“Have you ever lamped it?” he asked. “It looks like a calaboose.”
“It ain’t so bad,” said Kelly, the I.W.W., who was proselyting as usual among the flotsam and jetsam of the waterfront. “I ’ve been in worse joints in the United States.”
The cow-boy yielding, I escorted him to the institution, carrying his bag, as what with his disease and his antidote he was weak. The hospital was a block away from the lagoon. It was surrounded by a high stone wall, and as it was built by the military, it was ugly and had the ridiculous effrontery of the army and all its lack of common sense. The iron gate was shut, and a sign said, “Sonnez s’il vous plait!” A toothless French portière of thirty years let us in. All the doctors of Tahiti had left the island for a few days on an excursion, and the gay scientist who opened the champagne in his pockets at the Tiare Hotel New Year’s eve was in command. He sat in an arm-chair in a littered office and was smoking a pipe. His beard had a diameter of a foot, and obviated any need of collar or shirt-band, for it grew from his shoulder-blades up, so that his forehead, eyes, nose, and lips were white islands in a black sea, and even his nose was not bare, for he had been debited by Lovaina for his champagne as “Hair on nose.”
He was reading a novel, and asked gruffly what we were there for. I told him, and Baillon was assigned a room at twelve francs a day, and was required to pay for ten days in advance.
The next morning I visited him. He could speak no French, so I questioned Blackbeard in his office, where we had an aperitif. He was voluble.
“He has amoeban dysentery,” said he. “It is contagious and infectious, specifically, and it is fortunate your friend is attended by me. I have had that disease and know what’s what.”
I, too, had had it in the Philippine Islands, and I was amazed that it was infectious. How could he have got it?
“Alors,” replied the physician, “where has he taken meals?”
“Lovaina’s, Fanny’s, and some with the Chinese.”
The Frenchman threw his arms around the door in mock horror. He gagged and spat, exciting the cowboy into a fever.