Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/356

 five to seven he was tilted against the bar, never drunk, never altogether sober, always full of melody and kindliness; the one man who did not long for Home, because outside the Ice House he remembered no home.

When it was whispered that a man had died of something which might be plague, George William announced to his court that if it were true, it would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly well right. But every one knew that the West Indian climate prevented plague.

The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reassured.

It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice House a rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.

No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this death—and this—and another. No one liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; every one fled from every one else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic, which is more-murderous than its brother, the Plague.

Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability of too-large public gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine's prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, "Honestly, there's only been a few deaths, and I think it's all passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely because they've had several cases—why, it's barbarous! And it's been conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants would take the strongest measures against the administration. It would ruin the tourist and export business."

But Stokes of St. Swithin's secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about it?