I
From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept
something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister,
ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas down through walled
market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an
American missionary compound--creeping, silent, sure; and here and there
on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.
In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over
his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.
Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They
came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as
though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway
falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.
Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.
Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off
to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no
reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor
why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more
sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second
officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S.
_Pendown Castle_, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its
present cargo of lumber.
On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the
messroom steward on the _Pendown Castle_ died of what the skipper called
influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied
with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the
forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They
danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and
ruffled.
So the _Pendown Castle_ came to Blackwater, the capital and port of St.
Hubert.
It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports
a hundred thousand people-- English planters and clerks, Hindu
road-makers, negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along
its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the
Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and
bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.
Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and
dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had often relished to
lash came on him shaving, and straightway the lather was fantastically
smeared with blood.
To-day, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and
plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and rubber trees
and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin chapels, colored
washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots of silk-cotton trees,
steamy heat and royal palms and the immortelle that fills the valleys
with crimson; to-day it is all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled
cane-quotations, against the unsparing sun.
Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster houses and
incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus and balconied
stores whose dark depths open without barrier from the stifling streets,
has the harbor to one side and a swamp to the other. But behind it are
the Penrith Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is
Government House, looking to the winking sails.
Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of St. Hubert,
Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.
Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of messroom
stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till the port had gone
seven times round; but he was an execrable governor and a worried
governor. The man whose social rank was next to his own--the Hon. Cecil
Eric George Twyford, a lean, active, high-nosed despot who owned and
knew rod by snake-writhing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St.
Swithin’s Parish-- Twyford said that His Excellency was a “potty and
snoring fool,” and versions of the opinion came not too slowly to
Fairlamb. Then, to destroy him complete, the House of Assembly, which is
the St. Hubert legislature, was riven by the feud of Kellett the Red
Leg and George William Vertigan.
The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who had come to
St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred years before. Most of them
were still fishermen and plantation-foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a
man small-mouthed and angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy
to owner of a shipping company, and while his father still spread his
nets on the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of the House
of Assembly and a hound for economy--particularly any economy which
would annoy his fellow legislator, George William Vertigan.
George William, who was sometimes known as “Old Jeo Wm” and sometimes as
“The King of the Ice House” (that enticing and ruinous bar), had been
born behind a Little Bethel in Lancashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the
hugest stores in St. Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into
Venezuela; he was as full of song and incaution and rum as Kellett the
Red Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.
Between them, Kellett and George William split the House of Assembly.
There could be, to a respectable person, no question as to their merits:
Kellett the just and earnest man of domesticity whose rise was an
inspiration to youth; George William the gambler, the lusher, the
smuggler, the liar, the seller of shoddy cottons, a person whose only
excellence was his cheap good nature.
Kellett’s first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance removing the
melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who was the official rat-catcher
of St. Hubert.
George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward privily to Sir
Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and perhaps spread disease, and
His Excellency must veto the bill. Sir Robert was troubled. He called in
The Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be
called Mister, not Doctor).
Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man, without
bowels. He had come out from Home only two years before, and he wanted
to go back Home, to that particular part of Home represented by
tennis-teas in Surrey. He remarked to Sir Robert that rats and their
ever faithful fleas do carry diseases--plague and infectious jaundice
and rat-bite fever and possibly leprosy--but these diseases did not and
therefore could not exist in St. Hubert, except for leprosy, which was a
natural punishment of outlandish Native Races. In fact, noted Inchcape
Jones, nothing did exist in St. Hubert except malaria, dengue, and a
general beastly dullness, and if Red Legs like Kellett longed to die of
plague and rat-bite fever, why should decent people object?
So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St. Hubert, and of
His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney rat-catcher and his jiggling
young colored assistant were commanded to cease to exist. The
rat-catcher became a chauffeur. He drove Canadian and American tourists,
who stopped over at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and
Trinidad, along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve
with a second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation regarding the
flowers. The rat-catcher’s assistant became a respectable smuggler and
leader of a Wesleyan choir. And as for the rats themselves, they
flourished, they were glad in the land, and each female produced from
ten to two hundred offspring every year.
They were not often seen by day. “The rats aren’t increasing; the cats
kill ’em,” said Kellett the Red Leg. But by darkness they gamboled in
the warehouses and in and out of the schooners along the quay. They
ventured countryward, and lent their fleas to a species of ground
squirrels which were plentiful about the village of Carib.
