by M. M. Kaye
“Why couldn’t we go there ourselves and bring them here?” asked Hero thoughtfully.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the doctor in alarm, annoyed with himself for not realizing how Hero would react to such information, “on no account! And don’t you dare try it, young woman! I haven’t even been there myself—and what’s more I don’t intend to. We have a deal more work than we can handle already without going hunting for more. Besides, we’d only bring back the infection with us, and put the life of every child in this house at risk.”
Hero laughed at him and said affectionately: “Now that, dear sir, if you will forgive me saying so, is downright nonsense, and I’m surprised at you! Why, every single child in this house has been in contact with cholera, and you know it! That’s why they are here—because every one of them has lost parents or relatives, and many have no one left alive to look after them. Besides, surely this cholera is the same wherever it has broken out, so if we can take in the children it has orphaned here in the Stone Town, why not those from the African Town? The risk of infection can’t be greater, can it?”
“Speaking as a doctor, no; I suppose not But the sights you would be exposed to are far worse, which is why none of you are going there. That, dear girl, is an order!—and don’t you dare forget it!”
“No doctor,” said Hero with deceptive meekness. Nor did she forget it The plight of the orphaned children in the slums across the creek, who, according to Dr Kealey would have no one to bring them to the shelter of The Dolphins’ House, preyed on her mind and gave her no rest.
Someone would have to go to their help. And since Hero Athena, like Dan Larrimore, was incapable of shirking responsibility by shifting it onto others’ shoulders, that someone would have to be herself—though accompanied, of necessity, by one of the serving-women to act as guide and help carry babies who were too young to walk. She dared not discuss the project with anyone else either, for Dr Kealey’s reaction to it had shown her that if she did so it would certainly be vetoed. So she kept her own counsel. But despite his admission that the risks of infection could be no greater on one side of the creek than the other (and no worse, surely, than those that they all incurred daily with every new foundling they admitted!) she took the precaution of soaking two complete sets of outer clothing, including slippers, in strong disinfectant, and drying them without rinsing them out These could be put on in the house and removed before re-entering it; while as for any children rescued from the African Town, they would be treated in the same way as all the others—their clothes, if any, taken off and burnt, and they themselves dunked in a bath containing disinfectant.
With her preparations completed. Hero wasted no time, but left unobtrusively by a side door, accompanied by the once fat little negress, Ifabi—stout no longer but worn with anxiety and hard work. And ever afterwards she was to remember that day, and sometimes dream of it and wake up screaming.
“It had rained all the previous night. Unseasonable rain, Ralub had said, since normally at this time of year there was little rainfall. But though it had ceased at dawn, the day was grey and intolerably hot, for clouds still blanketed the sky and there was no breath of wind. The sodden earth, the gaunt Arab houses, the streets and lanes and alleyways of the city steamed with heat, and now that the rain had stopped there were more people in the streets. Life had still to be lived, and food must be bought and sold to sustain it. But many of the shops were shuttered or empty, and the crowds were no longer gay and colourful, but cowed and apprehensive and for the most part silent, save for organized processions of Koranic chanters and men who prayed aloud, invoking God to stay the pestilence and spare the living.
The streets themselves were cleaner than usual, for the heavy rain of the previous night had swept the usual accumulation of filth down to the sea in a rushing spate, and scoured the open gutters free of garbage. But the city stank of death, and the smell of it was all-pervading and inescapable.
It was a smell that Hero had become accustomed to, for no walls or windows could shut it out; though in The Dolphins’ House, as in Nathaniel Hollis’s, they burned pastilles and incense and joss-sticks to disguise it. But here in the open street it was sickeningly evident, and even the folded handkerchief that she had soaked in Cologne and held over her nose and mouth could not subdue it. She fought down her rising nausea and hurried resolutely forward, making for the African Town on the far side of the tidal creek that separated the stone-built town of Zanzibar from the stews where the negroes and the freed slaves lived. It was there that the cholera had taken its greatest toll, and where it still raged at white heat, and there must be hundreds of helpless children there; far more than in the better quarters of the town. But nothing that she had heard or imagined had prepared her for the sight of the creek, or the reeking abomination that lay on the far side of it.
