A silent Japanese took charge of me and my suitcase, and I was carried in a cart up a gentle rise to this cottage smothered in trees, the door of which is reached by way of a fragrant, vine-clasped arbor. The night was almost grewsomely still, and I tried to pierce the gloom to judge how near was that oppressive wall in the velvet black to the south.
The Japanese turned me over to his wife, a small motherly thing who fluttered me into a bright white room with canopied bed, into which she indicated I was to plump forthwith; that the bath was just across the lanai; breakfast at eight; and could she do anything for me?
After breakfast the official “clean” members of the colony dropped in, Doctors Goodhue and Hollmann, the pioneer resident surgeon and his assistant, with their wives, as well as the German-Hawaiian parents of Mrs. Goodhue, who had tramped down the pali the previous day from their ranch in the highlands “beyond the pale,” to visit their daughter. Jack and I promptly registered the thought that if they could negotiate that trail, why not we?
Never have we spent a day of such strange interest. Before luncheon, Mr. McVeigh drove us to within two or three hundred yards of the foot of the pali, to see the Kalaupapa Rifle Club at practice. Quite as a matter of course we sat on benches side by side with the lepers, and when our turns came, stood in their shooting boxes, and with rifles warm from their hands hit the target at two hundred yards. Oh, I did not quite make the bull’s-eye, but there were certain drawbacks to my best marksmanship—the heavy and unfamiliar gun that I had not the strength to hold perfectly steady, and the audience of curious men whose personal characteristics were far from quieting to malihini wahine nerves. We were duly decorated with the proud red badge of the Club, bearing “Kalaupapa Rifle Club, 1907,” in gilt letters.
But fancy watching these blasted remnants of humanity, lost in the delight of scoring, their knotted hands holding the guns, on the triggers the stumps of what had once been fingers, while their poor ruined eyes strove to run along the sights...
It took all our steel, at first, to avoid shrinking from their hideousness; but, assured as we were of the safety of mingling, our concern was to let them know we were unafraid. And it made such a touching difference. From out their watchful silence and bashful loneliness they emerged into their natural care-free Hawaiian spirits.
For, you must know, all leprosy is not painful. There is what is termed the anæsthetic variety, which twists and deforms but which ceases from twinging as the disease progresses or is arrested, and the nerves go to sleep. Another and loathsome form manifests itself in running sores; but Dr. Goodhue now takes prompt action with such cases, his brave, deft surgery producing marvelous results. Tubercular leprosy makes swift inroads and quick disposal of the sufferer. But it should make the public happier to know that here the majority of the patients come and go about the business of their lives as in other villages the world over, if with less beauty of face and form.
In the afternoon Dr. Hollmann took us in charge and showed us first the Bishop (Catholic) Home for Girls, presided over by Mother Marianne, the plucky, aged Mother Superior of Hawaii Nei. Here she spends most of her life, two sisters living with her. Like a tall spirit she guided us across the playground and through schoolrooms and dormitories. In one of the latter we recognized a young girl who came on the Noeau last night. Standing in a corner talking with two old friends whose faces were almost obliterated, this latest comer neither looked nor acted as if there was anything unusual about them. She has a rare sense of adjustment, that girl—or else is mercifully wanting in imagination.
Women seem more susceptible to the ruin of disease, mental or physical, than their brothers—at least they show it more ruinously. I have noticed in feeble-minded and insanity institutions that the eclipse of personality is more complete among the females. Perhaps it is because we are used to especial comeliness in women; and to see a vacant or disfigured countenance above feminine habiliments instead of the sweet flower of woman’s face, is dreadful beyond the dreadfulness of man’s features under similar misfortune.
“Would you like to hear the girls sing?”