“I am here, in spite of all your science. Kill me if you can. Meanwhile, pay me my toll of life.”
It was dark before we had passed the doctor and got ashore. The first visible sign of the terrible presence was a long wall of corrugated iron cutting off that portion of the town which lies along the wharves from the rest. There were openings in this, and each was guarded by a sentry with fixed bayonet, but more than twenty days before the Spectre had slipped past the sentries and slain a white man. Even now it was standing by the bedside of two white girls.
The Kanakas and Tonkinois didn’t seem to matter so much. But white people—that was a family matter to all of us. This seems uncharitable, but it is none the less true.
The Plague Area at Noumea. Offices of the Messageries Maritimes, with Sentries in front.
When I found the place that I was to sleep in, I began to see, or, rather, to smell, the reason why the Spectre had crossed the barriers. Noumea has a magnificent water-supply. Fresh water flows constantly from the mountains down through the stone channels on each side of the streets; but its sanitation is about as rudimentary as that of a Kaffir village.
When I went to bed I shut the long windows opening on to the balcony to keep the smell out. I also shut in the heat and some odd millions of mosquitos, any of which, according to popular belief, might have had thousands of microbes concealed about its person. As a matter of fact they hadn’t; but they got their own work in all the same.
I stood it for nearly an hour, and then I concluded that even the smell was preferable to suffocation, so I opened the windows and went out on the balcony to scratch and say things to the accompaniment of the song of many vocal insects. The next morning I went down into the yard to cool my wounds in a corrugated iron bathroom, which, with true French colonial forethought, had been built within two yards of an open cesspool. A shower-bath in tropical countries is usually a luxury as well as a necessity. In Noumea it was only a necessity.
When I set out for my first stroll round Noumea the morning after my arrival the sun was shining out of a sky of unflecked blue. A delicious breeze was flowing down the mountain-sides. The scent of fruit and flowers was everywhere atoning for the stench of that backyard. I took in long breaths of the sweet, soft air, and began to wonder whether that black Spectre really was haunting such a paradise as this.
Then I turned into the Place des Cocotiers, which is to Noumea what the Champs Elysées are to Paris—a broad square shaded by blazing flamboyants and flanked by rows of coco-palms. The next moment I saw a long, four-wheeled, white-curtained vehicle being driven rapidly through it. It was the ambulance, and inside it lay some stricken wretch. Who—yes, who was it? A question of some significance to one who might have had to say “here!” to the dread summons before the next sun rose.