The ground that had been set apart for burials had been soon filled, and fresh fields opened in the suburbs. But these too were already crammed with hastily buried corpses that rain and the dogs had uncovered, and now the negroes of the African Town were taking their dead by night to the Darajani Bridge that spanned the creek, and throwing them into the water below. Some of these the tide carried out to sea, but others—too many others—the ebb left behind, and a dozen terrible, putrefying bodies lay sprawled on the mud flats below the bridge. But the nightmare creek was as nothing to the open ground on the far side of it, for here the earth could no longer conceal the bodies of all those whom the denizens of the African Town had attempted to bury in it, and the red, reeking ground seemed to heave with a grisly host who appeared to be struggling to escape from their shallow graves, lifting skulls and arms and bony hands out of the mire.
It was a sight that would have given Dante material for another canto on Hell, and Hero shut her eyes, and clinging to Ifabi’s arm, hurried blindly down the short stretch of muddy road that spanned it, choking and gasping with horror. She had often skirted the African Town on her early morning rides, but she had never approached it closely, and seeing it now she realized that the squalor of the Stone Town, which had once so horrified her, was a paradise of cleanliness and order when compared with this. It was incredible to her that anything human could live and work and breed in hovels that the poorest immigrant from Europe would have considered unfit for his swine. And yet each of these stinking, windowless, makeshift pigsties housed from four to a dozen people: the old, the middle-aged and the young crowded together between crumbling mud walls that crawled with lice, under leaking roofs of rotted palm leaves or rusty tin.
The floors were deep in dirt and refuse and the narrow alleys no better than middens, while rats swarmed in both; scuttling unafraid between the very feet of the passers-by and skipping aside with bared teeth when a blow was aimed at them. There were cockroaches too, and swarms of flies. And everywhere the terrible scent of death, for half the huts were tenanted by dead or dying negroes and Hero leaned on Ifabi’s arm, vomiting helplessly and sobbing with shock and nausea.
They had not penetrated far into the evil mazes of the African Town, because there had been a baby crying in the mud by the threshold of a hut whose other occupants were dead, and Hero had stopped and picked it up. And instantly found herself in the centre of a menacing mob of shouting negroes who jostled and threatened, accusing her of stealing it Black, clawing hands snatched the child from her and struck at her, battering her to and fro, ripping at her Arab robes, grabbing and tearing while Ifabi’s frantic shrieks of explanation went unheeded and unheard in the ugly din of yelling voices.
Hero clasped her arms above her head to protect it from the hail of blows, and a stick crashed viciously down upon them, beating her to her knees. She crouched in the mud among a forest of trampling, kicking feet, moaning with pain: hearing Ifabi’s shrill screams above the howling of the mob and thinking with terror and incredulity that they were both going to be killed. This was the end of everything, and soon she and Ifabi would lie out in that terrible red field or on the mud flats below th
e bridge, mangled and unrecognizable. She could feel something warm and wet running down from a cut on her shoulder to soak her dress, and then a savage kick drove the breath out of her body and she toppled sideways, to lie writhing feebly in an agonizing struggle for breath; blind, deaf and disfigured by a clotted mask of mud and blood.
She did not hear the shots that were fired above the heads of the crowd, dominating the clamour and cutting it short as abruptly as though it had been a tangible thing that had been severed by the sweep of a knife. She did not even know that the mob had broken and fled and that she was alone in the fetid alleyway, and she was barely aware of being lifted. It was only when she could breathe again that she realized that someone was wiping the mud off her face and that the furious voice that had replaced the screeching tumult of the mob was Rory’s.
He seemed to be addressing someone who had incurred his displeasure, and most of the words he used were entirely unfamiliar to Hero; though even in her present state of pain-racked semi-consciousness she was in little doubt as to their meaning. It was some time before she awoke to the fact that it was she herself who was being addressed.
