III
A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a Negress who, before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door.
Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked old, now he was young and boisterous.
“Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let me at those rats! This Inchcape—to try to master them with strychnin! A noble melon! Leora, when you divorce Martin, you marry me, heh? Give me the salt. Yey, I sleep fine!”
The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room. Now he was diverted by what he considered its foreignness: the lofty walls of wood painted a watery blue, the wide furnitureless spaces, the bougainvillaea at the window, and in the courtyard the merciless heat and rattling metallic leaves of palmettoes.
Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a balconied Chinese shop and the violent-colored skylight of The Blue Bazaar.
He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world, but there was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius became dumb, though he had his moment. He waddled back to his room, dressed himself in surah silk last worn on the East Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a sun-helmet which secretly he had bought for Martin.
In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more to the tropics than to his own harsh Northern meadows.
But his pleasure in looking foreign was interrupted by the entrance of the Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones, lean but apple-cheeked, worried and hasty.
“Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we have to do I’m afraid we can’t give you the attention you doubtless expect,” he said indignantly.
Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who spoke of a nonexistent cousin who was a Harley Street specialist, and who explained that all they wanted was a laboratory for Martin and, for himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How many times, in how many lands, had Gustaf Sondelius flattered proconsuls and persuaded the heathen to let themselves be saved!
Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically human; he looked as though he really thought Leora was pretty; he promised that he might perhaps let Sondelius tamper with his rats. He would return that afternoon and conduct them to the house prepared for them, Penrith Lodge, on the safe secluded hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed gallantly) he thought that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge a topping bungalow, with three rather decent servants. The butler, though a colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.
Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was a pounding and it opened on Martin’s classmate at Winnemac, Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley.
Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had tried to save him during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection. He recalled him confusedly. The man came in, vast and lumbering. His eyes were staring and altogether mad, and his voice was parched:
“Hello, Mart. Yump, it’s old Ira. I’m in charge of all the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if you only knew the wickedness of the natives, and the way they lie and sing indecent songs and commit all manner of vileness! And the Church of England lets them wallow in their sins! Only us to save them. I heard you were coming. I have been laboring, Mart. I’ve nursed the poor plague-stricken devils, and I’ve told them how hellfire is roaring about them. Oh, Mart, if you knew how my heart bleeds to see these ignorant fellows going unrepentant to eternal torture! After all these years I know you can’t still be a scoffer. I come to you with open hands, begging you not merely to comfort the sufferers but to snatch their souls from the burning lakes of sulfur to which, in His everlasting mercy, the Lord of Hosts hath condemned those that blaspheme against His gospel, freely given—”
Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too discontented, while Martin could only sputter, “Now how do you suppose that maniac ever got here? This is going to be awful!”
Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured out for their first sight of the town … A Scientific Commission, yet all the while they were only boisterous Gustaf and doubtful Martin and casual Leora.
The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike pneumonic, there is no danger from direct contact with people developing the disease, so long as vermin were kept away, but they did not believe it. They were afraid of one another, and the more afraid of strangers. The Commission found a street dying with fear. House-shutters were closed, hot slatted patches in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty trolley-car with a frightened motorman who peered down at them and sped up lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drugstores were open, but from their shady depths the shopkeepers looked out timidly, and when the Commission neared a fish-stall, the one customer fled, edging past them.
Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild ungathered hair, ran by them shrieking, “My little boy—”
They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long corrugated-iron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names of the commissioners who had built it—by voting bonds for the building. It should have been buzzing with jovial buyers and sellers, but in all the gaudy booths there were only one Negress with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray rags squatting before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The rest was emptiness, and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding papers.
Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public square, and here was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient death.
The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees, which shut out the fainthearted breeze and cooped in the heat—stale lifeless heat, in whose misery the leering silence was the more dismaying. Through a break in the evil mangoes they beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.
“It’s too hot to walk. Perhaps we’d better go back to the hotel,” said Leora.