Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗

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 pesthouse. 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, with the thatch falling in sparks. The flame lighted the whole valley; roused the terrified squawking birds, and turned the surf at Point Carib to bloody foam.

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