She attempted to lift her head and was instantly sick again, and Rory said viciously: “Serve you damned well right!—you interfering, officious, crack-brained, bungling, bloody little tramp!”
But the fog of pain and terror was lifting a little, and neither the words nor the tone in which they were uttered deceived her, because he was still holding her and she could feel the intensity of the fear that drove him, and knew that it was not for himself that he was afraid, but for her. The knowledge brought her a strange content that she made no attempt to analyse, and she turned her head tiredly against his shoulder and relapsed into a half-coma that did not lift until she was back in the safety of The Dolphins’ House.
Olivia and Thérèse had put her to bed, and Dr Kealey, hastily summoned, had bandaged the cut on her shoulder and applied salves to her bruises, scolding her angrily the while, and finally made her swallow a noxious draught that must have contained a strong sedative, for she had fallen asleep almost immediately and had not woken until late on the following day.
“Oh, Hero darling, what a fright you gave us,” quavered Olivia, appearing in the doorway with a mug of strong tea. “We quite thought you would have been killed. And so you would, if Thérèse had not happened to ask one of the women where you were, and been told that you had gone out with Ifabi wearing those Arab clothes. Of course she didn’t dream that you’d think of going to the African Town, but she was sure that you ought not to go out with only Ifabi, because really the streets are not at all safe these days. Gangs, you know, and people looting. You really must not do these things, Hero.”
“I know,” admitted Hero apologetically. “It was stupid of me. Batty did tell me that some of the Africans might think we were stealing children, but when I asked Rory if that could be true, he only laughed, and I guess I forgot about it How did he know where Pd gone?”
“One of the children had heard you talking to Ifabi, which was the greatest piece of luck—though of course one cannot encourage eavesdropping and I do think…Well, Thérèse sent one of the men running for Captain Frost, who had gone down to the harbour with one or two of the others, and he and Mr Potter and some of the rest went after you. And just as well!”
“How is Ifabi?—is she all right?”
“Oh yes, she was hardly touched. But Captain Frost was simply furious with her for letting you go there and not telling him that you meant to, and she’s been snivelling ever since, poor thing.”
“It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t want to go at all, but I made her.”
“Ciel! that I can well believe!” observed Thérèse tartly, entering with towels and warm water. “But why? Why must you embark upon such a mad venture? And why not tell us where you were going?”
“I—I thought that if I told anyone, they’d stop me,” confessed Hero shame-facedly. “Or that you might insist on going instead, and I couldn’t let you do that.”
“Quelle blague!” snapped Thérèse crudely. “Me, I am in agreement with your poor uncle, M’sieur Hollis, who says that you are mad.”
“But Dr Kealey said that the cholera was worse in the African Town than anywhere else, and I wanted to see for myself. And I did, and it is. It’s true! It’s worse than anything you could ever—why there must be hundreds of children there who will die if we don’t do something quickly. We’ve just got to do something for them, Thérèse.”
“Mais certainement: but we shall not fetch them ourselves. You, ma chère, are too impulsive. You see only the goal and run towards it without observing the hazards in the path, which causes trouble and grief to a great many people. Your heart is warm, but one also needs a a cool head; and that, plainly, you have not got!”
Despite her protests Hero had been constrained to remain in bed for the remainder of that day, though none of her hurts was serious, for the folds of coarse black cloth had protected her with more effectiveness than might have been supposed. Apart from a superficial cut on one shoulder and a good many bruises she was relatively unharmed, and had been able to rise the following morning feeling not much the worse for her adventure, and endure with equanimity a blistering denunciation of her behaviour from Rory, delivered in a tone that would once have sent her temper flaring, however well-merited the rebuke. As it was, she had merely murmured that she was sorry, with a meekness that would have surprised her relations but seemed only to acerbate Rory’s ill-temper:
“So you bloody well should be! Apart from the fact that you would undoubtedly have been killed if we hadn’t happened to arrive when we did, you’d have been responsible for Ifabi’s death as well as your own. I suppose you didn’t think of that either? Or that she might contact cholera from going into a slum where it has gained such a foothold that the deaths there are now over a hundred a day? It’s the negroes who are most vulnerable to it, and she’s a negress. And yet you made her go with you!”
