For the next three or four days after my visit to the Peninsula of Ducos there was nothing definite to be learnt about means of transit. In fact there was nothing certain except the plague—always that Spectre which seemed to stand at the end of every pathway. It was really getting quite monotonous, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should ever get out of Noumea at all. Then I began making inquiries as to an over-land journey through the interior. No, that was impossible, save at great risk and expense. The Spectre had jumped the mountains. Huge armies of rats had appeared in the bush, just as though some Pied Piper of Hamelin had enticed them away from the towns into the mountains, and they were spreading the plague in all directions among the Kanakas.
It is a curious fact that rats, who of all animals[203] are the most susceptible to the plague, will migrate from a plague-stricken town just as they will try to escape from a sinking ship.
Convicts and Kanakas were dying in unknown numbers. Camps were being closed, and the rains were coming on. There was nothing to be seen or done worth seeing or doing, so I had to content myself with wandering about Noumea and the neighbourhood, taking photographs, making acquaintances with convicts and liberés and getting stories out of them, wondering the while, as every one else was doing, what the Spectre was going to do next.
As far as I was concerned, he did me the unkindest turn that he could have done, save one. He infected the only two decent boats on the Coast Service, and so left me the choice between voyaging to the Isle of Pines in La France or stopping where I was.
I had to get to the island somehow, so I chose La France, and at five o’clock one morning, after being duly inspected and squirted, I once more boarded the detestable little hooker.
I thought my first passage in her was bad enough, but it was nothing to this. She was swarming[204] with passengers, bond and free, black, white, and yellow, from end to end. She was loaded literally down to the deck, and she smelt, if possible, even stronger than she did before. The worst of this was that before we got to the Isle of Pines we had to get outside the reef and into the open water.
I have seen too much of seafaring to be easily frightened on salt water, but I candidly admit that I was frightened then. In fact, when we got outside and she began to feel the swell, I took out my swimming-jacket and put it on, though, of course this was a pretty forlorn hope, as the water was swarming with sharks and the shortest swim would have been a couple of miles. Still, one always likes to take the last chance.
Happily, she was English-built, and high in the bows, so she took nothing but spray over. Two or three green seas would have swamped her to a certainty, but they didn’t come, and so in time we got there.
On board I renewed the acquaintance of the Commandant of Ile Nou, who was taking his wife and family to the Isle of Pines, which is to Caledonia as the Riviera is to Europe. At midday we stopped at Prony, the headquarters of the forest[205] camps which I was to visit later on my return; and we lunched in the saloon with six inches of water on the floor. That was the first time I ever saw a steamer baled out with buckets. Still, they managed to get the water under somehow. There didn’t appear to be a pump on board.
When we passed the reef, and started on the sixty-mile run through the open sea, some began to say their prayers and some said other things, but in the end we worried through, and just as the evening star was growing golden in the west we anchored in the lovely little Bay of Kuto.
Never before had I heard the anchor chain rumble through the hawse-hole with greater thankfulness than I did then, and, judging by the limp and bedraggled look of every one, bond and free, who went ashore, I don’t think I was alone in hoping that I had seen the last of La France—which I hadn’t.
My friend the Commandant introduced me to his confrère of the Isle of Pines. He was not particularly sympathetic. I believe I was the only Englishman who had ever come to the island with authority to inspect his domains, and he didn’t take very kindly to the idea. Still, ruler and all[206] as he was in his own land, the long arm of the Minister of Colonies reached even to the Isle of Pines, and, although he did not even offer me the usual courtesy of a glass of wine, he handed the credentials back to me, and said:
“Très bien, monsieur! If you will come and see me at nine o’clock to-morrow morning we will make arrangements. You will, I think, find accommodation at the canteen.”
With that I took my leave, and went out into the darkness to find the canteen and some one to carry my luggage there. I found a surveillant, who found a relégué, and he shouldered my bag and found the canteen, the only semblance of an hotel on the island.
There, quite unknowingly, I stumbled upon excellent friends. The canteen-keeper was the man whose story I told in the last chapter. I was a stranger from a very strange land. Their resources are very limited; for communications with the grand terre were few and far between, and yet the twenty days that I was compelled to stop on the Isle of Pines, proved after all to be the pleasantest time that I had spent in New Caledonia.
[207]
But there was one exception, happily only a transient experience, yet bad enough in its way. If the plague was not on board La France it ought to have been, for never did a fitter nursery of microbes get afloat, and when I got into the wretched little bedroom, which was all they could fix up for me that night, I honestly believed that the little wriggling devil had got into the white corpuscles of my blood.
I had all the symptoms with which the conversation of the doctors at the Cercle in Noumea had made me only too familiar—headache, stomachache, nausea, dizziness, aching under the armpits and in the groins.
Of course, I was about as frightened as an ordinary person could very well be, a great deal more so in fact than I had been a few years before when I first experienced the sensation of being shot at. It may have been the fright or the fact, but the glands were swelling.
Then I caught myself repeating fragments of “Abide with me,” mixed up with Kipling’s “Song of the Banjo”; and when a lucid interval came I decided that the case was serious.
I had three things with me which no traveller[208] in the outlands of the world should be without—quinine, chlorodyne, and sulpholine lotion. I took a big dose of quinine, and then one of chlorodyne. I should be afraid to say how big they were. Then I soaked four handkerchiefs in the lotion, put them where they were wanted, and laid down to speculate as to what would happen if the microbe had really caught me?
I had an appointment with the Commandant at nine o’clock the next morning. His house was more than a mile away. What would happen if I couldn’t walk in the morning?
I should have to explain matters, if I were still sane, to the people at the canteen. I had just come from Noumea, the very centre of the plague. The inference would be instant. The military doctor in charge of the hospital would be sent for, and he would say la Peste. I should be taken to the hospital, where, a day or two after, I saw a man suspected of the plague die of blood-poisoning, and once there—quien sabe?
Thinking this and many other incongruously mixed-up things, I went to sleep. Probably it was only a matter of a few minutes altogether. Nine hours after I woke and thought I was in[209] heaven. The pains and the deadly fear were gone. I pulled my watch out from under my pillow. It was ten minutes to seven. The light was filtering in through the closely shut persiennes. The waves on the silver-sanded beach within a few yards of my bedroom were saying as plainly and seductively as waves ever said:
“Come and have a dip, and wash all that plague nonsense out of your head.”
So I got up, opened the window, put on my deck-shoes, and walked down to the beach.
I could walk! Out of hell I had come back to earth. A few hours before I had really believed that the next dawn would be shadowed by the presence of the Black Death. Now I looked up at the sapphire sky, and threw my hands above my head to make sure that the pains in the armpits were gone. Then I stepped out to the full length of my stride along the smooth, hard coral sand, to see if the groins were right.
Having reached a decent distance from the canteen I rolled into the cool, bright, blue water, and for half an hour I splashed around—not daring to go much beyond my depth, because those same blue waters are often cut by the[210] black triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin—thinking how good a thing it was to live instead of dying, especially in such a paradise as this.
When I paid my official visit after breakfast, I found M. le Commandant in a more friendly mood. We exchanged cigarettes and compliments, and then we had a stroll round the little settlement of Kuto.
Kuto is most exquisitely situated on a promontory between two delicious, white-shored, palm-fringed bays, broken with fantastic, tree-crowned rocks. Long ago it was the home of the “politicals” and those soldiers of the Commune who had not been thought dangerous enough to be put in batches against a wall and shot. In those days Kuto, so they told me, might have been taken for a tiny s............