# The Passenger Whom No One Saw

   There was not one of the passengers in the boat who did not feel the presence of that other passenger, whom no one saw, ... All the time, when they had been laughing, flirting, and card playing, and dreaming, on the liner, this passenger had been with them, unseen. He was with them still, and they knew that his hand was raised to strike. But whom, and when, they did not know.
THE PASSENGER WHOM NO ONE SAW
A VIVID TALE OF TROPIC SEAS
By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
Illustrated by C. D. Bachelor
IN those days when the liner crossed the invisible boundary dividing very-far-east from that which is neither west nor east, but Oceania, every one was happy. Always, in this happy, golden girdle of the earth, seas were warm, and sky and water jewel-colored; islands were always green and fresh, flowers grew on coral beaches day in and day out forever.
On the ship the decks were darkened by cool awnings; people lay in long, cane chairs, reading, smoking, calling the black boys to bring iced drinks, and watching the matchless panorama of the midtropic world slide by. Sometimes they went for days without a sight of land; again, group after group of fairy islets came and stayed and passed beyond the rail; smoking volcanoes reared their dragon-heads; canoes with crab-claw sails and wild brown sailors clad in a scarlet waist-cloth and a knife went flying by upon the barest surface of the sea.
The passengers were very content to take life easy. And they had crossed the line into Oceania, and it was now the Land-of-Lots-of-Time, forever and evermore.... Yes. there would be a jetty and a port some day, even customs' officers—tickets—trains. They knew these things, but they did not believe them.
So the passengers on the liner were very happy, and said so. They told each other that they had never had a voyage like it—not a thing wrong from the sixties to the equator; nobody quarrelling; no bad weather, even where it was to be expected: a perfect ship, and all the marvels of all the world widening out before her as she went on.
They were seven days out from the last port when Fortune turned and smote them. Agnes took ill with pneumonia.
Agnes was aged sixteen, a girl like a lily—if one can imagine a lily possessed of a strong a sense of humor, and a taste for deck sports.
WHEN she became ill no one thought that it was very much just at first. All the young people were fond of sitting out after dark, upon the forecastle head to enjoy the cool river of wind that pounded over the ship's bow; colds had been caught in that way; other things besides colds, without doubt, for these evening winds were best enjoyed, and most sought after, in pairs. Agnes and an American boy, of not much more than her own age, had been especially fond of sitting out there after dinner, the girl in evening dress, displaying her thin but pretty neck and shoulders. It was not considered dangerous in those latitudes; at least, it had not been, till now. When Agnes took ill the forecastle-head was deserted—to the entire satisfaction of the officers, who had long maintained that passengers were better in their own part of the ship—and wraps that had lain untouched in cabin trunks since the Mediterranean came suddenly forth again.
In cabin 21, occupied by the girl alone (she was traveling with her father), the stewardess had hard work to keep her little patient as quiet as the nature of the illness demanded. All day long steps passed up and down, and voices inquired at the door. The cold storage was ransacked for fruit; eau-de-Cologne descended in a deluge. Agnes was so young and childish, and such a universal favorite, that nobody minded her friends, men and women, coming in from time to time. It happened that there were extremely few women on the boat, and that two of them, just at this time, went down with some small tropical ailment, and were confined to their cabins; however, the two others, Mrs. Arthurs and Mrs. Waite, also at least a dozen of the man passengers, kept coming in and out, until the stewardess put down her foot, and declared they were making the young lady worse, and must stay away.
Whether the visitors were the cause or not, the girl did grow worse, with terrible rapidity. The stewardess, who had traveled longer and more widely than any one else upon the ship, said she had never seen a case of pneumonia as bad. Agnes' father was half out of his mind; the little girl suffered terribly, and nothing could be done. Like too many tropical steamers, they had no doctor on board. He was convinced that her life could be saved if only medical aid were obtainable, and he counted the hours and the miles, over and over again, to the nearest port. Port Torres was the name of the place; chief and, one might say, only town of the great island of New Gaboon. There was a government medical officer there of sorts and a hospital of sorts.
