CHAPTER IV
THEY WALK ALONG DREAMS
On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the villages just as I had found them, crying out for the healing I had no time to give. All I could do was lecture them, hand out the tins and gather them up for tests in the next place I stopped. Sometimes the containers were returned in fifteen minutes—such is the celerity of the savage gut. Faces would be wreathed in smiles. They had filled the magic boxes, just as I had ordered, had they not? To them that was all that was needed for the cure; fill the magic boxes, hand them over to the white medicine man who would say an incantation—and lo! sickness would vanish from the tribe.
This was a sort of Heathen Science point of view which would have been funny, had it not been so tragic. I got used to it, and left the people with a smile as cheery as their own. After all, the drug would be coming soon, and I had told the missionary or planter how to administer it.
When we had sufficient oil of chenopodium we did not waste an overnight stop in making diagnoses; in this district wherever there were villages the infection was obviously so heavy that we could call it 100 per cent. Therefore we lined them up and dosed every man, woman and child. With great gusto they swallowed down the nasty oil, in a spoonful of sugar, and smacked their lips. They laughed over the bitter purge that followed. More than once they lingered to steal the leavings of Epsom salts solution, on the principle that the more you take the sooner you get well. Only the children held back. I won’t forget the naked four-year-old who knew enough missionary English to yell, “Oh, Jesus, no!” when his elders dragged him forward.
Many of these first trips took us no farther from Port Moresby’s tinny orderliness than it would be from New York’s city hall to Trenton. Yet with every mile we found some curious or savage twist to the human animal’s makeup. There was always the white man, standing one against five hundred natives, in an urge to develop a resisting wilderness. Keep the tribes alive for another day’s work, that was the problem. My early expeditions were all zigzags. There was a plunge into the sawmill country along the Laloki River to inspect a mining company’s Kiwais, big jolly fellows like Virginia Negroes; I stayed there long enough to advise the operators on the use of their lumber for pit latrines. I won’t forget the cleanest native village I ever saw. The Company had surrounded it with a stockade fence and commanded the people to sweep the streets and throw their rubbish away. I had only one fault to find: the dark villagers polluted the trash-heaps they piled on the other side. These people should have been crawling with hookworms. Actually, the infection was extremely light. Another medical paradox....
I sometimes came upon pathological freaks. There was the paralytic at Kabadi plantation, who seemed to have lost muscular control of one side at a time; when he turned he grimaced horribly with the conscious effort. His walk was like pushing forward two sticks of wood. I wondered why they kept such a monster, then they told me. Oh, he was very useful. The Koiaris were so afraid of him they didn’t dare raid the place.
In the black belt of the South Pacific dreams are very real things. When you sleep your soul goes walking into living adventures. If you love a girl in sleep, then she is no longer a maiden when you meet her in the morning. A nightmare murder is no mere fancy; you have killed your enemy dead as dead. When you happen to meet him tomorrow sauntering down the glen, that is nothing. What you are seeing is merely a fancy. Your dream has killed the man you hate. And take care how you treat that frightful paralytic who leers at you in the hemp-fields. He may “walk along your dreams.”
Too many things I saw walked along my dreams. There was that pageant at Boera....
Boera was a dismal beach and supported a London Missionary Society station, presided over by two Samoans. Samoa was a far cry from that lost spit of sand. Alien to the soil, these imported teachers grow to be like many white missionaries, muddling along with Christ’s work. Their impulses are as fine as their results are vague in a dingy routine of bell-ringing, prayer-saying, Sunday school reading and more bell-ringing. This pair, Mosea and Emma, were meekly discouraged, but with the beautiful manners of the Polynesian aristocrat. Mosea was already heavy-legged with elephantiasis. His cousin Samueli dropped in to report with Christian cheerfulness that conditions were “very bad.”... Queer how they travel. Years later this same Samueli came to me on an Ellice Island beach far away from Papua, and made me a present of a fresh-killed chicken. When I asked him how conditions were, he said, “Very bad.”
At Boera I got my first real look at a yaws-stricken community. This hideous thing was apparent on the bodies and faces of at least a third of the people, men and women with noses reduced to yawning holes in the middle of a flat scar. Fingers and toes curled like withering twigs. Swarms of flies carried the filth-born germ. I looked into baby faces and saw how the process of healing had drawn their lips together into a featureless surface with an opening so small that you could hardly get a lead-pencil through.
Yes, these Papuan specters walk along your dreams. The tropics are dreamlands, released from the balance of Northern things. Life down there moves between poetic loveliness and monstrous disgust. I have since seen many other villages like Boera; and I should have become callous, seeing so much of it. I could get used to the maimed adults, but the children always wrung my heart.
