I lost all desire to go back. I didn’t care to see a splendid and unique race dying on its feet.
CHAPTER V
SUCH A LITTLE SCHOOL
I don’t think that I am a sentimental man. I shouldn’t be, for my work has not been along sentimental lines, and daily routine should have tried all the sugar out of my system. But when the Mariposa pulled out to sea I seemed to be pulling against it, every inch of the way. The races I had worked among for twenty-one years were not mine. Yet I had a foolish feeling that they were my people. I had been with them so constantly; even during my short leaves in the States they had seldom left my thoughts. A public health physician is no missionary. He does not starve for a Cause. He is well paid for his services, and if he is honest he does his level best to earn his wages. Looking back toward the last dot among the outlying Fijis, I hoped that I had earned my pay.
My older daughter Harriette, who was born in Mexico and whom Eloisa had carried as a baby into every tropical port where we could make another temporary home, was now grown. Sara Celia, born in Fiji, would be nine pretty soon. After all Eloisa had gone through—and she had gone through a great deal, practically and cheerfully—she didn’t look her age, they told me. I was too near-sighted to tell very accurately, but somehow I knew that she didn’t look her age.
My sight had very definitely failed, and that was what caused my retirement in June, 1939. The faulty vision which had bothered me in my student days was now far beyond a point where it could be corrected. I should have retired a year before I did, but one all-important thing held me in Suva—the Central Medical School.
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“Such a tiny little school!” a very great lady had said, wasting a patronizing glance on the small buildings and a knot of students going into class. I had had no time to tell her that this little school had cost one man seventeen years of ambitious planning. Webb Waldron, when he was all too kind to me in his write-up in Harper’s Magazine, had called it “unique in the world’s educational institutions.” He had done me honor overmuch, as Robert Emmet would have put it; but I was vain enough to believe that he had come nearer the truth than the very great lady.
As my days in Suva were coming toward an end my trusted champion the Times and Herald also did me honor overmuch in obituary tones. “Dr. Lambert brought to his work in Fiji, and in other adjacent groups, a personal enthusiasm that seemed to grow the longer he stayed.... He appeared to accept all the health problems of the Pacific as a personal challenge to S. M. Lambert. Many of these problems have either been solved or are in process of solution, and we ... have been given strong reason to hope that the natural problems arising through the contact of white civilization with native races need not necessarily mean the gradual decay of these native races....”
Well, I wasn’t dead yet. Although I had caught some of the diseases I treated, I had recovered. No crocodile had eaten me, no snake or cannibal had done me harm. In all my years down there I had had but one accident: a Ford door closed on one of my fingers, and I lost a nail.