THEY WALK ALONG DREAMS
On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the villages just as I had found them, crying out for the healing I had no time to give. All I could do was lecture them, hand out the tins and gather them up for tests in the next place I stopped. Sometimes the containers were returned in fifteen minutes—such is the celerity of the savage gut. Faces would be wreathed in smiles. They had filled the magic boxes, just as I had ordered, had they not? To them that was all that was needed for the cure; fill the magic boxes, hand them over to the white medicine man who would say an incantation—and lo! sickness would vanish from the tribe.
This was a sort of Heathen Science point of view which would have been funny, had it not been so tragic. I got used to it, and left the people with a smile as cheery as their own. After all, the drug would be coming soon, and I had told the missionary or planter how to administer it.
When we had sufficient oil of chenopodium we did not waste an overnight stop in making diagnoses; in this district wherever there were villages the infection was obviously so heavy that we could call it 100 per cent. Therefore we lined them up and dosed every man, woman and child. With great gusto they swallowed down the nasty oil, in a spoonful of sugar, and smacked their lips. They laughed over the bitter purge that followed. More than once they lingered to steal the leavings of Epsom salts solution, on the principle that the more you take the sooner you get well. Only the children held back. I won’t forget the naked four-year-old who knew enough missionary English to yell, “Oh, Jesus, no!” when his elders dragged him forward.
Many of these first trips took us no farther from Port Moresby’s tinny orderliness than it would be from New York’s city hall to Trenton. Yet with every mile we found some curious or savage twist to the human animal’s makeup. There was always the white man, standing one against five hundred natives, in an urge to develop a resisting wilderness. Keep the tribes alive for another day’s work, that was the problem. My early expeditions were all zigzags. There was a plunge into the sawmill country along the Laloki River to inspect a mining company’s Kiwais, big jolly fellows like Virginia Negroes; I stayed there long enough to advise the operators on the use of their lumber for pit latrines. I won’t forget the cleanest native village I ever saw. The Company had surrounded it with a stockade fence and commanded the people to sweep the streets and throw their rubbish away. I had only one fault to find: the dark villagers polluted the trash-heaps they piled on the other side. These people should have been crawling with hookworms. Actually, the infection was extremely light. Another medical paradox....
I sometimes came upon pathological freaks. There was the paralytic at Kabadi plantation, who seemed to have lost muscular control of one side at a time; when he turned he grimaced horribly with the conscious effort. His walk was like pushing forward two sticks of wood. I wondered why they kept such a monster, then they told me. Oh, he was very useful. The Koiaris were so afraid of him they didn’t dare raid the place.
In the black belt of the South Pacific dreams are very real things. When you sleep your soul goes walking into living adventures. If you love a girl in sleep, then she is no longer a maiden when you meet her in the morning. A nightmare murder is no mere fancy; you have killed your enemy dead as dead. When you happen to meet him tomorrow sauntering down the glen, that is nothing. What you are seeing is merely a fancy. Your dream has killed the man you hate. And take care how you treat that frightful paralytic who leers at you in the hemp-fields. He may “walk along your dreams.”
Too many things I saw walked along my dreams. There was that pageant at Boera....
Boera was a dismal beach and supported a London Missionary Society station, presided over by two Samoans. Samoa was a far cry from that lost spit of sand. Alien to the soil, these imported teachers grow to be like many white missionaries, muddling along with Christ’s work. Their impulses are as fine as their results are vague in a dingy routine of bell-ringing, prayer-saying, Sunday school reading and more bell-ringing. This pair, Mosea and Emma, were meekly discouraged, but with the beautiful manners of the Polynesian aristocrat. Mosea was already heavy-legged with elephantiasis. His cousin Samueli dropped in to report with Christian cheerfulness that conditions were “very bad.”... Queer how they travel. Years later this same Samueli came to me on an Ellice Island beach far away from Papua, and made me a present of a fresh-killed chicken. When I asked him how conditions were, he said, “Very bad.”
At Boera I got my first real look at a yaws-stricken community. This hideous thing was apparent on the bodies and faces of at least a third of the people, men and women with noses reduced to yawning holes in the middle of a flat scar. Fingers and toes curled like withering twigs. Swarms of flies carried the filth-born germ. I looked into baby faces and saw how the process of healing had drawn their lips together into a featureless surface with an opening so small that you could hardly get a lead-pencil through.