Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the Ballande liner St. Louis.
We had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by day, and cribbage by night. In the after saloon, an apartment measuring about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us—three men and the wife of a mining superintendent in Pam. The miner was one of the good old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and the possessor of one of the[280] most luxuriant vocabularies I have ever had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. One night, I remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from her moorings and gone ashore or whether the Kanaka crew had mutinied. It turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague before the quarantine was over. He knew that there had been fourteen deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and he was considerably scared. When he told us that the rat was alive I began to laugh, whereupon he turned the stream of his eloquence upon me. He literally coruscated with profanity, and the more his adjectives multiplied the louder I laughed, and only the influence of my stable companion, a pearl-sheller and diver from Thursday Island, who had been exploring the ocean floor round New Caledonia, prevented a breach of our harmonious relations.
When I got my breath and the miner lost his, I explained that the fact of the rat being alive proved it to be absolutely harmless. It was indeed a guarantee that there was no plague on the ship.[281] If it had been dead and the sanitary authorities had got to know of it, it might have got us another twenty days’ quarantine. Finally, it came out that the rat had bitten the miner’s toe, and, as he believed, inoculated him with the plague. I suggested that whiskey was the best antidote for anything of that sort and so the proceedings terminated amicably.
My friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too picturesque to be printable. We had travelled together all the way from Noumea, and made friends before the St. Antoine had left the wharf. We had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. I never travelled with a better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world I hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during that evil time.
I have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship.
I had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won education and culture of a sort disappeared, and I found myself[282] thinking the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’ boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse, blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. The man who is found out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of such was our conversation on the St. Antoine and the St. Louis; not exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true description of men and things.
On the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at North Head, I said to him:
“Well, I’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into civilisation again.”
“I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and I had[283] had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory.
 
The Quarantine Station, North Head, Sydney.
 
For nearly a month we had been living on food that a Kaffir in the Kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on board the St. Louis we had eaten dirt of many French descriptions. Everything was dirty. Not even the insides of the loaves were clean. The galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of a starving man. The cook was to match. The steward who waited on us was willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself and his crockery. The chief steward on French ships is called ma?tre d’h?tel, and by this title we addressed him. On shore we should have said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the St. Louis he was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was open to judicious bribery.
[284]
We had worried through our last dirty déje?ner on board, and preparations were being made for getting the anchors up. The captain and the mate had each put on a clean collar, and the chief engineer was wringing his hands and dancing about the forecastle because the donkey-engine had gone wrong and only fizzed feebly when it should have been getting the cable in.
“Well, thank God,” I said to ............