Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/391

 My strength— Huh! I am almost sixty, but the way I can lift weights that no sailor can touch— And I could fight five rounds! Oh, my God, Martin, I am so weak! Not scared! No!"

But for Martin's arms he would have collapsed.

He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora's nursing. "I who have isolated so many—it is my turn," he said.

Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager clean cottage—the family had died there, all of them, but it had been fumigated. They procured a nurse and Martin himself attended the sick man, trying to remember that once he had been a doctor, who understood ice-bags and consolation. One thing was not to be had—mosquito netting—and only of this did Sondelius complain.

Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his skin, how swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice as he babbled:

"Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best one is the tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea and mountains. He made the fruit to grow so well that man need not work—and then He laughed, and stuck in volcanoes and snakes and damp heat and early senility and the plague and malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever played on man was inventing the flea."

His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a feeble croaking, and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.

He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with infinite pain, tears in his eyes at his own weakness:

"I want you to see how an agnostic can die!

"I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls, and Holy Week at Sevilla. And one good last drunk! I am very peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but life was a good game. And—I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my people the phage! Save all of them— God, I did not think they could hurt me so!"

His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.

Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist