I
Misty mountains 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.
II
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 and _stay_!” 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 passengers who 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.”
The _St. Buryan_ had 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. Much impressed. 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, what _are_ you 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 the _St. 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.
III
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 me at 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 shopkeepers looked 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.
IV
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.
V
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 in calling 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.
VI
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
him wait--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 have _his_ piles 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 one a 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.