Horror in Paradise (26 page)

The
Snark
has been a hospital for months, and I confess that we are getting used to it. At Meringe Lagoon, where we careened and cleaned the
Snark’s
copper, there were times when only one man of us was able to go into the water, while the three white men on the plantation ashore were all down with fever. At the moment of writing this we are lost at sea somewhere northeast of Ysabel and trying vainly to find Lord Howe Island, which is an atoll that cannot be sighted unless one is on top of it. The chronometer has gone wrong. The sun does not shine anyway, nor can I get a star observation at night, and we have had nothing but squalls and rain for days and days. The cook is gone. Nakata, who has been trying to be both cook and cabin boy, is down on his back with fever. Martin is just up from fever, and going down again. Charmian, whose fever has become periodical, is looking up in her date book to find when the next attack will be. Henry has begun to eat quinine in an expectant mood. And, since my attacks hit me with the suddenness of bludgeon blows, I do not know from moment to moment when I shall be brought down. By a mistake we gave our last flour away to some white men who did not have any flour. We don’t know when we’ll make land. Our Solomon sores are worse than ever, and more numerous. The corrosive sublimate was accidentally left ashore at Penduffryn; the peroxide of hydrogen is exhausted; and I am experimenting with boracic acid, lysol, and antiphlogystine. At any rate, if I fail in becoming a reputable M.D., it won’t be from lack of practice.

P.S. It is now two weeks since the foregoing was written, and Tehei, the only immune on board, has been down ten days with far severer fever than any of us and is still down. His temperature has been repeatedly as high as 104, and his pulse 115.

P.S. At sea, between Tasman atoll and Manning Straits.

Tehei’s attack developed into blackwater fever—the severest form of malarial fever, which, the doctor-book assures me, is due to some outside infection as well. Having pulled him through his fever, I am now at my wit’s end, for he has lost his wits altogether. I am rather recent in practice to take up the cure of insanity. This makes the second lunacy case on this short voyage.

P.S. Some day I shall write a book (for the profession), and entitle it, “Around the World on the Hospital Ship
Snark.”
Even our pets have not escaped. We sailed from Meringe Lagoon with two, an Irish terrier and a white cockatoo. The terrier fell down the cabin companionway and lamed its nigh hind leg, then repeated the maneuver and lamed its off fore leg. At the present moment it has but two legs to walk on. Fortunately, they are on opposite sides and ends, so that she can still dot and carry two. The cockatoo was crushed under the cabin skylight and had to be killed.

This was our first funeral—though for that matter, the several chickens we had, and which would have made welcome broth for the convalescents, flew overboard and were drowned. Only the cockroaches flourish. Neither illness nor accident ever befalls them, and they grow larger and more carnivorous day by day, gnawing our fingernails and toenails while we sleep.

P.S. Charmian is having another bout with fever. Martin, in despair, has taken to horse-doctoring his yaws with blue-stone and to blessing the Solomons. As for me, in addition to navigating, doctoring, and writing short stories, I am far from well. With the exception of the insanity cases, I’m the worst off on board. I shall catch the next steamer to Australia and go on the operating table. Among my minor afflictions, I may mention a new and mysterious one. For the past week my hands have been swelling as with dropsy. It is only by a painful effort that I can close them. A pull on a rope is excruciating. The sensations are like those that accompany severe chilblains. Also, the skin is peeling off both hands at an alarming rate, besides which the new skin underneath is growing hard and thick. The doctor-book fails to mention this disease. Nobody knows what it is.

P.S. Well, anyway, I’ve cured the chronometer. After knocking about the sea for eight squally, rainy days, most of the time hove to, I succeeded in catching a partial observation of the sun at midday. From this I worked up my latitude, then headed by log to the latitude of Lord Howe, and ran both that latitude and the island down together. Here I tested the chronometer by longitude sights and found it something like three minutes out. Since each minute is equivalent to fifteen miles, the total error can be appreciated. By repeated observations at Lord Howe I rated the chronometer, finding it to have a daily losing error of seven-tenths of a second. Now it happens that a year ago, when we sailed from Hawaii, that selfsame chronometer had that selfsame losing error of seven-tenths of a second. Since that error was faithfully added every day, and since that error, as proved by my observations at Lord Howe, has not changed, then what under the sun made that chronometer all of a sudden accelerate and catch up with itself three minutes?

