I
To persuade 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, and the 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.
II
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!”
III
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 are Church 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.
IV
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 from shops, 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.
V
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 long time 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.
VI
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.
VII
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 in _Vanity Fair_ a 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:
“You _are_ my 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 are almost 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.