It was evening before they made New Gaboon; already the giant peaks of that strange, unknown island were lifting the blood-colored sunset sky, when the captain came down from the bridge and knocked at the door of through cabin 21. The stewardess answered through the lattice.
"Tea, sir, I'll come out and speak to you."
"I'll come in; I want to see her."
"No, sir." The stewardess' voice was firm. "I'll come to you on the after deck directly."
Captains do not usually take orders from stewardesses; but the commander of the ship turned away at once, and went on deck, whistling softly and unpleasantly as he did so. It was very quiet there; all the passengers were at dinner in the grand saloon, amidships.
The stewardess came out in a minute—a tall, lean woman, with dark eyes and graying hair, and a quiet, secretive face. Yet there was something likable in it, too.
"Well?" said the captain. looking straight at her with his sharp, sea-blue eyes.
"She's going fast, sir," said the woman.
"Last till we get in?"
"I think so, sir."
"YOU know. It may be nothing—nothing at all. Can't pronounce without the doctor."
"Yes, sir," her manner was respectful. "But that last port was full of it. They were keeping it quiet, sir. I heard after we'd sailed."
"What about my having a look?"
"We can't afford to have you mads a contact, with the crew you've got." She had momentarily dropped the sir, but neither noticed it. There was something abroad that night, that made little of ship rank.
"I ought to, damn it." said the captain, angrily pulling his beard.
"Sir, those Malays——"
"All right, all right. Let me look at her across the alley-way; and keep your tongue between your teeth."
"Ill keep it; it won't be for long, probably," said the woman.
"Why, you haven't——"
"Oh, no. sir. But if it is, I shall. You know the percentage of contacts."
"My God, you're a brave woman," said the sailor, looking at her calm, worn face.
"I've nothing to leave behind," she said, following to the cabin-door, which she opened wide. The captain stood at the other side of the passage, looking at Agnes' flushed, thin face lying on the pillow.
"If I hadn't such a set of confounded ninnyhammers as officers——" he said, impatiently. "But if the Malays take charge, there'll be the devil to pay, and no pitch hot. And they will, if——"
"Yes, sir, they will if——" said the stewardess. "Better not, sir. You can do no good. She's unconscious. Don't make a contact of the only real man on the ship, sir."
Again the presence that was aboard stood between them, and waved away the bar of rank—ship rank, that is more rigid than anything ashore. The stewardess spoke as woman to man.
The captain looked the stewardess straight in the eyes.
"If you get out of this, and I get out of it, I'll make something of you, and that will be a sailor's wife." he said.
"Yes, sir," said the stewardess. "The passengers are coming out from dinner, sir."
Out upon the flaming blue of Port Torres harbor, the liner lay—far out, a mile from shore. She would lie there for a week, and then she would steam on (as if nothing had happened on board) for her next port of call. She was in the strictest of quarantine; not a canoe was allowed to run within a hundred yards of her tall, gray sides, not any boat from the the town must approach her—except doctor's, which was free to come, but did not make use of the freedom. Dr. Coster, the man with the two beautiful black eyes, and the marvelous white teeth, and the musical, clipped accent—Dr. Coster had said it wasn't necessary. The captain could signal for him if he was wanted. And he was very busy at present on shore. He was; he had to take his own temperature every hour, and look at himself in the glass every time he was left alone. And he had to do a good deal of Bible-reading—Dr. Coster, once Da Coster, had been brought up at a mission school in India, and was religious, especially since the day before yesterday, when he had examined a dying little girl, looked at a bead of saliva in his microscope, and pitched the instrument into the the sea.
HE had hardly nerve to give the necessary directions, but he gave them, saw the boat start from the side of the ship, saw a thin, canvas parcel plunge from the rail (the stewardess, with a perfectly calm countenance, and no help from any one, had lashed little Agnes up in a piece of weighted sail-cloth the moment the breath was out of her body), and then made for the township himself in his launch, sweating with terror. Half-skinned with disinfectants, he kept to his house till next day, alternately reading up tropic diseases and saying his prayers. In a week, his piety relaxed; in ten days, it had faded like hibiscus bloom plucked from the stalk. Ten days was more than enough. And his duty to the township (he was very certain) absolutely demanded that he should expose himself to no more actual risk.
