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

were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when the American guest came down and from the door stared at Martin as strangely as he stared in turn.

He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps thirty to his thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness, her black brows and dusky hair, she was his twin; she was his self enchanted.

He could hear his voice croaking, “But you’re my sister!” and she opened her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they bowed at introduction. When she sat down, Martin had never been so conscious of a woman’s presence.

He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon, widow of Roger Lanyon of New York. She had come to St. Hubert to see her plantations and had been trapped by the quarantine. He had tentatively heard of her dead husband as a young man of wealth and family; he seemed to remember having seen in Vanity Fair a picture of the Lanyons at Palm Beach.

She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a rising gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford. In the midst of her debonair insults to the hugest of the huge sons, Martin turned on her:

“You are my sister!”

“Obviously. Well, since you’re a scientist⁠—Are you a good scientist?”

“Pretty good.”

“I’ve met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Holabird. Met ’em in Hessian Hook. You know it, don’t you?”

“No, I⁠—Oh, I’ve heard of it.”

“You know. It’s that renovated old part of Brooklyn where writers and economists and all those people, some of them almost as good as the very best, consort with people who are almost as smart as the very smartest. You know. Where they dress for dinner but all of them have heard about James Joyce. Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don’t you think?”

“Why⁠—”

“Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining what you plan to do experimentally. Could I help you⁠—nursing or cooking or something⁠—or would I merely be in the way?”

“I don’t know yet. If I can use you, I’ll be unscrupulous enough!”

“Oh, don’t be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes! They have no sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil adores him, and I suppose he’s simply infested with virtues, but I find him so dry and thin and unappetizing. Don’t you think he might be a little gayer?”

Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurled:

“Look here! You said you found Holabird ‘charming.’ It makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and not appreciate Stokes. Stokes is hard⁠—thank God!⁠—and probably he’s rude. Why not? He’s fighting a world that bellows for fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind and not come out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could hear him being rude to me!”

Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. But Joyce Lanyon’s lovely eyes were kind, and when she spoke she had lost something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out:

“Yes. I suppose it’s the difference between me, playing at being a planter, and Cecil.”

After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till she hinted:

“My dear man, you’re so apologetic about never being apologetic! If you really must be my twin brother, do me the honor of telling me to go to the devil whenever you want to. I don’t mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so much of an obsession with you⁠—”

“Obsession! Rats! He⁠—”

They parted an hour after.

Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping, puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.

He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How lovely her shoulders, above black satin at dinner! She had a genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a rosy glow behind it, as from an inner light.)

Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now, off there in Penrith Lodge, missing him, lying awake for him?)

How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the formal Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That afternoon he had recognized the rigid though kindly code of the Twyfords, but could he not set it aside by being frankly an Outlander?)

Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.

XXXV I

The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the population into two equal parts. One of them, driven in by Twyford, was injected with plague phage, the other half was left without.

He began to succeed. He saw far-off India, with its annual four hundred thousand deaths from plague, saved by his efforts. He heard Max Gottlieb saying, “Martin, you haf done your experiment. I am very glat!”

The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more heavily than those who had been treated. There did appear a case or two among those who had the phage, but among the others there were ten, then twenty, then thirty daily victims. These unfortunate cases he treated, giving the phage to alternate patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the parish, a whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting background