for the next three or four days after my visit to the peninsula of ducos there was nothing definite to be learnt about means of transit. in fact there was nothing certain except the plague—always that spectre which seemed to stand at the end of every pathway. it was really getting quite monotonous, and i was beginning to wonder whether i should ever get out of noumea at all.
then i began making inquiries as to an over-land journey through the interior. no, that was impossible, save at great risk and expense. the spectre had jumped the mountains. huge armies of rats had appeared in the bush, just as though some pied piper of hamelin had enticed them away from the towns into the mountains, and they were spreading the plague in all directions among the kanakas.
it is a curious fact that rats, who of all animals[203] are the most susceptible to the plague, will migrate from a plague-stricken town just as they will try to escape from a sinking ship.
convicts and kanakas were dying in unknown numbers. camps were being closed, and the rains were coming on. there was nothing to be seen or done worth seeing or doing, so i had to content myself with wandering about noumea and the neighbourhood, taking photographs, making acquaintances with convicts and liberés and getting stories out of them, wondering the while, as every one else was doing, what the spectre was going to do next.
as far as i was concerned, he did me the unkindest turn that he could have done, save one. he infected the only two decent boats on the coast service, and so left me the choice between voyaging to the isle of pines in la france or stopping where i was.
i had to get to the island somehow, so i chose la france, and at five o’clock one morning, after being duly inspected and squirted, i once more boarded the detestable little hooker.
i thought my first passage in her was bad enough, but it was nothing to this. she was swarming[204] with passengers, bond and free, black, white, and yellow, from end to end. she was loaded literally down to the deck, and she smelt, if possible, even stronger than she did before. the worst of this was that before we got to the isle of pines we had to get outside the reef and into the open water.
i have seen too much of seafaring to be easily frightened on salt water, but i candidly admit that i was frightened then. in fact, when we got outside and she began to feel the swell, i took out my swimming-jacket and put it on, though, of course this was a pretty forlorn hope, as the water was swarming with sharks and the shortest swim would have been a couple of miles. still, one always likes to take the last chance.
happily, she was english-built, and high in the bows, so she took nothing but spray over. two or three green seas would have swamped her to a certainty, but they didn’t come, and so in time we got there.
on board i renewed the acquaintance of the commandant of ile nou, who was taking his wife and family to the isle of pines, which is to caledonia as the riviera is to europe. at midday we stopped at prony, the headquarters of the forest[205] camps which i was to visit later on my return; and we lunched in the saloon with six inches of water on the floor. that was the first time i ever saw a steamer baled out with buckets. still, they managed to get the water under somehow. there didn’t appear to be a pump on board.
when we passed the reef, and started on the sixty-mile run through the open sea, some began to say their prayers and some said other things, but in the end we worried through, and just as the evening star was growing golden in the west we anchored in the lovely little bay of kuto.
never before had i heard the anchor chain rumble through the hawse-hole with greater thankfulness than i did then, and, judging by the limp and bedraggled look of every one, bond and free, who went ashore, i don’t think i was alone in hoping that i had seen the last of la france—which i hadn’t.
my friend the commandant introduced me to his confrère of the isle of pines. he was not particularly sympathetic. i believe i was the only englishman who had ever come to the island with authority to inspect his domains, and he didn’t take very kindly to the idea. still, ruler and all[206] as he was in his own land, the long arm of the minister of colonies reached even to the isle of pines, and, although he did not even offer me the usual courtesy of a glass of wine, he handed the credentials back to me, and said:
“très bien, monsieur! if you will come and see me at nine o’clock to-morrow morning we will make arrangements. you will, i think, find accommodation at the canteen.”
with that i took my leave, and went out into the darkness to find the canteen and some one to carry my luggage there. i found a surveillant, who found a relégué, and he shouldered my bag and found the canteen, the only semblance of an hotel on the island.
there, quite unknowingly, i stumbled upon excellent friends. the canteen-keeper was the man whose story i told in the last chapter. i was a stranger from a very strange land. their resources are very limited; for communications with the grand terre were few and far between, and yet the twenty days that i was compelled to stop on the isle of pines, proved after all to be the pleasantest time that i had spent in new caledonia.
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but there was one exception, happily only a transient experience, yet bad enough in its way. if the plague was not on board la france it ought to have been, for never did a fitter nursery of microbes get afloat, and when i got into the wretched little bedroom, which was all they could fix up for me that night, i honestly believed that the little wriggling devil had got into the white corpuscles of my blood.
i had all the symptoms with which the conversation of the doctors at the cercle in noumea had made me only too familiar—headache, stomachache, nausea, dizziness, aching under the armpits and in the groins.
of course, i was about as frightened as an ordinary person could very well be, a great deal more so in fact than i had been a few years before when i first experienced the sensation of being shot at. it may have been the fright or the fact, but the glands were swelling.
then i caught myself repeating fragments of “abide with me,” mixed up with kipling’s “song of the banjo”; and when a lucid interval came i decided that the case was serious.
i had three things with me which no traveller[208] in the outlands of the world should be without—quinine, chlorodyne, and sulpholine lotion. i took a big dose of quinine, and then one of chlorodyne. i should be afraid to say how big they were. then i soaked four handkerchiefs in the lotion, put them where they were wanted, and laid down to speculate as to what would happen if the microbe had really caught me?
i had an appointment with the commandant at nine o’clock the next morning. his house was more than a mile away. what would happen if i couldn’t walk in the morning?
i should have to explain matters, if i were still sane, to the people at the canteen. i had just come from noumea, the very centre of the plague. the inference would be instant. the military doctor in charge of the hospital would be sent for, and he would say la peste. i should be taken to the hospital, where, a day or two after, i saw a man suspected of the plague die of blood-poisoning, and once there—quien sabe?
thinking this and many other incongruously mixed-up things, i went to sleep. probably it was only a matter of a few minutes altogether. nine hours after i woke and thought i was in[209] heaven. the pains and the deadly fear were gone. i pulled my watch out from under my pillow. it was ten minutes to seven. the light was filtering in through the closely shut persiennes. the waves on the silver-sanded beach within a few yards of my bedroom were saying as plainly and seductively as waves ever said:
“come and have a dip, and wash all that plague nonsense out of your head.”
so i got up, opened the window, put on my deck-shoes, and walked down to the beach.
i could walk! out of hell i had come back to earth. a few hours before i had really believed that the next dawn would be shadowed by the presence of the black death. now i looked up at the sapphire sky, and threw my hands above my head to make sure that the pains in the armpits were gone. then i stepped out to the full length of my stride along the smooth, hard coral sand, to see if the groins were right.
having reached a decent distance from the canteen i rolled into the cool, bright, blue water, and for half an hour i splashed around—not daring to go much beyond my depth, because those same blue waters are often cut by the[210] black triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin—thinking how good a thing it was to live instead of dying, especially in such a paradise as this.
when i paid my official visit after breakfast, i found m. le commandant in a more friendly mood. we exchanged cigarettes and compliments, and then we had a stroll round the little settlement of kuto.
kuto is most exquisitely situated on a promontory between two delicious, white-shored, palm-fringed bays, broken with fantastic, tree-crowned rocks. long ago it was the home of the “politicals” and those soldiers of the commune who had not been thought dangerous enough to be put in batches against a wall and shot. in those days kuto, so they told me, might have been taken for a tiny suburb of paris. it had a theatre, and a couple of newspapers, one serious and one humorous. there were social functions and many gaieties in the intervals of road-making and barrack-building.
but nowadays all this is changed. the deportés have gone back to france, and the relégués have come in their place, which is the same thing as saying that over this lovely scrap of earth there has descended the moral night of[211] incurable crime and hopeless despair. kuto is now a silent place of prisons, barracks, and workshops, inhabited by a few soldiers and officials and many blue-clad figures with clean-shaven faces, mostly repulsive to look upon and all stamped with the seal of stolid despair.
in order that you may understand what manner of people these were it is necessary to explain the meaning of the french legal term relégation, since there is nothing at all corresponding to it in the english system.
in france, as in all countries, there are criminals of many kinds and ranks, and of these the french relégués are the lowest and meanest. i have said before that in the criminal society of new caledonia the assassins, forgers, embezzlers, and what we should call swell-mobsmen form the aristocracy. the relégués are the lowest class. they are the gutter-snipes of crime; the hard cases; the human refuse beyond all hope of social salvation; mental and moral derelicts, of no use to themselves or anybody else.
we have thousands of them in this country, but we don’t deal as wisely or as humanely with them as the french do. our judges and[212] magistrates send them to prison again and again, well knowing that they will only come out to commit more crimes and be sent again to prison, becoming in the intervals of liberty the wives and husbands and parents of other criminals.
this is one of the social problems which they deal with better in france. there is no nonsense there about a criminal “having paid his debt to society” when he has served his sentence, and being, therefore, free to go and commit more crimes. when a man or woman has committed a certain number of crimes of the minor sort, or has been convicted of hopeless immorality or alcoholism—in other words, when there is reason to believe that he or she is absolutely unfit to possess the rights of citizenship—such person may be, in the last resort, sentenced as in england, say, to twelve or eighteen months’ hard labour as punishment for that particular crime.
now in an english police-court the habitual criminal might possibly thank the magistrate and go away to “do it on his head,” but in france he may hear the fatal words:
“at the expiration of your sentence you will be placed in relégation.”
the “market” in the convent, isle of pines. the female réliqués are drawn up before one of the prison buildings. in the foreground are the kanakas waiting to sell their fruit and vegetables.
drawn by harold piffard from a photograph.
