II
They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by afternoon. It was late night, with most of the passengers asleep, when they arrived at Blackwater. As Martin came out on the damp and vacant deck, it seemed unreal, harshly unfriendly, and of the coming battleground he saw nothing but a few shore lights beyond uneasy water.
About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit. The ship’s surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the captain could be heard growling on the bridge; the first officer hastened up to confer with him and disappeared below again; and there was no one to meet them. The steamer waited, rolling in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot miasma.
“And here’s where we’re going to land and stay!” Martin grunted to Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of phage, on the heaving, black-shining deck near the top of the accommodation-ladder.
Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, “Yes, this must be the place, those lights there. Must be fierce. What? Somebody going ashore? Oh, sure, those two doctors. Well, they got nerve. I certainly don’t envy them!”
Martin heard.
From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid round the bow, and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-ladder. In the haze of a lantern held by a steward at the foot of the steps, Martin could see a smart covered launch, manned by darky sailors in naval uniform and glazed black straw hats with ribbons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking man with some sort of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.
The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the ship. While the launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening, he had a long and complaining conference with the commander of the launch, and received a pouch of mail, the only thing to come aboard.
The ship’s surgeon took it from the captain with aversion, grumbling, “Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these darn letters in?”
Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.
They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they had not seen all the trip—one of the mysterious passengers who are never noticed till they come on deck at landing. Apparently she was going ashore. She was pale, her hands twitching.
The captain shouted at them, “All right—all right—all right! You can go now. Hustle, please. I’ve got to get on … Damn nuisance.”
The St. Buryan had not seemed large or luxurious, but it was a castle, steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as Martin crept down the swaying stairs, thinking all at once, “We’re in for it; like going to the scaffold—they lead you along—no chance to resist,” and, “You’re letting your imagination run away with you; quit it now!” and, “Is it too late to make Lee stay behind, on the steamer?” and an agonized, “Oh, Lord, are the stewards handling that phage carefully?” Then he was on the tiny square platform at the bottom of the accommodation-ladder, the ship’s side was high above him, lit by the round ports of cabins, and someone was helping him into the launch.
As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin saw in lantern light how her lips tightened once, then her whole face went blank, like one who waited hopelessly.
Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.
He muttered, while the steamer whistled, “Quick! You can still go back! You must!”
“And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look at the elegant engine it’s got! … Gosh, I’m scared blue!”
As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the filtering of lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced to the swell, the sandy-headed official demanded of Martin:
“You’re the McGurk Commission?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and humorless.
“Are you the port-doctor?” asked Sondelius.
“No, not exactly. I’m Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin’s Parish. We’re all of us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doctor—In fact he died couple of days ago.”
Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate him.
“You’re Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work in Africa, in German East—was out there myself. And you’re Dr. Arrowsmith? I read your plague phage paper. Much impressed. Now I have just the chance to say before we go ashore—You’ll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G., has lost his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes—afraid to burn Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of what you may want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to me in my parish—if I’m still alive. Stokes, my name is … Damn it, boy, what are you doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela? … Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won’t even cremate the bodies—some religious prejudice among the blacks—obee or something.”
“I see,” said Martin.
“How many cases plague you got now?” said Sondelius.
“Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats … I’m so sleepy! … Well, welcome, gentlemen—” He flung out his arms in a dry hysteria. “Welcome to the Island of Hesperides!”
Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most of the town was dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no face along the dim waterfront—warehouses, tram station, mean hotels—and they ground against a pier, they went ashore, without attention from customs officials. There were no carriages, and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists landing from the St. Buryan, whatever the hour, were dead now or hidden.
The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering with her suitcase—she had said no word, and they never saw her again. The Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-police who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Martin weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty balconied streets to the San Marino Hotel.
Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips, stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the hotel, when they stood before it, a weary caravan laden with bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a window before she would admit them.
As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stirring of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following an open wagon in which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.
“And I might have saved all of them, with phage,” he whispered to himself.
His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he babbled to the manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed that Leora might not have seen the Things in that slow creaking wagon.
“I’d have choked her before I let her come, if I’d known,” he was shuddering.
The woman apologized, “I must ask you gentlemen to carry your things up to your rooms. Our boys—They aren’t here any more.”
What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased vanity, Martin had bought in New York, he never knew. He was too busy guarding the cases of phage, and worrying, “Maybe this stuff would save everybody.”
Now Stokes of St. Swithin’s was a reticent man and hard, but when they had the last bag upstairs, he leaned his head against a door, cried, “My God, Arrowsmith, I’m so glad you’ve got here,” and broke from them, running … One of the Negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the English of the Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly, said, “Sar, have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys will now go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes have told I to bring.”
Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said. “Thank you very much, boys. Here’s a quid between you. Now get some sleep.”
They saluted and were not.
Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could for half an hour.
Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flaring, green and crimson morning, yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that about them was a strange land, as yet unseen, and before them the work that in distant New York had seemed dramatic and joyful and that stank now of the charnel house.