Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/354

 had been smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with delirium and buboes. Inchcape Jones said that it could not be plague, because there never was plague in St. Hubert. His confrère, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it couldn't be plague, but it damn' well was plague.

Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical officer of St. Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic reaches of St. Swithin, where he belonged, but snooped all over the island, annoying Inchcape Jones. He was an M.B. of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush; he had had blackwater fever and cholera and most other reasonable afflictions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was not a nice man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a nasty, unsporting serve—the sort of serve you'd expect from an American.

And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied himself as an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have him creeping about the docks, catching rats, making cultures from the bellies of their fleas, and barging in—sandy-headed and red-faced, thin and unpleasant—to insist that they bore plague.

"My dear fellow, there's always some Bacillus pestis among rats," said Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.

When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that it be openly admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.

"Even if it was plague, which is not certain," said Inchcape Jones, "there's no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody. It was a sporadic case. There won't be any more."

There was more, immediately. In a week three other waterfront workers and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with something which, even Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was uncomfortably like the description of plague in "Manson's Tropical Diseases": "a prodromal stage characterized by depression, anorexia, aching of the limbs," then the fever, the vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes in the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased being chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost as grim as Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied, and St. Hubert did not know did not know.