Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/380

 calling bacteriophage an organism. But what about Bordet's contention that it's an enzyme?"

Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Marchand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague of race-fear, draw diagrams.

Marchand sighed, "I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any way I can? It is a great privilege to know you."

He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.

"I never thought a negro doctor— I wish people wouldn't keep showing me how much I don't know!" said Martin.

While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones's administration, which proved to be almost anything that could be wrong.

A plague epidemic to-day, in a civilized land, is no longer an affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting "Bring out your dead." The fight against it is conducted like modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers. The ancient horror bears a face of efficiency. There are offices, card indices, bacteriological examinations of patients and of rats. There is, or should be, a lone director with superlegal powers. There are large funds, education of the public by placard and newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of disinfectors, isolation of patients lest vermin carry the germs from them to others.

In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To have the existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he had had to fight the merchants controlling the House of Assembly, who had howled that a quarantine would ruin them, and who now refused to give him complete power and tried to manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was somewhat worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means of a committee.

Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not cajole people. The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not help win over the public to take precautions against rats and ground squirrels. He had tried to fumigate a few warehouses with sulfur dioxid, but the owners complained that the fumes stained fabrics and paint; and the Board of Health bade him