down and from the door stared at Martin as strangely as he stared in turn.
He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps thirty to his thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness, her black brows and dusky hair, she was his twin; she was his self enchanted.
He could hear his voice croaking, “But you’re my sister!” and she opened her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they bowed at introduction. When she sat down, Martin had never been so conscious of a woman’s presence.
He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon, widow of Roger Lanyon of New York. She had come to St. Hubert to see her plantations and had been trapped by the quarantine. He had tentatively heard of her dead husband as a young man of wealth and family; he seemed to remember having seen inVanity Faira picture of the Lanyons at Palm Beach.
She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a rising gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford. In the midst of her debonair insults to the hugest of the huge sons, Martin turned on her:
“Youaremy sister!”
“Obviously. Well, since you’re a scientist— Are you a good scientist?”
“Pretty good.”
“I’ve met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Holabird. Met ’em in Hessian Hook. You know it, don’t you?”
“No, I— Oh, I’ve heard of it.”
“You know. It’s that renovated old part of Brooklyn where writers and economists and all those people, some of them almost as good as the very best, consort with people who arealmost as smart as the very smartest. You know. Where they dress for dinner but all of them have heard about James Joyce. Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don’t you think?”
“Why—”
“Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining what you plan to do experimentally. Could I help you—nursing or cooking or something—or would I merely be in the way?”
“I don’t know yet. If I can use you, I’ll be unscrupulous enough!”
“Oh, don’t be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes! They have no sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil adores him, and I suppose he’s simply infested with virtues, but I find him so dry and thin and unappetizing. Don’t you think he might be a little gayer?”
Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurled:
“Look here! You said you found Holabird ‘charming.’ It makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and not appreciate Stokes. Stokes is hard—thank God!—and probably he’s rude. Why not? He’s fighting a world that bellows for fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind and not come out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could hear him being rude to me!”
Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. But Joyce Lanyon’s lovely eyes were kind, and when she spoke she had lost something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out:
“Yes. I suppose it’s the difference between me, playing at being a planter, and Cecil.”
After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till she hinted:
“My dear man, you’re so apologetic about never being apologetic! If you really must be my twin brother, do me the honor of telling me to go to the devil whenever you want to. I don’t mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so much of an obsession with you—”
“Obsession! Rats! He—”
They parted an hour after.
Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping,puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.
He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How lovely her shoulders, above black satin at dinner! She had a genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a rosy glow behind it, as from an inner light.)
Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now, off there in Penrith Lodge, missing him, lying awake for him?)
How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the formal Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That afternoon he had recognized the rigid though kindly code of the Twyfords, but could he not set it aside by being frankly an Outlander?)
Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.
Theplague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the population into two equal parts. One of them, driven in by Twyford, was injected with plague phage, the other half was left without.
He began to succeed. He saw far-off India, with its annual four hundred thousand deaths from plague, saved by his efforts. He heard Max Gottlieb saying, “Martin, you haf done your experiment. I am very glat!”
The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more heavily than those who had been treated. There did appear a case or two among those who had the phage, but among the others there were ten, then twenty, then thirty daily victims. These unfortunate cases he treated, giving the phage to alternate patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the parish, a whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting background of banyans and breadfruit trees.
He could never understand Cecil Twyford. Though Twyford had considered his hands as slaves, though he had, in his great barony, given them only this barren almshouse, yet he risked his life now in nursing them, and the lives of all his sons.
Despite Martin’s discouragement, Mrs. Lanyon came down to cook, and a remarkably good cook she was. She also made beds; she showed more intelligence than the Twyford men about disinfecting herself; and as she bustled about the rusty kitchen, in a gingham gown she had borrowed from a maid, she so disturbed Martin that he forgot to be gruff.
In the evening, while they returned by Twyford’s rattling little motor to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Martin as one who had shared his work, but when she had bathedand powdered and dressed, he talked to her as one who was afraid of her. Their bond was their resemblance as brother and sister. They decided, almost irritably, that they looked utterly alike, except that her hair was more patent-leather than his and she lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.
Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or twice Mrs. Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family stolidity of the Twyfords as from the thought of fever-scorched patients, to the shore of a rocky lagoon which cut far in from the sea.
They sat on a cliff, full of the sound of the healing tide. His brain was hectic with the memory of charts on the whitewashed broad planks of the almshouse, the sun cracks in the wall, the puffy terrified faces of black patients, how one of the Twyford sons had knocked over an ampule of phage, and how itchingly hot it had been in the ward. But to his intensity the lagoon breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide. He perceived that Mrs. Lanyon’s white frock was fluttering about her knees; he realized that she too was strained and still. He turned somberly toward her, and she cried:
“I’m so frightened, and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic, but they’re stone. I’m so marooned!”
He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The softness of her sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke away with:
“No! You don’t really care a hang about me. Just curious. Perhaps that’s a good thing for me—to-night.”
He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and her fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the still face of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand crept to hers they sat unimpassioned, comprehending, free to talk of what they would.
He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the house, and imagined her soft moving within.
“No,” he raged. “Can’t do it. Joyce—women like her—one of the million things I’ve given up for work and for Lee. Well. That’s all there is to it then. But if I were here two weeks— Fool! She’d be furious if you knocked! But—”
He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his room.
The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge—the port-doctor had cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a neighbor. The central was now demoralized by the plague, and when for two hours Martin had tried to have Leora summoned, he gave up.
But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would drive to Penrith Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his suggestion that Leora be invited hither, and if she and Joyce Lanyon should become such friends that Joyce would never again turn to him in loneliness, he was willing, he was eager—he was almost eager.
When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so little apart since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital room in Zenith.
The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creaking she roused with the hope that it was his step, and realized that he would not be coming, all the blank evening, the terrifying night; would not be here anywhere, not his voice nor the touch of his hand.
Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone when Martin was at the Institute, but then he had been returning to her some time before dawn—probably—and she had reflectively munched a snack on the corner of the kitchen table, looking at the funnies in the evening paper. To-night she had to live up to the butler, who served her as though she were a dinner-party of twenty.
She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Blackwater below, sure that she felt a “miasm” writhing up through the hot darkness.
She knew the direction of St. Swithin’s Parish—beyond that delicate glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills. She concentrated on it, wondering if by some magic she might not have a signal from him, but she could get no feeling of his looking toward her. She sat long and quiet.... She had nothing to do.
Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an electric globe inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-netting, but there was a tear in the netting and the mosquitoes crept through. As she turned out the light and lay tense, unable to give herself over to sleep, unable to sink into security, while to her blurred eyes the half-seen folds of the mosquito netting seemed to slide about her, she tried to remember whether these mosquitoes might be carrying plague germs. She realized how much she had depended on Martin for such bits of knowledge, as for all philosophy. She recalled how annoyed he had been because she could not remember whether the yellow fever mosquito wasAnophelesorStegomyia—or was itAëdes?—and suddenly she laughed in the night.
She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.
“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that to-morrow.”
“Do that t’morrow—do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.
Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.
In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become of him.
Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It seemed filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.
Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at dusting—here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease—a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a regiment.
Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, herlimbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.
All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing for some one to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.
“Got to—got to—can’t remember what it was,” her voice kept appealing to her cloudy brain.
Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in flight, and in the darkness staggered out to find help. As she came to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge, unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees she crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for Martin.
She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for him—listened—tense with listening.