Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

the yellow fever mosquito was Anopheles or Stegomyia⁠—or was it Aedes?⁠—and suddenly she laughed in the night.

She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.

“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that tomorrow.”

“Do that t’morrow⁠—do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.

Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.

In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become of him.

Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It seemed filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.

Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at dusting⁠—here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease⁠—a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a regiment.

Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.

All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing for someone to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.

“Got to⁠—got to⁠—can’t remember what it was,” her voice kept appealing to her cloudy brain.

Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in flight, and in the darkness staggered out to find help. As she came to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge, unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees she crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for Martin.

She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for him⁠—listened⁠—tense with listening.

“You will come! I know you’ll come and help me! I know. You’ll come! Martin! Sandy! Sandy!” she sobbed.

Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her hoarse and struggling breath.

V

Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage to everybody.

“I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they tried to lynch me,” he boasted.

He had explained Leora to Joyce.

“I don’t know whether you two will like each other. You’re so darn different. You’re awfully articulate, and you like these ‘pretty people’ that you’re always talking about, but she doesn’t care a hang for ’em. She sits back⁠—oh, she never misses anything, but she never says much. Still, she’s got the best instinct for honesty that I’ve ever known. I hope you two’ll get each other. I was afraid to let her come here⁠—didn’t know what I’d find⁠—but now I’m going to hustle to Penrith and bring her here today.”

He borrowed Twyford’s car and drove to Blackwater, up to Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have a lively time in the evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they would sing⁠—

He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, “Lee! Leora! Come on! Here we are!”

The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty, and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a desperate silence. He was uneasy. He darted in, found no one in the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bedroom.

On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting, was Leora’s body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook her, he stood weeping.

He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her understand that he had loved her and had left her here only for her safety⁠—

There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down raw full glasses. They did not affect him.

By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy garden looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her light stiff body, kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row of her little dresses with the lines of her soft body in them, he was terrified.

Then he went to pieces.

He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford’s, and moved into a room behind the Surgeon General’s office. Beside his cot there was always a bottle.

Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he raged, “Oh, damn experimentation!” and, despite Stokes’s dismay, he gave the phage to everyone who asked.

Only in St. Swithin’s, since there his experiment was so excellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from distributing the phage universally; but the conduct of this experiment he turned over