Can such things be? Expert watchmakers say no; but I say that they have never done any expert watchmaking and watch-rating in the Solomons. That it is the climate is my only diagnosis. At any rate, I have successfully doctored the chronometer, even if I have failed with the lunacy cases and with Martin’s yaws.

P.S. Martin has just tried burnt alum, and is blessing the Solomons more fervently than ever.

P.S. Between Manning Straits and Pavuvu Islands. Henry has developed rheumatism in his back, ten skins have peeled off my hands and the eleventh is now peeling, while Tehei is more lunatic than ever and day and night prays God not to kill him. Also, Nakata and I are slashing away at fever again. And finally up to date, Nakata last evening had an attack of ptomaine poisoning, and we spent half the night pulling him through.

Genevieve Taggard

Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948), born at Waitsburg, Washington, was two years old when her parents went to the Hawaiian Islands to teach there in the public schools. Up to the time she entered Punahou High School in Honolulu, her playmates were almost entirely children of the various groups that predominate in the islands—Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese. She taught for a year in a rural school on the island of Oahu and then in 1914 left to study at the University of California. Later she taught at several colleges for women and published half a dozen volumes of verse. The following sketch, drawn from memory of her life in Hawaii, shows an equal mastery of prose.

ONE evening my father came in late to supper just as we had lighted the kerosene lamp and put it in the middle of the cleared dining table. He had been off seeing the superintendent about building the new school.

“Hayashida is sick,” said my mother, “and wants to see you before you go to bed.”

My father took a little hand lamp and went out into the tropic blackness, down the latticed walk to Hayashida’s little whitewashed house, where he lived with Kiko. The screen door banged after him, and he was gone a long time, while I watched the mealy damp baby moths who came under the lamp shade and got cooked on the kerosene surface of the silver lamp. Then the screen door closed lightly, and my father came back holding his lamp up.

“Mama,” he said as he blew out the light and stood some distance from us, “Hayashida has a bubo under his arm as big as an egg.”

He washed himself with kerosene and called up the doctor on the telephor.-, sitting down as he waited for a connection. Mother sent us to bed. We didn’t know what a bubo was.

The next day the doctors—about four of them and several health officials—came to see Hayashida. They told my father to say that Hayashida had measles and dismiss the school indefinitely. This my father did, because he had to, although he hated to stand up before all his schoolchildren and tell a lie. Hayashida besides being our Japanese boy was the janitor of the school. He had swept it out on Monday afternoon just before he was taken sick.

The neighbors knew what they knew—the measles story wasn’t very convincing. The doctors went in and out of the little whitewashed house where Hayashida lived, and Kiko could be seen standing limp against one window—all her lovely oiled hair pressed against the glass. We children loved Hayashida and Kiko. He was a big raw-boned Japanese, gaunt and yellow, and very merry. He had come to us right off a plantation when he couldn’t speak any English.

Only Kiko could speak, because she had been a silkworm girl in Tokyo. Under the lattice of the passion vine over our door they stood beside each other and wished to come and work for us. Hayashida took care of our huge garden and the lawn; he clipped the hedges and swept the walks, and all afternoon long, while he ran the sprinklers and changed them, he kept our swings going too, and carried us around on his shoulders. Once a centipede crawled up inside his blue denim pants and he caught hold of the cloth and called to us to look while he squeezed it to death, so that it wouldn’t bite him. He also sang very sweet songs to himself in a high silly voice all the time he worked.

Now with a great bang, we were overridden with doctors who tramped into our house and brushed past us children as if we didn’t even exist.

