Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/371



mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market full of colored women with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St. Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured paw-paws and breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives who came alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the languor of the isles, and panted before they approached Barbados.

Just beyond was St. Hubert.

None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were raging that the company should have taken them into danger. In the tepid wind they felt the plague.

The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they would stop at Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they would anchor far out in the harbor; and while the passengers bound for St. Hubert would be permitted to go ashore, in the port-doctor's launch, no one in St. Hubert would be allowed to leave—nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer except the official mail, which the ship's surgeon would disinfect.

(The ship's surgeon was wondering, the while, how you disinfected mail—let's see—sulfur burning in the presence of moisture, wasn't it?)

The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with wharf-masters, and the tourists were reassured. But Martin murmured to his Commission, "I hadn't thought of that. Once we go ashore, we'll be practically prisoners till the epidemic's over—if it ever does get over—prisoners with the plague around us."

"Why, of course!" said Sondelius. 361