Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/374

 impressed. Now I have just the chance to say before we go ashore— You'll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G., has lost his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes—afraid to burn Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of what you may want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to me in my parish—if I'm still alive. Stokes, my name is Damn it, boy, what are you doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won't even cremate the bodies—some religious prejudice among the blacks—obee or something."

"I see," said Martin.

"How many cases plague you got now?" said Sondelius.

"Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats I'm so sleepy Well, welcome, gentlemen—" He flung out his arms in a dry hysteria. "Welcome to the Island of Hesperides!"

Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most of the town was dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no face along the dim waterfront—warehouses, tram station, mean hotels—and they ground against a pier, they went ashore, without attention from customs officials. There were no carriages, and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists landing from the St. Buryan, whatever the hour, were dead now or hidden.

The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering with her suit-case—she had said no word, and they never saw her again. The Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-police who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Martin weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty balconied streets to the San Marino Hotel.

Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips, stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the hotel, when they stood before it, a weary caravan laden with bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a window before she would admit them.

As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stirring of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following an open wagon in which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.

"And I might have saved all of them, with phage," he whispered to himself.