The Chief Medical Officer sat pining at his desk when I made my first call. He was about to retire, and that splendid Englishman, Dr. Aubrey Montague, with twenty years of local experience, was about to take his place.
The soon-retiring C.M.O. rose from his work, offered me his hand and said mournfully, “So you’ve come to Fiji!”
Yes, we’d come to Fiji. The Chief Medical Officer retained the hairline balance of politeness. The Foundation was a nice philanthropic institution, and it was sweet of us to be interested and all that; but there was no enthusiasm for chenopodium. I heartily agreed with him. We compared notes—without profit. You can’t invent a cure-all overnight. There was nothing to take the place of what we had, and nothing to do but go on.
It was a boon to me and to Fiji when Dr. Aubrey Montague took over the desk of the Chief Medical Officer. He was the best of the Anglo-Saxon breed, one of the most helpful influences that ever touched my life. Clear-headed, clear-eyed, he was spiritually incapable of lying even to himself. I never knew him to do an underhand thing or go back on his word—quite a record for an official in the tropics. He was one of the three ablest men I have known in the Pacific and he didn’t take third place. A naturally shy man walls himself in. I put a high value on the intimacy we formed when the wall was broken and I could look in on his well-controlled intellect.
His clean life and ideals were free from intolerance; he judged men leniently. I have often seen them fail him, and be forgiven tomorrow after he had weighed them in his kindly practical mind. His administration opened an era of large expansion, especially along lines of preventive medicine. A routine politician would have thrown money around. Montague was economical, almost parsimonious. It was a wondrous thing in those days to see government funds protected by a gentleman’s deep responsibility to King and Country.
Governors continually came to him with questions outside his department; advice from his clear mind was never less than valuable. So it was a great shock to me when Montague, after thirty years of service to the Empire, was allowed to retire and to die without the honors he richly deserved. He had done his job unobtrusively and lacked the self-seeking qualities that bid for titles. The only monument he left behind him was an unfillable gap.
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Through those first few months we agreed on three ambitious plans. Montague wanted an improved native medical school for his Fijians, a real one instead of a makeshift. His wish was mine, and uppermost in my thoughts; but I wanted this educational project to reach out over all the South Pacific. It was a big idea which might have seemed audacious, but we discussed its possibilities from every angle. He saw clearly the advantage of sending competently educated islanders back to their homes to work among their own people.
We went into the subject of asylum for lepers at Mokogai,[2] a near-by island where the old establishment had been moldering for years. I pointed out that all the poor, small Pacific groups might combine their resources co-operatively and make Mokogai the center, a modernized and enlarged plant where patients could be cared for at minimum cost and with maximum results. Here would be teamwork, the thing most needed over those wide blue waters.
And we agreed on another design for teamwork. High Commission control should be centralized more, particularly in health matters. Quick communications, radio especially, were bringing the islands together. We saw a far vision of a unified medical service; one that would make sense out of the bedlam that existed from New Guinea to the Society Islands. Montague and I were for this plan, and before our preliminary talks were over we had decided that he, Montague, was to secure the backing of the Fiji Government and that I was to bring in the financial and moral support of governments controlling the many Pacific groups around us.