Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/386

 manner, that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Surgeon General, when a broad red face and a broad red voice projected themselves over the veranda railing, with a rumble of, "Send him up, Jackson, and don't be a fool!"

Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the verandah, at a small round table littered with coffee and liqueurs and starred with candles. She was a slight, nervous insignificance; he was rather puffy, very flushed, undoubtedly courageous, and altogether dismayed; and at a time when no laundress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was luminous.

Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply soft shirt which Leora had been meanin' to wash.

Martin explained what he wanted to do—what he must do, if the world was ever to get over the absurdity of having plague.

Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he understood, but at the end he bellowed:

"Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front, with a dud show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office clerk asked me to risk the whole thing to try out some precious little invention of his own, can you imagine what I'd answer? There isn't much I can do now—these doctor Johnnies have taken everything out of my hands—but as far as possible I shall certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from coming in and using us as a lot of sanguinary—sorry, Evelyn—sanguinary corpses. Good night, sir!"

Thanks to Sondelius's crafty bullying, Martin was able to present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor, the temporarily suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones, several hearty members of the House of Assembly, and Sondelius himself, attending in the unofficial capacity which all over the world he had found useful for masking a cheerful tyranny. Sondelius even brought in the negro doctor, Oliver Marchand, not on the ground that he was the most intelligent person on the island (which happened to be Sondelius's reason) but because he "represented the plantation hands."

Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin's unemotional experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all experiments should be, by devices not entirely clear to him,