“Now, how could I have known I was going to run into a thing like that, out there on the other edge of Java? Do I look like Mrs. Grundy? She hated me, mind you; she was terribly afraid of me; she couldn’t a bit trust me to see the thing her way; but there was no one else. I was an American, and I had had the bad luck to know Dorrien long before. She wasn’t trying any feminine wiles; she was just pleading for civilization, as she understood it, against mad and monstrous ideas that she hadn’t dreamed existed, except inaccessibly. Caste goes deeper than sex—among us, anyhow. I don’t know what she thought about Dorrien, really. Probably he merely seemed to her, for the moment, to have obliterated deliberately all his caste-marks. I’ve always held that, if a man did the work, it wasn’t up to the woman to tell him how to do it; and I remembered how Dorrien had felt about leprosy. Probably he could do good work there. I fancied he knew what he wanted. Some one had to be at Molokai; why, or why not, Dorrien?
“I looked at him. He was sitting perfectly straight and uncomfortable, his mad eyes fixed, as if they were glass, on the palm-boughs out beyond the smoky porch-lamp. Nothing to be done there. And when I turned back to her, I simply—oh, abominably, I grant you—laughed aloud. The notion of expecting a woman like that to live on a leper island! It had been bad enough to see her in Soerabaya. I was sorry, fundamentally and genuinely sorry, for Dorrien; but it ought to have been patent even to him that Mrs. Dorrien couldn’t go to Molokai. Nothing but an exclusive love, the kind we’ve all heard about and never experienced, would have made her do it. She and Dorrien had nothing of that sort to go upon, I was absolutely sure.
“‘But you’re sailing.’ I clung to Dorrien’s explicit words.
“‘By Heaven, I’m not!’ His lips just moved. He looked like a statue conceived in madness, carved with scorn.
“‘I grant some one has to go’—she was apparently trying to be extraordinarily generous—‘but why he? It’s not his place or his life. It’s not what he’s fit for. It’s not asked of him. He has me; he has Virginia. Virginia!’ She had turned to me, her shoulder blotting out Dorrien. It seemed that they had to communicate through me; they had ceased to address each other. ‘Has he a right,’ she went on, ‘to take us to a place like that? Has a husband, a father, no responsibilities? Even if I don’t matter, must Virginia live and die among those monsters?’
“How could I say, I ask you, that Virginia must? I had never seen Virginia. I had nothing to do with these people. Why didn’t they see that? I don’t believe, you know, that they ever saw it. I might have been Rhadamanthus in a poor disguise.
“Mrs. Dorrien stopped, and cried quietly into her handkerchief. Her husband took up the talk.
“‘God knows I’ve wasted life long enough. It’s a chance in a million, man—the one chance in the whole world. Give me ten years there, and I’ll know, I tell you. I’ll find a cure. I’ll track the filthy germ. I’ve never had half a show, pulling old ladies through bronchitis. It’s no work for a man. I’ve been ashamed to look at myself in a glass for two years. I’ve gone a little way; I swear I’m on the right track. It’s the kind of thing I can do. I haven’t a bedside manner; Agatha has that. Those poor wretches don’t need a bedside manner. They need some one to avenge them. She’s ambitious. Well, let her give me my head for ten years, and she can cover herself with my medals. We’ll come back, when I’ve done my work, and she can queen it all over Europe.’
“He was incoherent, overweening, inconsequent, but terrifyingly in earnest. More probably than not, she would have a suicide on her hands, I thought, if she did take him home. It didn’t look as if she would get him past Suez.
“Mrs. Dorrien sat with her hands folded in her lap, breathing hard, but quite silent. They were appalling, that pair. I’d have given a good deal to hear a little repartee just then. But the mortal insult would have been to suggest that either one should speak to the other. The queerest night I ever spent, and I’ve been through some I didn’t believe in, myself, the next day. Well, all I wanted was to have it over; I didn’t care how brutally I hastened it.