Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [195]
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 palmettoes were silhouetted. The solid-seeming huts were instantly changed into thin bamboo frameworks, thin lines of black slats,