Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [193]
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 veranda, 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