Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb’s own imagination aroused enough to visualize the far-off misery of the blacks in the canefields, he summoned Martin and remarked:
“It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you, Martin, to use the phage with only half your patients and keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions but without the phage, then you could make an absolute determination of its value, as complete as what we have of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, and then I would send you down to St. Hubert. What do you t’ink?”
Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast between patients treated and untreated, and so, perhaps, end all plague forever; he would harden his heart and keep clear his eyes.
“We will get Sondelius to go along,” said Gottlieb. “He will do the big boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the newspapers which, I am now told, a Director must obtain.”
Sondelius did not merely consent—he insisted.
Martin had never seen a foreign country—he could not think of Canada, where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as foreign to him. He could not comprehend that he was really going to a place of palm trees and brown faces and languid Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius was out ordering linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealed in tiny ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but conferences and powers were considering him.
There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise Martin and Sondelius as to their methods. For it the President of the University of Wilmington gave up a promising interview with a millionaire alumnus, Ross McGurk gave up a game of golf, and one of the three university scientists arrived by aeroplane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather young man in a wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of Erlenmeyer flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin was confronted by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found that he was no longer concealed in the invisibility of insignificance but regarded as a leader who was expected not only to produce miracles but to explain beforehand how important and mature and miraculous he was.
He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees as they sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza Hall— Gottlieb a little removed, also trying to look grave and supreme. But Sondelius rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous, and suddenly Martin was not shy, nor was he respectful to his one-time master in public health.
Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hubert, to enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin’s serum and Haffkine’s prophylactic, and to give Martin’s phage to everybody in St. Hubert, all at once, all with everybody.
Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gottlieb speaking.