Of the liner there is little more to say. She lay for the prescribed time, making no signals to the shore and telling no tales. What went on on board, when the three hundred and eighty colored fourth-class passengers realized that they were shut up on a plague ship with sixty or seventy whites, death grinning in their faces, and land and safety (so they thought) just a mile of blue water away, is not in this story. But it was well for the whites, and for the ship and for the township of Port Torres, that the captain was not, after all, among the "contacts."
The boat that went away from the ship's side was steered straight for an island that lay two or three miles out to sea: a low, long island, not ten feet above high water at any point; a glaring barren island of sand and stunted palms, with two new, plain, weatherboard one-room houses standing on the highest point. It was the quarantine island, used heretofore by Port Torres for the isolation of dysentery among the natives, and never till now occupied by whites.
It was a strange boatload that gilded over the coral gardens or the inner reef, and through the jade-blue passage into the green lagoon water. The boat was badly rowed: there were no sailors in it, only a few man passengers, Mrs. Arthurs, Mrs. Waite, the stewardess and a steward. All were of those who had come in and out to see, or to wait on, little Agnes. They were "contacts," and, as such, ordered into banishment. For Dr. Coster, who at least knew his bacteriology, had pronounced the disease to be plague—pneumonic plague, the horror that slays with 100 per cent of victims, and something like 80 per cent of those who come into direct contact with the infection. The black death of the middle ages, which is the bubonic plague of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is mild compared with the rarer &and more terrible pneumonic disease.
There was not one of the passengers in the boat who did not know by this time what they took away with them; did not feel the presence of that other passenger, whom no one saw, as they slipped away from the liner's side—they, the contacts, and one other ... All the time, when they had been laughing, flirting, and card playing, and dreaming, on the liner, this passenger had been with them, unseen. He was with them still, and they knew that his hand was raised to strike. But whom, and when, they did not know.
The island was all sand and wind and sun; it seemed to be steeped in light and heat. Light flashed from. the windy palms that shook always against the white-hot sky; light sparked back from the hard, sword-like pandanus leaves, and struck clear through the thin tangles of creeper and liana, as if they had been made of glass. Light beat in one's face from the glaring sand and flashed from a brazen sea. There was not a spot of shade on the whole place, save in the hot, verandaless houses, where the party of contacts hastened to carry their belongings and their food. The houses at least were new and clean, and no one had lived in them; there were bare necessaries of furniture and a few rough cooking utensils in an outhouse.
THEY all sat down to table together that night when the food was ready; the three young men, Arthurs the clergyman and Mrs. Arthurs, his wife; Mrs. Waite, the smart society widow; the broken-down, miserable man who was little Agnes' father, the steward and the stewardess. They were as cheerful as they could manage to be; they talked of the voyage, and the ports they had seen, and the wonderful weather, and what typhoons were like: they did their best to hearten the bereaved father, whom no one could hearten or help, and nobody said a single word about pneumonic plague, and nobody thought, for one solitary second, of anything else. Arthurs, the clergyman, a bright, middle-aged man with the Oxford manner, felt, confusedly, that it was all very like the dinners in the Conciergerie prison during the time of the French revolution, when the aristocrats under sentence of death made it a point of honor to be frivolously gay and to avoid all mention of guillotines. Afterward, walking up and down on the moonlit sands with his wife and Mrs. Waite, he said something of the kind. Mrs. Waite fastened on the idea; she was a woman of poses, and was already amazingly pleased with her own dauntless courage in the face of such an awful danger.
Later, the women went men together into one house and the men into the other, and camped as best they could. No one slept much; the distant singing of the reef and near rustle of dry palms were constantly broken by restless turning and tossing and long sighs inside the hot, small houses. For the Passenger Whom No One Saw was with them, and every one of them all feared lest those unseen footsteps should pause by her or him.