It is quite understandable that the early voyagers should have confused yaws with syphilis. That such confusion still persists is reasonable. For all we know of yaws, it may be syphilis modified by Stone Age conditions. We call it framboesia tropica (tropical raspberry). When you speak of yaws you must always speak of syphilis—the two are so alike, with wide differences.
Captain Cook, who first visited the Pacific in 1773, wisely wrote: “Another disease of more mischievous consequences, which is also very frequent, and appears on every part of the body, in large broad ulcers, discharging a thin, clear pus ... it being certainly known and even acknowledged by themselves that the natives are subject to this disease before they were visited by the English, it cannot be the result of venereal contagion, notwithstanding the similarity of the symptoms....”
Here at least is illness you can’t blame on the whites.
The enlightened traders and missionaries who followed Cook sketchily jotted down “syphilis.” All my work in Papua and my following years of careful research over the whole Pacific failed to find one case of syphilis, although I have run across one or two rather doubtful diagnoses. I have never found the tell-tale chancre scar, which is the sure mark. The manifestations of the two diseases run so parallel that carelessness or ignorance have put a libel on the native races.[1]
Yaws is not a venereal disease, nor is it hereditary. It is usually acquired in early childhood. Native mothers expose their babies to it in hopes of “getting it out of their systems,” much as some Yankee mothers do when measles come around.
Now here’s the confusing resemblance. The yaws germ Treponema pertenue is so closely related to the syphilis germ Treponema pallidum that the two are hard to tell apart. Both diseases progress in three of four stages. The “mother yaw” first appears on any part of the body, and its secondary manifestation is a great number of “daughter yaws” which are widely distributed over the skin and progress into the third stage, which is remarkably syphilitic in appearance. Arterial changes and nerve lesions (as in syphilis) sometimes cause the general paralysis of the insane.
Missionaries have an easy way of accounting for yaws: it’s a curse inherited from cannibal ancestors. Certainly it is ugly enough to have come to the world through that black door.
And here’s another parallel. The treatment for yaws is exactly the same as the treatment for syphilis—arsenical injections. Framboesia was quite beyond the reach of medicine until Professor Ehrlich produced his salvarsan. There is nothing more dramatic in medicine than the almost visible growth of healthy tissue over a yaws sore after an arsenical injection.
The Pacific is the one place in the world where yaws is in no way complicated by syphilis. I am told that in Tahiti the two diseases thrive, but the same person never has both. On the Islands there seems to be a cross-immunity, so that the two germs cannot prosper in the same host. Certainly the native has been abundantly exposed to syphilis; East Indian labor, when it came to Fiji, brought with it 75 per cent infection. The Chinese and the white sailors fetched their share and did their amatory best to spread it, but nothing happened. Something had made the native immune, and that something is quite apparent.
The stamping out of yaws is largely a matter of intensive campaigning. But what will happen when the fight is won? Will syphilis slip in to take the place of the spirochete it could never meet—on equal terms? That is another doctor’s dilemma.
******
The morning after we heard the planters’ ghost stories I sent Kendrick to ride ahead for preliminary inspection of the rubber plantations. On a rough sea or a jungle trail, Chris was at home. I made short surveys along the trail, resting my raw posterior when I could. Then horseback again, clenching my teeth at every bump on the saddle-sores. Imagine a Coney Island roller coaster magnified a hundred times, and you have our slide and scramble, up and down, down and up, to attain an elevation of 3,000 feet. Down, down would go the coaster on a grade so steep that a fly, if he tried it, would fall over on his nose; and I marveled again at the adhesive footing of my horse. On the final upgrade I spared my buttocks and skinned my heels, for even the horse surrendered.
Now the rubber trees were all around, above and below me, their coarse, hard leaves like green glass that blinded the eyes in afternoon sun. Underneath was a grotto of soft light, upheld by pale trunks like pillars of snakeskin. Naked men worked in silent preoccupation, sharp knives making incisions in the bark; neatly they would rip down paper-thin slices, and the tree’s milk-white blood would trickle into cups. Watching, I was thinking: they are natural surgeons. Down the ages they have learned so much, dissecting human flesh with the razor-edges of split bamboo. Train men like these to use the knife to save instead of kill, and what couldn’t they accomplish for their people?...
