Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [175]
Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the thing he most liked in Leora was her singular ability to be cheerfully non-existent even when she was present. At first he was annoyed by Sondelius’s disturbing presence, however interesting he found his fervors about plague-bearing rats (whom Sondelius hated not at all but whom, with loving zeal, he had slaughtered by the million, with a romantic absorption in traps and poison gas). But the Sondelius who was raucous in conversation could be almost silent at work. He knew exactly how to hold the animals while Martin did intrapleural injections; he made cultures of Bacillus pestis; when Martin’s technician had gone home at but a little after midnight (the garcon liked Martin and thought well enough of science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six hours’ daily sleep and sometimes seeing his wife and children in Harlem), then Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and needles, and lumbered up to the animal house to bring down victims.
The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin’s master to his slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all his Pickerbaughian love of sensationalism, cared so little about mastery or credit, that neither of them considered that there had been a change. They borrowed cigarettes from each other; they went out at the most improbable hours to have flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they candled test-tubes charged with death.
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
CHAPTER 31
From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound — creeping, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.
In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.
Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.
Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.
Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S. Pendown Castle, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present cargo of lumber.
On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the messroom steward on the Pendown Castle died of what the skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and ruffled.
So the Pendown Castle came to Blackwater, the capital and port of St. Hubert.
It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports a hundred thousand people — English planters and clerks, Hindu road-makers, Negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.
Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had often relished to lash came on him shaving, and straightway the lather was fantastically