Next morning was better. They reminded themselves that many escaped contagion; each hoped to be one of the many. They looked at the liner's gray mass lying out against the blue, and watched the tiny figures moving on her decks. They were all very energetic, and told each other they never felt better in their lives. Some of the men went for s walk around the island, six miles or so, and returned scarlet with sun, but almost gay. The women did some sewing, and told each other alleged humorous stories, about the funny things they had known cats and dogs do. These made them laugh very much, with loud, shrill laughter. When Mrs. Waite was not laughing, she sat with her mouth open and her chin a little dropped; her eyes had sunk in her head since morning, and stared uncomfortably at you, if you spoke to her. It was noticeable that she had dressed her hair high up, over an improvised pad, and wore a lace handkerchief tied round it under her chin, eighteenth century style. She used he word "aristocrat" occasionally, and dropped the final "t."
About 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Arthurs, who was a comfortable, motherly woman, full to her plump chin of simple common sense, put down the teapot, with which she had just been serving tea in the women's house to the assembled company, and said plainly:
"I'm tired of all this pretending and nonsense. We're here because we're likely to get pneumonic plague, some of us or all of us. Does any one know the period of infection?"
Mrs. Waite "bridled" under her lace martingale, fanned herself with a paper fan she had made during the day, and laughed—a high, whinnying laugh.
"It is all equal to me," she said. "I do not care. We meet death as gentlemen and ladies."
"Poppycock!" said the American lad, quite rudely. "Stewardess, I guess you know something about it."
"I do, sir," said the stewardess. "Not much, but the doctor told me the the period of incubation was three days to a week."
"And how long does the thing take, if you get it?"
"Different periods," said the stewardess. She had seen Mrs. Waite's eyes, and parted lips, like those of the Lost Soul in Michelangelo's "Judgment," that showed behind the down-dropped paper-fan. She was not going to tell all she knew.
THEY all knew next day, for Agnes' father refused food at breakfast; complained of bitter cold during the morning—in a temperature that kept every one gasping for breath—and by lunch time was terribly, unmistakably ill. The Unseen Passenger had struck.
He would not come into the house, but sat moaning and fighting for breath upon the burning sand below. And there, with a face like an angel, the commonplace curate of the Oxford manner joined him, and led him away into the long brushwood shed away behind the palms, which none had spoken of. And in that rude isolation ward Arthurs did his best for the first to fall, knowing well how little there was to be done. It was a worse case than the first. Within twenty-four hours Agnes' father was dead.
Arthurs took the body by the feet, threw it along the sand, away from at the houses, and dropped it into the channel that ran through the reef. The tide went like a mill race out to sea when it turned; the sharks would do the rest. Then he disinfected himself, bathed, dressed and joined the others again. But now the hand of he Unseen Passenger hovered almost visibly above his head; and the face of his wife was pitiful to see. From this time on the two spent hardly a minute apart. They sat away from the rest, talking to one another, in the little oblongs of shadow thrown by the houses early and late in the day—the only shade to be had out of doors. Their voices were low and made little sound; there was little sound of any kind on the island in these days, save for the wearisome, mindless rushing of the southeast trade, the quarreling notes of leathernecks in the palms and the high, far scream of parrots, red, green, violet and yellow, flying 'homeward when the sun went down. The factitious gayety of the passengers had altogether disappeared since Agnes' father died. And still it was only four days since they had left the ship.
Arthurs sickened in three days more, His wife went with him to the brushwood house; and for three days after food was brought by the others and laid on the ground near the doorway, Then Mrs. Arthurs came out, with her comely face thinned down to a mere shadow of its former rosy curves, and her eyes burned out with tears. She had tied a rope to his feet; she flung it to the men, and ran away into the bush alone, while they dragged the body away, and slung it into the mill race of the passage into the reef.
When Mr«. Arthurs sickened, which was five days later, the little band of contacts saw how the thing was going. It was a law, seemingly, that he or she who cared for the smitten one to the end should be the next to so, The stewardess had miraculously escaped when tending little Agnes, but on the ship there were many means of disinfection and safeguard that were unavailable here. The wretched half-caste doctor had been afraid to land on the island all through; he came only once, screaming at them from his launch that his duty to the town would not permit him to run the risk of carrying infection; asked news of the number of cases, slung some carbolic ashore, and "chunked" away again as speedily as his engineer could take him. So, all alone, within sight of a terrified town that would willingly have drowned them all, they worked their way unhelped. The liner was gone; she could not wait after pratique was given, knowing that it might be many weeks before all the contacts were free, or dead. Another boat came in, but did not land a passenger; as soon as a launch came out from shore and spoke with all speed and steamed out within with all speed, and steamed out within the half-hour. The prisoners on the island followed her with aching eyes. Each one of them was convinced that he was not going to take the plague, if only he could get away. Oh, to be out on that happy steamer—out, and away, and safe!
Mrs. Arthurs would not give in at first to the truth; the trouble was slow taking hold of her, and for a day two she kept about, shivering, breathing hard, and trying her plucky best to fight it off. Whether she had any theory of her own about the power of the mind over the body or not one cannot say. She never told what she thought; there was not time. On the second afternoon she dropped fainting to the sand, and the stewardess, with perfectly calm expression of face, stepped forward in her neat blue print and white apron to lift her up and help her away.
"STOP!" cried a hoarse voice that no one recognized. The stewards turned round. It was Mrs. Waite, still wearing the eighteenth century hair-dress, and with the "aristocrat" expression as if frozen on her face.
"I—I am not afraid," she said. "I am not canaille. For myself I have no fear. 1 speak for these others. Why, then, should they have to die? Stewardess—look here, stewardess," suddenly changing her manner. "I say, it's an awful shame that every one who goes has to kill some one else....
"Why do you go with her? She's half insensible. She could very well do alone. Give her a tin of water, and stay away. Why should you die?"
"I don't understand you, Mrs. Waite," said the stewardess, coolly. She was supporting Mrs. Arthurs now—supporting her toward the brushwood house.
"Well, I'll make you!" screamed the other, beyond all control. "You'll be the next, and I shall to have nurse you—I shall have to die!"
"I guess not," said the American lad. "I'll tend to the lady myself. There isn't any Mrs. Grundy on a plague island. Stewardess, you needn't nurse that lady there, anyhow. I'll do it. I guess we can't spare our ladies, no any more of them, that is."
They all spoke of Mrs. Arthurs as dead; the hundred per cent toll of the fatal disease was known to every one. And indeed the unseen passenger's first victim scarce seemed to know what was going on about her.
It must not be held against the stewardess that she hesitated. The scene in the liner alley-way came rushing through her mind, as scenes and faces pass before the eyes of the drowning.... "I've no one to leave behind me." .... "If we get out of this, I'll make a sailor's wife of you..." Had she indeed no one to leave behind—now? The sea-blue eyes of the "only man on the ship" looked at her out of the shadown that lay upon the brushwood house. Other visions rose, passed and faded, and left her senses clear once more—clear to the burning sand, the brassy palms, the hooting wind from the sea, and the bright, watching face of the lad beside her—so young a face! She thought of her graying hair, the "years that the locust had eaten."
"Thank you, sir, it's good of you," she said. "But I'll see her through; It's my duty, you know, and I didn't take it from Miss Agnes."
"Yes," said some of the men, with an air of relief from responsibility, "she didn't take it—she's proof—she'll get through."
The stewardess moved away with Mrs. Arturs to the brushwood house, She did not say good-bye.
Mrs. Waite, losing all self-control, flung herself about and screamed to the stewardess to come back. Nobody took any notice of her, and she went angrily into the women's house, alone.
"I'll be the next. I won't be the next," she sobbed to herself. And then—"Canaille! Canaille! But I will show them!"
There were some afterward who said that the horrors of that time upon the island had really turned Mrs. Waite's weak brain. And there were others who said that she had never been any madder than she always was—mad with vanity and love of self.
In the brushwood house, beside the sick woman, the stewardess sat upon the sand: there was no furniture in there—nothing but a mass of soft dried grass for bedding, and a hurricane lantern to use in the long night. A kerosene tin full of water stood inside the door, and a cocoanut shell for drinking was beside it. Mrs. Arthur's own cocoanut-shell lay at her head. The stewardess was not going to lose any chances that she could keep. Had not she got through with the other case? She disinfected her hands; she kept a wad of grass over her mouth and nose when attending to the patient. There was a chance; she must not forget that. To believe you will escape helps you to it.
But if she did not escape—what then? Who would insist on caring for her—who would lay down a life to make her last few hours easier? Some one would, she was certain. It would be of no use for her to refuse; the spirit of martyrdom was abroad; the white man's law, that demands care for the sick and dying at any and every cost, held good there on the little lonely island of death, far from human help. The hideous chain would be linked on and on, till it closed round the last of all.
Sitting there on the sandy ground, under the dim, brown roof of the brushwood house, with the half-conscious and raving woman moaning beside her, the stewardess thought, and saw no end to it all. The day wore on; red rays of sundown shot through the low door. Mrs. Arthurs complained feebly of pain; the stewardess lit a fire, and improvised a poultice; propped her up on the bed of grass, raised her when she sank and stifled; held drink to her lips, Moskuitoes tormented them—they had been troublesome all the time on the island. The stewardess fanned them off with a frond of palm.
BYE-AND-BYE the patient seemed easier, and the other woman, making a rough paper fan like foolish Mrs. Waite's, to keep away the mosquito horde more effectively, thought she would go over to the lamp and read a bit of paper, before it was utterly crumpled. Reading matter was scarce upon the island, and every bit of print had its value.
The newspaper was comparatively fresh: she had not read the telegrams it contained, and she found them interesting. Anything was welcome, to relieve one's and mind a little, here in this dim, windy shed, with the sea and the night-birds crying outside, and the lantern swinging on its nail at her elbow.
Among the telegrams was one from the south polar rescue expedition. It told the tale of the men who had found too late; of the long history of self-sacrificing and bravery left behind in their diaries: of one who wrote, planned, considered, to the very end of all, with death sitting at his side as he held the pen; of one who went out alone into the snow, giving up last few days of life to help his comrades live.
The stewardess laid down the paper, and sat still, looking out through the black, star-sprinkled opening of the doorway. Palm branches waved low and dark against the dim steel of the sea; somewhere not far away shone out the small, bright lights of a steamer. The stewardess looked at them all as a ghost might look from the tomb at a world in which his share has passed away. Then she rose up, and went over to her patient. Mrs. Arthurs was sinking fast.
"And not too soon," said the stewardess. "I shall have time, but no more than I need." She took her clinical thermometer out, and slipped it under her own arm. The mercury marked a hundred-and-one.
Next morning she tied the rope to Mrs. Arthurs' feet, and the men came and drew her away, and slung her into the tide-race, and the current of the reef passage snatched her out to sea. The stewardess stood on the bare rocks close to the channel, and looked curiously at the depth and force of the sea-river that rushed through it. When they called to ask her if she was ready to return to the women's house, she shook her head, and went back to the brushwood-shed.
"Not till tomorrow," she said.
The day and the evening passed. Night came, with a rushing sea and a fierce, high-tide rip in the channel. The men in the men's house, sitting dull and depressed over their pipes, heard it in the pauses of the languid talk. Mrs. Waite, in the women's house alone, heard it as she stood at the door, and watched the men for company. Once she thought she saw something—a shadow, a spirit, she could not tell what—slip past in the far dusk, and vanish through the moonless night, somewhere near the roaring channel edge. Her hair crept upon her head—she knew there was no one living upon the island but herself, the men, and the stewardess busy with disinfectants in the brushwood house. This thing was not of earth, therefore. She could not brave the silence of the house; she picked up her skirts and ran to the other, begging them to take her in. They did, for, though they despised her outbreak of a day or two before, she was yet, a woman, as such, retained her sex's inalienable claim to care. They made her a bed with the best they had, and, near the door where there was cool air, and she slept till morning.
With the early light, the men got up to go down and bathe, and Mrs. Waite returned to her house. On the way, she saw something white upon the track—a piece of paper, written on with a charred stick. The writing had been well and carefully done, and was legible some way off.
"Do not touch this," it began. "Read and throw a match on it."
Half curious, half terrified, she read; read:
"Some one has got to break the chain. We are taking it from each other now; the period of infection from the case on the ship is long over. I have decided that it is best for me to break it. My temperature was high last night, and is very high tonight. I feel sick, and am sure that I am taking it. When it is dark and the tide is very high, I will get into the tide race. Mrs. Waite need not have been afraid; she is safe. Good-bye all."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Waite. "On!"
Her breath seemed to fail her, and she sat right down on the track—not near the paper, however—she flung away from that.
Presently, she pulled herself together, rose and looked round to see if any of the men were in sight. There was not one. She ran for a match, lit it, flung it on the paper, and watched till every bit was burned up
THERE was wondering and talking that morning; afterward dismay, shouts and calls, a wild hunt all over the tiny island. It ended soon. The stewardess was not to be found.
"I thought," said Mrs. Waite, doubtfully, "I thought I saw some one near the sea last night. She may have fallen in. One never knows—and there was a bottle of wine missing, I think."
"Hold your tongue, she devil!" said one of the men. "I believe you know more than you care to tell."
Mrs. Waite did not enjoy the probationary week that they had still to pass, after signaling to the doctor ashore—"No cases." The men were "perfect bears" she afterward told her friend. Especially she disliked the sharp-tongued American youth. When the launch came at last to take them off and convey them to the steamer outside the reef (not their own liner, which was far away), she drew her skirts away from him as she stepped on board and hissed a word as she passed him, which was the last and only word she addressed to him before Sydney separated the party for good.
"What'd she say to you?" asked one of the men.
"Called me a 'canal'; goldarned if I know why—or care." said the lad.
Mrs. Waite had a good who deal of shopping to do in Sydney, as became a lady of refinement who had lost the greater part of her clothes through the cruelties of quarantine regulations. After a very busy morning in the Palace Emporium of Farmer Jones, Brothers, she found herself somewhat tired out, and drifted into the writing and waiting room for a rest. Reposing there in a green velvet chair, she was suddenly assailed by a vulgar voice from behind that remarked "Pop" almost in her ear.
She jumped to her feet angrily, and was very much astonished to see the captain of her unlucky liner standing behind the chair and stifling his laughter with a new pocket handkerchief.
"Is the man mad?" she asked of the green velvet furniture and the emporium at large.
"Not mad, only married." answered the captain, burying his face in his handkerchief again. "It is such a lark, I really can't help It. To see you sitting there like a cold fowl in the storage room, and know all the time that you went and burned that paper and never told and thought the sea itself was going to tell on you—oh, my good lady, it is a joke!"
Mrs. Waite, with a choke in her throat, tried to draw herself up and asked majestically: "To whom do you suppose you are speaking?" But she could not find the words. For there, at the captain's elbow, stood a tall, dark-eyed woman with graying hair, handsomely but quietly dressed, a woman who looked younger and brighter than ever the stewardess had looked, on ship or shore, and yet who was, unmistakably, the stewardess.
"Good God!" was all that Mrs. Waite could find to say at last.
"Don't have a fit," said the captain. "They don't like people to fit in expensive resting rooms, where the E-lite go shopping. Let me explain. My wife didn't have pneumonic plague at all. She had malarial fever: small wonder, in an island full of mosquitoes. But she didn't think of that, she just went and killed herself, for the sake of the rest of the people on the island, including you, you——"
"Jack!" said the ex-stewardess, warningly.
"Well, she didn't kill herself enough, because the tide rip and her clothes floated her out to sea, and she was picked up just insensible by a steamer that was leaving the port—a steamer that had a doctor on board. And they patched her up. And there she is."
"Very interesting," said Mrs. Waite, with a factitious yawn. "And a very nice arrangement for people in your class of life. Good morning."
"Let her go," said the captain's wife, as the captain betrayed some tendency to follow and "have it out." She didn't harm me. Anything I did, I did myself. And all's over and done. But there's nothing, Jack—nothing that will bring back the dead.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1953, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 71 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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