The man nearest to me turned. His wooly hair, his sloping brow, his long, hooked nose told me that he was a Goaribari. I looked at his companions. All Goaribaris, with that undeniably Hebrew profile which gave them the name “the Lost Tribes of Israel.” But these were different from the scrawny cannibals I had seen on the hemp plantation. They were fatter, better-muscled, and their brown skins were beginning to show silk. They were not newcomers, and the planters had taken care of them. Back home, where they pursued the jolly business of going to war and dining on the enemy, they hadn’t eaten very regularly. On the farms the white man had fed them, and done his best to teach them sanitary ways; an uphill job among primitives who were naïve as cattle in their bodily functions. In subsequent surveys all over the Territory I could tell, almost at a sweep of the eye, the men who had been on plantations. They were the upstanding, healthy specimens.
Rubber plantations have a smell of their own, something like the aroma of fried overshoes. It drifts from the factory where the sap is being smoked and reduced to the wide, dirty-gray ribbons that go forward to market. Here my cannibals worked like hiving bees, swarming in and out of the door on the commonplace business of supplying crude material for the raincoat trade. I looked around and saw Chris Kendrick, smiling and self-assured, pushing his way through the throng.
“You missed something yesterday afternoon,” Kendrick said. “The Koiaris came down and staged a raid on the Goaribaris. A lot of workmen were loafing in a field, then a naked devil was in the midst of them, poking away with a long spear in either hand. There was just one of him, mind you, and there must have been twenty Goaribaris. They may be tough bastards in their home towns, but here they were taking it like frozen lambs—till somebody ran in with a shovel and a hoe handle. Next you knew the Koiari was making for the woods, naked and howling, shaking his long spears.
“But the Goaribaris caught him and—what do you think?—turned him over to the management! What the hell did he care? He’d got his man.” Like so many of the fiercer tribes, Koiaris kill because murder is a proof of manhood, and a warrior who has not bloodied his spear is laughed at, even by the women.
“I got a snapshot of the fellow he left behind,” Kendrick said, and showed me the print he had developed. A broken body lay in the scrub. The plantation manager came up just then and grinned, “We buried him deep. His brother Goaribaris might take a notion to eat him, you know. Of course, they’re pretty well fed, but.... Yo-hum, farming’s so full of little problems like that!”
******
Yes, farming in Papua, even at its best, offered many problems never dreamed of in the philosophy of a Secretary of Agriculture. The old hands were far from hookworm-free, although vastly improved in general health. New recruits were coming in with fresh loads of parasites to be hatched from the filth they scattered in spite of managerial watchfulness. Green laborers regarded the well-built privies as queer traps set by the white man for their undoing ... pretty, but look out!
That night I lectured by the light of hurricane lanterns swung from the beams of a great, empty warehouse. The audience sat cross-legged in a wide crescent, their oily faces gleaming up at us. The front row was solid Goaribari with natives of gentler tribes behind. These, being more nearly civilized, understood Motu, which was so much Greek to the Delta savages. Therefore it had been up to Ahuia to fetch the local constable, a very ugly man in a G-string and a policeman’s cap.
Such occasions were Ahuia’s hour to shine. Out on the trail he went stripped to the waist, but at lectures the gaudy yellow H on his bright blue jumper stretched with every expansion of his chest. And he hadn’t forgotten to put lilies in his hair. He had set the stage with our regulation International Health Board chart, loosely bound pages with simple illustrations of the hookworm’s course to the intestines; there were drawings, greatly enlarged, of the male and female parasite and the egg their mutual love produced. There were big photographs of a sick boy and a well boy—something like the patent-medicine man’s “Before and After Treatment.”
Ahuia quelled the Goaribaris with his pirate’s scowl, and in impressive silence brought out our prize number, a large bottle of adult hookworms, pickled in alcohol. This was a stage property which we carried for purposes of demonstration. Cannibal eyes popped as the collection was passed from hand to hand.
Ahuia was getting his lesson by heart, but I still felt it safer to prompt him. “Tell them first,” I said, “that they must look carefully at what is in the bottle.” He spoke Motu, straight into the mouth of the interpreter: “Tatau bona, memero, umui iboumuiai inai gaigai ba itaia....” The native constable was saying it after him, in the queer lingo of the Goaribaris: “Men and boys, all of you look at these little snakes.”
Education strained through three languages. The row of man-eaters sat very still; their long noses, pointed up, were like the muzzles of wistful hounds. Ahuia was telling them how the lady snake laid very bad eggs that fell out of the black boy and the black “mary”; how the eggs hatched tiny baby snakes that nipped the black boy’s foot and crawled back into his belly. Now see the picture of the sick boy and the well boy—they are both the same boy. The well boy took the medicine the taubada brings, and the snakes came out of his belly. Now he will keep well, because he is a wise boy. He goes to the clean privy the white man built him, so that the snake cannot come out and crawl into him again.
