Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/406

 fence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say, "Mayn't I come to see you?"

But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer him nor comfort him.

Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford to his own first precise figures.

As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened islanders, he had become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue of the Blackwater Guardian after the quarantine was raised, "the savior of all our lives." He was the universal hero. If Sondelius had helped to cleanse them, had Sondelius not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention of the Lord, as the earnest old negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord surely sent him?

No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease without phage.

When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was "feeling seedy," that he had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:

"Established the value—rats! I about half made the tests," sighed Martin, and: "Department! I've given too many