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 to Stokes. + 

Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when Martin snarled, “What do I care for your science?” did he try to hold Martin to his test. + 

Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and kept the notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after working fourteen or fifteen hours since dawn, Stokes would hasten to St. Swithin’s by motorcycle⁠—he hated the joggling and the lack of dignity and he found it somewhat dangerous to take curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour, but this was the quickest way, and till midnight he conferred with Twyford, gave him orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy annotations, and marveled at his grim meekness. + 

Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citizens, in the Surgeon General’s office in Blackwater. Stokes begged him at least to turn the work over to another doctor and take what interest he could in St. Swithin’s, but Martin had a bitter satisfaction in throwing away all his significance, in helping to wreck his own purposes. + 

With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File on file of people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue a block long, ten deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They crept up to the nurse beside Martin and in embarrassment exposed their arms, which she scrubbed with soap and water and dabbed with alcohol before passing them on to him. He brusquely pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed it with the needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking, never seeing their individual faces. As they left him they fluttered with gratitude⁠—“Oh, may God bless you, Doctor!”⁠—but he did not hear. + 

Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly when in the queue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithin’s, who were supposed to remain in their parish under strict control, to test the value of the phage. Sometimes Sir Robert Fairlamb came down to beam and gurgle and offer his aid⁠ ⁠… Lady Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next to her a tattered kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujahs. + 

After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had four doctors making the injections, while he manufactured phage. + 

But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He had an advantage over normal cautious humanity in not caring whether he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talking to Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Marchand, to Inchcape Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted appealing hands. + 

After Leora’s death he had returned to Twyford’s but once, to fetch his baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He hated her. He swore that it was not her presence which had kept him from returning earlier to Leora, but he was aware that while he had been chattering with Joyce, Leora had been dying. + 

“Damn glib society climber! Thank God I’ll never see her again!” + 

He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless room, his hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley kitten, which he esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow. At a knock he muttered, “I can’t talk to Stokes now. Let him do his own experiments. Sick of experiments!” + 

Sulkily, “Oh, come in!” + 

The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure. + 

“What do you want?” he grunted. + 

She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She coaxed the indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat by him on the frowsy cot. Then: + 

“Please! I know what’s happened. Cecil is in town for an hour and I wanted to bring⁠—Won’t it comfort you a little if you know how fond we are of you? Won’t you let me offer you friendship?” + 

“I don’t want anybody’s friendship. I haven’t any friends!” + 

He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt a shiver of new courage. + 

He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky, and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection of all who came begging for it, but he turned both injection and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most rigid observation of his experiment in St. Swithin’s⁠ ⁠… blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the parish going in to Blackwater to receive the phage. + 

He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most evenings now he was sober. + 