“You’ve got to fumigate,” said one. “How solid is this house anyway?” and he poked at the new wallpaper and made a hole. “I thought so—built out of sticks,” he said.

I wanted to yell at him for that; to bang him on the head; to tell him to get out of my house. While some of the strange men were talking to my mother, the same one who had broken the paper went over and yanked down the curtains.

“Take down all the hangings,” he ordered my father.

Then the death wagon came for Hayashida. They carried him out with masks over their faces and gloves on, and little Kiko walked sorrowfully after him in a kimono which she had ceased to wear since she lived with us. Now she reverted to a kimono, and carried a few belongings in a little handkerchief. She sat at his head in the wagon, and a few children were there to see what was happening. My father tried not to cry; so did we all. Hayashida was going for good. No one ever got well of the plague.

“Good-bye, Hayashida,” said my father, “you have been a good boy with us.”

Hayashida sat up in the wagon.

“Will you take care of Kiko if I die, Mr. Taggard?”

“Yes, Hayashida.”

“If I get well, can I have my old place back?”

“Yes, Hayashida.”

So he went away. The doctors hurried him off to the receiving station and he was put in quarantine. Now two health officials fastened on us.

“Take your children and go away for three or four days while we fumigate. Go anywhere. There is no danger. You haven’t been exposed. Go visit friends. Don’t let anybody know. There mustn’t be a scare. This is only the sixth case. We must keep it quiet.”

“I won’t go to a friend’s house,” replied my indignant mother. “Where shall we go? There isn’t a place in the world.”

“You’ve got to get out for about four days,” they said savagely, wishing she wouldn’t quibble with them.

I started to take down some dresses.

“Little girl,” one of them bawled at me. “Don’t touch those things. Get out of the house in the fresh air. You can’t take anything with you.”

So we went, headachy and driven, forlorn in our old clothes, about four o’clock, knowing that all the neighbors down the long road to the streetcar were looking out from behind the doors and whispering that there was Plague in our family.

The streetcars go very fast in the Islands, because there are such long stretches. They are open—a row of seats and a roof. On these flying platforms you go across rice fields and wait at switches for the other car; you climb a hill with a drone, and then branch off into Palama where the Japanese live.

At four o’clock on a school day it seemed strange to be riding through Palama. Dimly, the reason for this ride—the distinction of having Plague in the family, the awful importance of an event that seizes you the way a cat does a rat, the very great satisfaction of having something happen that is huge and terrible, that may end in darker, grimmer events—all this was in our minds as we went through Palama, looking at the Japanese and Chinese, the children, the withered women in their flat-chested black sateen coats and earringed ears. On all the faces that turned up to our car as it danged its bell through the crowded streets and down across the bridge, I extended the now gently painful knowledge that Hayashida would die, that our house would be fumigated and that my head ached and my feet were cold.

On we went through Honolulu, past the hardware store where the Sherwin Williams paint folders were tucked in little boxes—(we always helped ourselves to the little booklets with their shiny inches of blue and tan); past our little church looking brown and dusty on a weekday with the shutters closed and the bougainvillea vine next it blooming cerise in the heat; past the Palace, the Opera House, the statue of Kamehameha, where the idiot Portuguese boy stood all day, worshiping and rubbing his hands; past the rich people’s houses on the way to Waikiki.

Waikiki was our heaven always. It was always reserved for the greatest occasions of joy. A sharp turn—our car was running wildly over the swamp in the stiff breeze from the sea, with Diamond Head lifted up, brown as a niggertoe nut, running parallel with our track. Another curve and wind and a switch, and the smell of salt/and the first turn of a wave, between two hedges as we started up again, running headlong into Diamond Head,—headlong for the place where the water came into the arm of the old brown-purple mountain.

(Oh, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the waves; the high clouds; the bright water, the crazy foam on the surf away out, the blue limpid lovely empty water. Oh, the sea.) So I cried to myself, and got up to stand on the seat