One morning I got up feeling rather seedy. It may have been the mosquitos, or the heat, or the last French cigar overnight. It is a true saying that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client, and that a man who is his own doctor has a still bigger fool for a patient; but by this time I had heard enough of la Peste in Noumea to convince me that I had to take the latter risk into my own hands. If I had described my symptoms to a doctor I should have been “under observation” in the hospital within an hour. After that the date of my coming out would have been a very uncertain one, so I smoked the mosquitos out of my bedroom, took some chlorodyne, and went to bed. It is bad to take opiates, but it is a great deal worse to lie awake in a plague-smitten town and wonder whether or not you’ve got it.
The next day I saw a coffin carried out of a house. That night the house was pulled down, and the ruins burnt, but the day after that, as though in mockery of every precaution taken, the Demon showed himself in a new and deadlier form.
A great cleaning-up had been going on all this time, just as it was in Sydney later on. The filth-accumulations of years were being cleared out. A white man, very much down on his luck, took a job with the Kanakas and convicts who were cleaning out the basement of a store in which dead rats had been found. The others had their mouths and noses covered with cloths steeped in corrosive sublimate, but he wasn’t afraid of any blanked plague, and so he went in without.
He happened to stir up some dust out of which he disinterred the corpse of a rat. He inhaled some of the dust. The little black wriggly thing that I had seen under the microscope got into his lungs, and assisted in the change of the venous into the arterial blood. In six hours that man was dead. The pulmonary form of the Black Death is perhaps the most swiftly killing of all diseases.
After this the corrugated iron fence round the wharves came down, and the sentries went back to barracks. The enemy had passed them, unseen and unchallenged. Every gust of wind which raised a cloud of dust in the street might carry death, and sometimes did.
You might, for example, walk through one of these clouds on your way to dinner. Your appetite would not be quite as good as usual. After dinner you would feel headachy and sick, and, being disinclined to walk home,—a very bad symptom, by the way,—you would call a cab and be driven there. The next day you would have a drive in the ambulance, after which your fate lay on the knees of the gods. In the particular case here referred to the matter was decided in four days.
It was little wonder that the microbe was thriving apace in this outwardly lovely place, for dirt, disease, and death are a trinity found ever hand in hand. Just en passant, I may say here that my excellent landlady who, I am sorry to say, died of the plague soon after I left her hospitable roof, subsequently confided to me that among her guests there were some who had not had a bath for three weeks. Of course there was no law to make them wash, but I think that in a tropical country in which the Black Death has taken up its abode the penalty for not bathing, at least once a day, should be delivery to the tender mercies of the local fire brigade, with permission to squirt to taste.