“I’m sorry. I only took her because she knew the way and I didn’t. I never thought—”
“You never do!” interrupted Rory savagely. “Well you can start thinking now! One or both of you may well have taken the disease off that mob—they were mauling and manhandling you and spitting in your faces, and it’s safe to say that several of them are dead by this time. If you have, it’ll be no more than you deserve! A child of six should have known better, and I am rapidly acquiring a deep sympathy for your uncle and that double-dealing bastard you were going to marry!”
“Someone had to go,” protested Hero defensively. “And I thought it had better be me. I couldn’t just sit here and do nothing about it.”
Rory’s face changed and some of the anger and impatience left it. He said less harshly: “You’re not sitting here and doing nothing. You’re doing a deal too much. But you don’t understand these people. I do; so you’ll kindly leave me to deal with this sort of thing in future.”
“Would you? Could you really do something about it—explain to them so that they would understand?”
He stood looking at her, his face grim again and his mouth not quite under control. Seeing what the mob and the past weeks and he himself had done to her; she was so thin that it hurt him to look at her. The lovely, rounded body whose every line and curve and hollow he knew so intimately—that he had once possessed with such savagery and later with such astonishing, heart-stopping rapture—was wasted now to the point of emaciation. Her hands were rough from hard work and her grey eyes with their circles of dark shadows too large for her white face, and it was suddenly all he could do not to reach out and pull her into his arms and say: “Hero, for the love of God do you have to do this?” But he knew that it was no use to say it and that he must not touch her. Not again. Yesterday had been bad enough in all conscience! Worse than he had thought possible…
Hero said: “Could you, Rory?”
“I suppose so,” said Rory, resigned.
39
&
nbsp; “We shall need more mattresses and more milk and food. More everything!” wailed Olivia, struggling with an influx of starving infants from the slums across the creek, who threatened to put an unbearable strain upon the resources of The Dolphins’ House.
“Vraiment!—and more soap,” said Thérèse, wrinkling her nose at the overpowering odour of unwashed and filth-encrusted babies.
“And more room!” sighed Hero. “Thank goodness there is still the garden. We can put up tents. Thérèse, could you?”
“I will arrange it,” said Thérèse. And went off to beg, borrow or otherwise acquire tents and canvas, and anything else that could be used to construct shelters, from Colonel Edwards, Monsieur Dubail, Mr Nathaniel Hollis and a dozen other sources in the city.
The majority of the newcomers from the African Town were in a shocking state of dirt and starvation, and for too many of them help had come too late. More than a dozen of them died that same night, and many others looked as though nothing could save them. But Dr Kealey, walking along the packed verandahs and through the noisy, crowded rooms was not dissatisfied and pronounced them to be doing well: a deal better than he had expected.
He enquired after Hero’s injuries and she replied lightly that they were nothing and scarcely troubled her at all, but he looked at her with more attention than he had given her of late, and did not like what he saw. He knew that she had been roughly handled and that her body must by now be black and blue with bruises, but he did not think that she had received any internal injury. It was not this that worried him, but the thought of the appalling prevalence of cholera in the Black Town.
As a humanitarian Dr Kealey could understand and sympathize with the motive that had driven Hero into going there, but his views on the unwisdom of her action agreed entirely with Rory’s. Besides, the girl was not looking at all well, and though he was aware that she could hardly be expected to do so after such an experience, he could not throw off his uneasiness, and he found himself praying that her extreme pallor and the black shadows that encircled her eyes were nothing more than the result of shock and superficial bruising, and not of something infinitely worse. He spoke sharply to her, ordering her to take more rest, and on departing informed Mrs Credwell that he looked to her to see that Hero lay down for at least two hours every afternoon until further notice.