The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur. Страница 28

Like many infants born of a mother on the verge of menopause, there was a quaint old-fashioned solemnity about him, like a little old gnome who had already lived a hundred years. He watched his mother's face as though he had understood each word she uttered.

Robyn closed her eyes again, and the twins who had perked up at the prospect of a final amen glanced at each other, and slumped with resignation.

"Dear Lord, Thou know est of the great experiment upon which Thy humble servant will embark before this day ends, and we are certain of Your understanding and protection during the dangerous days ahead."

Juba's understanding of the English language was just sufficient to follow this injunction, and the smile faded from her face. Even the twins looked up again, both of them so troubled and unhappy that when Robyn sounded the long awaited "Amen', neither of them reached for the platters or jugs.

"Victoria, Elizabeth, you may begin," Robyn had to prompt them, and they chewed dismally for a while.

"You never told us it was to be today," Vicky spoke up at last.

"The young girl from Zama's kraal is a perfect subject, she started her chills an hour ago, I expect her fever to peak before sundown." "Please, Mama." Elizabeth jumped up from her seat and knelt beside Robyn with both arms around her waist, her expression stricken.

"Please don't do it." "Now don't be a silly girl, Elizabeth," Robyn told her firmly. "Return to your seat and eat your food." "Lizzie is right." Vicky had tears in her green eyes. "We don't want you to do this. It's so dangerous, so horrible." Robyn's expression softened a little, and she placed one narrow but strong brown hand on Elizabeth's head. "Sometimes we have to do things that frighten us. It's God's test of our strength and faith." Robyn stroked the lustrous dark hair back from Elizabeth's forehead. "Your grandfather, Fuller Ballantyne-" "Grandfather was touched," Vicky cut in quickly. "He was crazy mad."

Robyn shook her head. "Fuller Ballantyne was a great man of God, there were no limits to his vision and courage. It is only the mean little people who call- such men mad. They doubted him, as they now doubt me, but as he did, I shall prove the truth," she said firmly.

The previous year Robyn had, in her professional capacity as Medical Superintendent of Khami Mission, submitted a paper to the British Medical Association in which she set out the conclusions of twenty years" study of tropical malarial fever.

At the beginning of the paper she had scrupulously acknowledged the work of Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran who was the first to isolate the malarial parasite under microscopic examination, but then Robyn had gone on to postulate that the periodic paroxysms of chill and fever that characterized the disease were coincident with the segmentation of these parasites in the patient's bloodstream.

The august members of the British Medical Association were well aware of Robyn's reputation as a political trouble stirrer a radical who flew in the face of their conservative convictions. They had never forgiven nor forgotten that she had impersonated a man to attend medical school and had desecrated their exclusive masculine preserve by obtaining her medical qualification under false colours. They recalled with.pain the furore and scandal that she had conjured up when the governors of St. Matthew's Hospital, London, where she had received her training, had attempted, quite reasonably, to revoke her doctorate.

Sourly they had looked on as she published a series of highly successful books, culminating in the infamous Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, a vicious attack on the Company in which a great deal of the association's funds were invested.

Naturally the honourable members of such an august body were above such mundane emotions as envy and malice, so none of them had grudged her the princely royalties from her publications, and when some of Robyn's outrageous theories on tropical diseases had finally been proven accurate, and after they had been brought under pressure by Oliver Wicks who was Robyn's champion and editor of the Standard, they had magnanimously retracted their previous refutations. Nevertheless, when Dr. Robyn St. John, previously Codrington, nee Ballantyne, finally succeeded in hoisting and hanging herself on her own audacity and presumption, the members of the British Medical Association would not be numbered amongst the company of her mourners.

Thus, they read the first part of Robyn's latest paper on malarial fever with mild alarm. Her theory on the coincidence of parasite segmentation and patient temperature-change could only add lustre to her reputation. Then, with mounting joy, they came to the second part, and realized that once more she had placed herself and her reputation in jeopardy. Since Hippocrates had first described the disease, in the fifth century Bc, it had been an uncontested fact that malaria, as its name applied, was transmitted by the foul airs of swampy ground and poisonous nights. Robyn St. John postulated that this was fallacy, and that it was transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy victim by the physical transfer of blood. Then, incredibly, her paper went on to suggest that the carrier agents were the flying mosquitoes that were usually associated with the swamps and marshy ground where the disease proliferated. As proof, Robyn cited her discovery, by microscopic examination, of the malarial parasite in the stomach contents of the insects.

Offered such an opportunity, her peers in the British Medical Association had been unable to resist the temptation to embark on an orgy of derision. "Doctor St. John should not allow her penchant for lurid fiction to intrude upon the sacred grounds of medical research," wrote one of her more charitable critics. "There is not the remotest shred of evidence that any disease can be transferred in the blood, and to look to the agency of flying insects to affect this mischief is not far removed from belief in vampires and werewolves." "They scoffed at your grandfather also." Robyn's chin was up now as she addressed her family, and in this mood the strength and determination of her features were daunting. "When he refuted their belief that yellow jack was an infectious or a contagious disease, they challenged him to provide proof." The twins had heard this piece of family history a dozen times before, so they both paled in anticipatory nausea.

"He went into that fever hospital where all those eminent surgeons were gathered, and he collected a crystal glass of the yellow vomit from one of the patients who was dying of the disease, and he toasted his fellow surgeons with the glass and then he quaffed it down in front of them all." Vicky covered her own mouth, and Elizabeth gagged softly and turned icy pale.