A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when the
_Pendown Castle_ came in from Montevideo and moored by the Councillor
Pier, it was observed by ten thousand glinty small eyes among the piles.
As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with the
deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew of the
_Pendown Castle_ put rat-shields on the mooring hawsers, but they did
not take up the gang-plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered
ashore to find among its kin in Blackwater more unctuous fare than
hardwood lumber. The _Pendown_ sailed amiably for home, and from
Avonmouth came to Surgeon General Inchcape Jones a cable announcing that
the ship was held, that others of the crew had died ... and died of
plague.
In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-scorching fire.
Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lighterman had been
smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with delirium and buboes.
Inchcape Jones said that it could not be plague, because there never was
plague in St. Hubert. His confrère, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it
couldn’t be plague, but it damn’ well _was_ plague.
Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical officer of St.
Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic reaches of St. Swithin,
where he belonged, but snooped all over the island, annoying Inchcape
Jones. He was an M.B. of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush;
he had had blackwater fever and cholera and most other reasonable
afflictions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood
corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was not a nice
man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a nasty, unsporting
serve--the sort of serve you’d expect from an American.
And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied himself as
an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have him creeping about
the docks, catching rats, making cultures from the bellies of their
fleas, and barging in--sandy-headed and red-faced, thin and
unpleasant--to insist that they bore plague.
“My dear fellow, there’s always some _Bacillus pestis_ among rats,” said
Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.
When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that it be openly
admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.
“Even if it was plague, which is not certain,” said Inchcape Jones,
“there’s no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody. It was a
sporadic case. There won’t be any more.”
There was more, immediately. In a week three other waterfront workers
and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with something which, even
Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was uncomfortably like the description of
plague in “Manson’s Tropical Diseases”: “a prodromal stage characterized
by depression, anorexia, aching of the limbs,” then the fever, the
vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes
in the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased being
chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost as grim as
Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied, and St. Hubert did not
know ... did not know.
II
To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the rather dull
and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and restaurant called the
Ice House.
It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the shop where
the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of Oxford sells carved
tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible likeness of a head shrunken by
headhunters. Except for the balcony, where one lunches and looks down on
squatting breech-clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English
children at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and
dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moorish grills, a
touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy, amazingly long mahogany
bar, slot machines, and marble-topped tables beyond your own.
Here, at the cocktail-hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted white
rulers of St. Hubert who haven’t quite the caste to belong to the
Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the merchants who have no
grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inchcape Joneses, the Italians and
Portuguese who smuggle into Venezuela.
Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding apéritifs which are
made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling swizzle-sticks of
the darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles become peaceful, and have
another swizzle, and grow certain again (as for twenty-four hours, since
the last cocktail-hour, they have not been certain) that next year they
will go Home. Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn
coolness, stop drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home ...
the Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the Ice
House they think of Piccadilly or the heights of Quebec, of Indiana or
Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire.... They never go Home. But always
they have new reassuring cocktail-hours at the Ice House, until they
die, and the other lost men come to their funerals and whisper one to
another that they _are_ going Home.
Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of the Blue Bazaar,
was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick, ruddy man, the sort of
Englishman one sees in the Midlands, the sort that is either very
Non-Conformist or very alcoholic, and George William was not
Non-Conformist. Each day from five to seven he was tilted against the
bar, never drunk, never altogether sober, always full of melody and
kindliness; the one man who did not long for Home, because outside the
Ice House he remembered no home.
When it was whispered that a man had died of something which might be
plague, George William announced to his court that if it were true, it
would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly well right. But every one knew
that the West Indian climate prevented plague.
The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reassured.
It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice House a
rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.
III
No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice
House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the negroes gather
after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this
death--and this--and another. No one liked to shake hands with his
oldest friend; every one fled from every one else, though the rats
loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic,
which is more murderous than its brother, the Plague.
Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones
vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability of too-large public
gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine’s
prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, “Honestly,
there’s only been a few deaths, and I think it’s all passed over. As for
these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely
because they’ve had several cases--why, it’s barbarous! And it’s been
conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants
would take the strongest measures against the administration. It would
ruin the tourist and export business.”
But Stokes of St. Swithin’s secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director
of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and
consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about
it?