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of this the meaning is: “you have proved yourself unfit to live in the society of your fellow-citizens. punishment is no warning to you. you will neither reform yourself nor be reformed; therefore society has done with you: you are banished! you will be fed and clothed and attended when you are sick. you will have work found for you, and you will be paid for it. but if you won’t work there will be the prison and the cell for you. now go, and make the best of it.”
the banishment is practically for life. there are circumstances under which a relégué can win his release, but there are two things that he can never do: he can never gain a concession and marry and settle down on his own property; and he can never gain restoration of the full rights of citizenship—both of which, as i have shown, the for?at can do.
as we drove out through the big gate in the wall which had been built across the neck of the peninsula to keep revolting kanakas out, i remarked what a pity it was that such a lovely land should be nothing better than the habitation of scoundrels, to which the commandant replied that the island served the purposes of the administration very[214] well, and if the relégués were not there it would have to be given over to the kanakas, for free colonists would not come.
i thought—but, of course, i didn’t say—what british colonists would have made of such a paradise—fertile, well-watered, and blest with an absolutely perfect climate.
the first thing i noticed in the isle of pines was the excellence and extent of the roads. they are broad, level, and beautifully kept, and, tiny as the island is, there are many more miles of them than there are in all new caledonia. they were mostly made by the deported communards, who also built the solid stone prisons, barracks, hospitals, chapels, and official residences which seemed to me to be ample for about twice the present white population of the island, which is under two thousand, bond and free.
i found very little difference between the treatment of the relégués and the best class of convicts, save that they were rather better fed, and lived in open camps. they slept in hammocks in common dormitories, and were permitted to have any little luxuries that they could buy with their earnings. there were no plank-beds or[215] chains to be seen in the camps. in fact, they might just have been ordinary industrial settlements, save for the blue cotton livery, the bandless straw hats, and the hang-dog, hopeless faces which looked out under the brims.
but before our first drive was half over we passed a big quadrangle of high, white walls, and over the little black door in front was the word “prison” in big black letters.
“that’s for the hard cases, i suppose?” i said to the commandant as we passed.
“yes,” he said; “we will visit it another day, and you shall see. this is worse than ile nou, you know. there they have the aristocrats. here we have the canaille, the sweepings of the streets. any one of these animals here would cut your throat for a few francs if he dare.”
then i told him what the commandant of bourail had said about locking doors.
he laughed, and said:
“parfaitement, but you had better lock your door here, and if you have a revolver put it under your pillow.”
the advice was well-meant but somewhat superfluous. the faces i had seen were quite enough.[216] i soon found that my friend was somewhat of a cynic and a humorist in his way, for when i asked him what was the greatest punishment he could inflict on a recalcitrant relégué, he said:
“make him work. look at that gang of men yonder,” he went on, pointing to the hillside, which a long row of blue-clad figures was breaking up with picks and spades. “every stroke of the pick is a punishment to those men. they are wretches whose only idea of life is to get through it without working. they have been thieves and swindlers, beggars and souteneurs—everything that is useless and vile. there is nothing they have not done to save themselves from working. now, you see, we make them work.”
“and if they won’t?”
“eh bien! they have stomachs—and soup and fish and meat and coffee and a drink of wine now and then, with a cigarette or a pipe, are better than bread and water, and the open air in a country like this is better than the black cell or the quartier disciplinaire, which you will see later on.”
“in other words,” i said, “you have gone[217] back to the good old law: if a man will not work, neither shall he eat. well, i must admit that you deal more sensibly with your hopeless vagabonds than we do with ours.”
“bien possible,” he said, with some justification, “you will see that at least we make some use of them, more than they would in paris or london, i think. for instance, this is our farm.”
as he said this we pulled up opposite to a rustic arch, over which were the words ferme uro.
we went down through a flowery avenue to a pretty verandahed house almost buried in greenery and flowers—the home of the farm superintendent. he came out and greeted his territorial lord, and then we went over the farm.
it was as perfect a specimen of what the french call petit culture as could be imagined. it was, in fact, rather a collection of exquisitely kept vegetable gardens than a farm. every patch was irrigated by water from the low hills which run across the centre of the island. every kind of vegetable, tropical and temperate, was under cultivation, and outside the gardens there were broad fields of maize and grass pasture.
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in one of the fields i saw a long line of women hoeing the ridges for corn, and at one end of the line stood a white-clad surveillant, revolver on hip. for the fiftieth time my english prejudices were shocked when i learnt that these were a detachment of the female relégués; and i wondered what would be thought at home if the lady-guests at aylesbury were turned out to work in the fields under the charge of a male warder. here it was quite a matter of course.
“wait till you have made the acquaintance of the ladies,” laughed the commandant, in reply to a rather injudicious question, “and you will see that they want some watching.”
