I went under the verandah of the Hotel de France, which fronts the square, and ordered a limonade, so that I might ask the news. Yes, it was the ambulance, and its occupant was one of the white girls. In three days she was to be the first white bride of the Black Death. It was rumoured that there were six new cases that morning, but the Sanitary Commission very wisely only reported two “suspected” cases and one death. If they had told the truth for a few days more there would have been panic, and panic is the best—or worst—helpmeet of disease, especially in a place like Noumea.
From the hotel I wandered along the shady sidewalks of the broad streets, and presently found myself in a quarter of the town which looked as if it had been bombarded. The houses were wrecked and roofless. Some of them were smouldering still, and some were cold, skeleton ruins. It was here that the Black Death had found its first victims. They were only Kanakas and Tonkinois, so their families had been cleared out, and their houses and belongings burnt.
Farther on up the hill leading to the military reservation I saw all that was left of what had once been a pretty villa standing in its own grounds, a garden such as one sees only in the tropics. This had been the house of the first white victim, a young fellow of splendid physique, who had fought the Demon through three weeks of torture, dying by inches in multiplying horrors unspeakable.
Later on the Demon was more merciful, because he struck harder and killed quicker. In a few weeks it was to be a matter of hours rather than of days.
I learnt afterwards that, although the Sanitary Commission had burnt the house down, they had allowed the furniture to be sold by public auction. The same authority permitted the traveller by sea to take any sort of luggage he liked on board the steamer, but would not allow even a package of clean linen to be forwarded from one port to another unless it was in the possession of its owner. Nail it up in a box and it could go, but as personal effects—no. Later on the Demon took his revenge for this foolishness. He laid his hands on the Chief of the Commission, and killed him in thirty-six hours.
That night I dined at the club, the Cercle de Noumea, an institution which is devoted to eating and drinking during the day, and to poker and baccarat during the night.
There was only one subject of conversation among the Frenchmen round the long table—la Peste.
During the plague-time in Bombay it cost drinks round to mention the word in white society, but in Noumea every one, doctors and laymen alike, talked unrestrainedly of it. The doctors told of the new “cases,” enlarged on symptoms, and described experiments in detail which made the laymen mostly sick, and nearly all frightened. Which is one point of difference between English and French ways of looking at ugly things.
A day or two after, when the name of the Demon had become familiar to my ears, and had, therefore, lost some of its terrors—I suppose I really was quite as frightened as anybody else—I noticed that a man feeling furtively under his armpits was looked at with suspicion, and a man seen limping in the street was left to walk alone.