“And therefore all the more interesting.”
“Well, if you will go, so-long, and don’t get it. If you do, in a place like that you’ll have about one chance in five of getting back.”
Ten days afterwards I steamed into the lovely harbour of Noumea, the Malta of the Pacific, which England lost by about three hours one morning nearly fifty years ago. But the adventures of H.M.S. Dodderer will be a twist in another yarn.
Even if we had not known that the terrible Black Death had come to Noumea, the least observant of us would have asked:
“What is the matter with this place?”
A couple of dozen steamers and sailing-ships were laid up, and a ship out of work is about as forlorn a spectacle as a deserted workhouse.
The ships that were in work were all flying Yellow Jack—that spectre in bunting which followed me across the world till I bade it, I hope, a last farewell on the quay at Marseilles. Steam-launches, too, were flying it, dodging backwards and forwards between the ships and the shore. They were patrolling to stop all unauthorised communication. One of them ran alongside. Other boats, containing friends of passengers, kept at a very respectful distance.
“Five fresh cases to-day; two deaths, one a white man,” were almost the first words I heard at the gangway. Then the Doctor’s words came home to me in a somewhat chill fashion. At Sydney it was only the news. This was the ugly reality. We began to look at each other, and especially at the people from the shore.
Which of us would be first? You could see the unspoken question in every one’s eyes. People who had been friends on the passage didn’t care to shake hands now. We looked at the lovely landscape in front of us, the white-walled, grey-roofed town, nestling under tall, feathery palms, and the flamboyants blazing with crimson blossom, at the foot of the densely wooded mountains, and it seemed strangely out of the order of things that this demon which has devastated the world for ages should have chosen so fair a spot from which to send that dread message forth to men and doctors: