Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [196]
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 everyone, 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 willfully 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