“A judgment of Providence.”
And now Mackintosh watched him enter upon the day’s work.
He began with the sick, for Walker added doctoring to his other activities, and he had a small room behind the office full of drugs.
An elderly man came forward, a man with a crop of curly grey hair, in a blue lava-lava, elaborately tatooed, with the skin of his body wrinkled like a wine-skin.
“What have you come for?” Walker asked him abruptly.
In a whining voice the man said that he could not eat without vomiting and that he had pains here and pains there.
“Go to the missionaries,” said Walker. “You know that I only cure children.”
“I have been to the missionaries and they do me no good.”
“Then go home and prepare yourself to die.
Have you lived so long and still want to go on living?
You’re a fool.”
The man broke into querulous expostulation, but Walker, pointing to a woman with a sick child in her arms, told her to bring it to his desk.
He asked her questions and looked at the child.
“I will give you medicine,” he said. He turned to the half-caste clerk. “Go into the dispensary and bring me some calomel pills.”
He made the child swallow one there and then and gave another to the mother.
“Take the child away and keep it warm.
To-morrow it will be dead or better.”
He leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe.
“Wonderful stuff, calomel.
I’ve saved more lives with it than all the hospital doctors at Apia put together.”
Walker was very proud of his skill, and with the dogmatism of ignorance had no patience with the members of the medical profession.
“The sort of case I like,” he said, “is the one that all the doctors have given up as hopeless.
When the doctors have said they can’t cure you, I say to them, ‘come to me.’
Did I ever tell you about the fellow who had a cancer?”
“Frequently,” said Mackintosh.
“I got him right in three months.”
“You’ve never told me about the people you haven’t cured.”
He finished this part of the work and went on to the rest.
It was a queer medley.
There was a woman who could not get on with her husband and a man who complained that his wife had run away from him.
“Lucky dog,” said Walker.
“Most men wish their wives would too.”
There was a long complicated quarrel about the ownership of a few yards of land. There was a dispute about the sharing out of a catch of fish.
There was a complaint against a white trader because he had given short measure.
Walker listened attentively to every case, made up his mind quickly, and gave his decision.
Then he would listen to nothing more; if the complainant went on he was hustled out of the office by a policeman.
Mackintosh listened to it all with sullen irritation.
On the whole, perhaps, it might be admitted that rough justice was done, but it exasperated the assistant that his chief trusted his instinct rather than the evidence.
He would not listen to reason. He browbeat the witnesses and when they did not see what he wished them to called them thieves and liars.
He left to the last a group of men who were sitting in the corner of the room.
He had deliberately ignored them.
The party consisted of an old chief, a tall, dignified man with short, white hair, in a new lava-lava, bearing a huge fly wisp as a badge of office, his son, and half a dozen of the important men of the village.
Walker had had a feud with them and had beaten them.
As was characteristic of him he meant now to rub in his victory, and because he had them down to profit by their helplessness.
The facts were peculiar.
Walker had a passion for building roads.
When he had come to Talua there were but a few tracks here and there, but in course of time he had cut roads through the country, joining the villages together, and it was to this that a great part of the island’s prosperity was due.
Whereas in the old days it had been impossible to get the produce of the land, copra chiefly, down to the coast where it could be put on schooners or motor launches and so taken to Apia, now transport was easy and simple.
His ambition was to make a road right round the island and a great part of it was already built.
“In two years I shall have done it, and then I can die or they can fire me, I don’t care.”