Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [200]
He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and her fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the still face of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand crept to hers they sat unimpassioned, comprehending, free to talk of what they would.
He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the house, and imagined her soft moving within.
“No,” he raged. “Can’t do it. Joyce — women like her — one of the million things I’ve given up for work and for Lee. Well. That’s all there is to it then. But if I were here two weeks — Fool! She’d be furious if you knocked! But —”
He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his room.
III
The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge — the port-doctor had cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a neighbor. The central was now demoralized by the plague, and when for two hours Martin had tried to have Leora summoned, he gave up.
But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would drive to Penrith Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his suggestion that Leora be invited hither, and if she and Joyce Lanyon should become such friends that Joyce would never again turn to him in loneliness, he was willing, he was eager — he was almost eager.
IV
When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so little apart since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital room in Zenith.
The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creaking she roused with the hope that it was his step, and realized that he would not be coming, all the blank evening, the terrifying night; would not be here anywhere, not his voice nor the touch of his hand.
Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone when Martin was at the Institute, but then he had been returning to her some time before dawn — probably — and she had reflectively munched a snack on the corner of the kitchen table, looking at the funnies in the evening paper. Tonight she had to live up to the butler, who served her as though she were a dinner-party of twenty.
She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Blackwater below, sure that she felt a “miasm” writhing up through the hot darkness.
She knew the direction of St. Swithin’s Parish — beyond that delicate glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills. She concentrated on it, wondering if by some magic she might not have a signal from him, but she could get no feeling of his looking toward her. She sat long and quiet. . . . She had nothing to do.
Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an electric globe inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-netting, but there was a tear in the netting and the mosquitoes crept through. As she turned out the light and lay tense, unable to give herself over to sleep, unable to sink into security, while to her blurred eyes the half-seen folds of the mosquito netting seemed to slide about her, she tried to remember whether these mosquitoes might be carrying plague germs. She realized how much she had depended on Martin for such bits of knowledge, as for all philosophy. She recalled how annoyed he had been because she could not remember whether the yellow fever mosquito was Anopheles or Stegomyia — or was it Aedes?— and suddenly she laughed in the night.
She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.
“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that tomorrow.
“Do that t’morrow — do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.
Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought