Father Damien | Page 6

could not drag you to behold.
You, who do not even know its situation on the map, probably
denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in
your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore
there one early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters,
bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys
of human life. One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself
from joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would
have triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer,
and you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our
common manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a
population as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a
nightmare - what a haggard eye you would have rolled over your
reluctant shoulder towards the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone
on; had you found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you
visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there
almost unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still
remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto is an
ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye
quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have felt it was (even
today) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of
possible infection. That seems a little thing when compared with the
pain, the pity, and the disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and the
atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he
breathes. I do not think I am a man more than usually timid; but I never
recall the days and nights I spent upon that island promontory (eight

days and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I am
somewhere else. I find in my diary that I speak of my stay as a
"grinding experience": I have once jotted in the margin,
"HARROWING is the word"; and when the MOKOLII bore me at last
towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new
conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song -
" 'Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen."
And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement
purged, bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the
Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the poctor, and the
missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different
place when Damien came there and made this great renunciation, and
slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with
pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful
sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and
stumps.
You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses. I
have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses. But
there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for
what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by
which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to
enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,
they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time
to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to
recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors
of his own sepulchre.
I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.
A. "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in
the field of his labours and sufferings. 'He was a good man, but very
officious,' says one. Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests so
easily do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of a
Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to
laugh at" [over] "it. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was a
popular."

B. "After Ragsdale's death" [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,
of the unruly settlement] "there followed a brief term of office by
Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble
man. He was rough in his ways, and he had no control. Authority was
relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and he was soon eager