Patiently drumming simple words into woolly heads, we tried to make simple men understand cause, cure and prevention of a disease they might have brought from Africa, ages ago; a disease so wasting that the mills, rivers, the plantations were calling upon half-invalids to furnish brawn for Europe’s driving ambition.
Sometimes in my early lectures as I looked over the stooped dark figures I would have moments of weakening. I would wonder if it was worth while to save these curious beings, so out of touch with anything our Northern civilization knew.
As time went on, I came to realize how very much worth while it was.
******
The lecture was over and I started alone across an open swathe of dim moonlight that pointed toward the plantation house. I was anxious to get to headquarters where I could write up my notebook and tumble into bed. On both sides of me rubber trees made high black walls, like something built of coal. My conscious mind was concerned only with the day’s work and tomorrow’s; somewhere in the back of my dreams I may have sensed the danger of another such Koiari spear as had butchered a man yesterday.
I looked up and saw the outline of three men, emerging out of the shadows. Even to my defective eyes they made a grotesque group, all locked together in a shambling stride. There was nothing for me but trust in the white man’s prestige. I was unarmed. If I had shouted for help it would have been a sign of fear, and these fellows, I knew, worked in a hurry. When they came closer I saw that they carried no weapons.
Two of them, who had been holding to the third, began jabbering in Goaribari, making friendly sounds. Was this a trap? Fortunately Ahuia and the native constable came swinging up with hurricane lanterns—even in moonlight they carried lanterns to scare away ghosts. Ahuia pointed to the man in the middle. “That fellow broke his hand in a fight. There were not enough women to go around.”
All right, let’s have a look at it. We led the foiled lover to my quarters where I examined the wrist and found a bad Colles’s fracture. In dim lantern-light I did a careful job of bonesetting, even though the fellow had just scared the living lights out of me. If he had shown up in the dispensary at Rochester with the pick of the faculty looking on, he couldn’t have had more meticulous surgical attention. I even took time to give him Doctor Moore’s famous dressing, which is fussy, but perfect.
“All right, boy,” I said, “run along.” He stood there patiently, holding out his unwounded hand. What the devil was he waiting for? “Does he want to thank me?” I asked Ahuia.
“No, master.” Ahuia looked fiercely sad. “He is waiting for you to pay him. That fashion belong this fellow.”
“What fashion?” My short temper was getting shorter. “What should I pay him for?”
“For mending his sick hand, Taubada.”
I growled and Ahuia shoved him out into the night. When I was around Ahuia feared neither ghosts nor Goaribaris. The incident seemed to be closed, but I was aware that the cubicle next to Kendrick’s, where I slept, was quite doorless and exposed to pale moonlight.
Next morning I was aroused by softly arguing Motu voices. Ahuia and Quai, who was with Kendrick, had missed something from our bags. Quite likely. For there was a gentleman’s agreement among Motuan servants: Never steal from your master—oh, that was very tabu. But you could take a little something from your master’s host, or from some stranger taubada, sleeping near you, if he happened to leave his bags open. It was honorable to snitch a handkerchief or a pair of new shorts and drop the small loot into your bag. When two white men were bunking adjacently, their boys working with the bags would watch each other as cat watches mouse. It was all right for the good servant to get away with a few of the stranger’s cigarettes, for personal smoking.
There were other guests on the plantation, and I was wondering whose boy had gotten by Ahuia’s watchfulness when a sleepy glance through the sunlit window awoke me to a real annoyance. There sat the Goaribari with the bandaged hand, serenely chewing betel-nut. “For the love of God, Ahuia, what does he want now?”
Ahuia’s funny English informed me, “Taubada, he still wishes to be paid. He has slept all night on the porch.”
I jumped out of bed, dragging the mosquito netting with me. Like a fishwife in a bridal veil I exhausted all the arts of profanity. With an amiable smile on his betel-red mouth the cannibal listened—and held out his good hand. Then I checked myself in mid-oath and laughed as I have never laughed before. This was socialized medicine with a reverse English.
“Ahuia,” I shouted, “give this cheeky bastard two sticks of trade tobacco.”
Quite unemotionally the savage accepted his fee and departed.
I was still laughing when the planter came in, and he grinned. “It’s the fashion—that’s all a bush fellow will say. They’re pretty much confused about money values. To them a white man’s a sort of cross between Simon Legree and Santa Claus; when he comes around it’s either to send ’em to jail or pay ’em off.”
I grumbled: “Next thing they’ll expect me to pass around free tobacco before every hookworm lecture.”
“Certainly they will,” he said. Then he rang the changes the planters had rung all along the line. “Anything can happen in Papua.”