Like was hardly the word; I would have fled weeping from what could only be an ordeal to every one. But we could not refuse good Mother Marianne the opportunity to display the talents of her pupils, and a Sister was dispatched to summon them.
Draggingly enough they came, unsmiling, their bloated or contracted features emerging grotesquely from the clean holokus. Every gesture and averted head bespoke a piteous shame over lost fairness—a sensitive pridefulness that does not appear to trouble the male patients.
Clustered round a piano, one played with hands that were not hands—for where were the fingers? But play she did, and weep I did, in a corner, in sheer uncontrol of heartache at the girlish voices gone shrill and sexless and tinny like the old French piano, and the writhen mouths that tried to frame words carolled in happier days. They gazed dumbly at the white wahine who grieved for them—indeed, it would have been difficult to say who was sorrier for the other. Out of their horrible eye-pits they watched us go, and I wonder if Jack’s sad face and my wet cheek were any solace to them. But they called Aloha bravely as we went down the steps, as did a group of girls under a hau tree—one of whom, a beautiful thing, crossing the inclosure with the high-breasted, processional carriage of Hawaiian, showed no mark of the curse upon her swart skin where the blood surged in response to our greeting.
The Bay View Home was our next objective, in which are kept the most advanced cases of the men. Nothing would do but Jack would see everything to be seen—and where he goes and can take me, there does he wish me to go to learn the face, fair and foul, of the world in which we live. Here we found several of our own race who appeared quite cheerful—let us say philosophical. One in particular, a ghastly white old man whose eyes hung impossibly upon his cheeks, spoke with the gentlest Christian fortitude, trying to smile with a lip that fanned his chest—I do not exaggerate. Only one there was who seemed not in the slightest resigned—he who led us among his brother sufferers in this house of tardy dissolution.
“Do any of them ever become used to their condition?”
His terrible eyes came down to my face with a look of utter hopelessness.
“I have been here twenty-five years, Mrs. London, and I am not used to it yet.”
Glancing back from the gate, we saw him still standing on the lanai, straight and tall, gazing out over the sea; a man once wealthy and honored in his world—a senator, in fact. And now there remains nothing, after his two and a half disintegrating decades of exile, but long years of the same to follow; at the end of which he sees himself, an unsightly object, laid in the ground out of the light of heaven.
There is one hope, always, for those of the lepers who think—the shining hope that blessed science, now aroused, may discover at any illuminated moment the natural enemy of the bacillus lepræ which has been isolated and become thoroughly familiar to the germ specialists. Jack, visiting the Kalihi Detention Home and Experiment Station, in Honolulu, was shown the bacillus lepræ under the microscope. Plans are under way for a federal experiment laboratory and hospital on Molokai for the study of the evil germ. The Settlement itself is a territorial care, managed by the Board of Health.
In still another building we inspected the little dispensary, and here met Annie Kekoa, a half-white telephone operator from Hilo, on Hawaii, daughter of a native minister. One of her small hands is very slightly warped; otherwise she is without blemish, and very charming—educated and refined, with the loveliest brown eyes and heart-shaped face. Being a deft typewriter, she is employed in the dispensary to fill her days, for she is unreconciled to her changed condition. Little she spoke of herself, but was eager for news of Honolulu and our own travels. We told her of a resemblance she bears to a friend at home, and she said in a shaken voice: “When you see your friend again, tell her she has a little sister on Molokai.” At the moment of parting, a sudden impulse caused us both to forget the rules, and we reached for each other’s hands. I know I shall never be sorry.