Mr. Harbison came back in a half hour, and I remembered
the eggs. We fished them out of the tea kettle,
and they were perfectly hard, but we ate them.
The doctor from the board of health came that morning
and vaccinated us. There was a great deal of
excitement, and Aunt Selina was done on the arm.
As she did not affect evening clothes this was entirely
natural, but later on in the week, when the wretched
things began to take, nobody dared to limp, and Leila
made a terrible break by wearing a bandage on her left
arm, after telling Aunt Selina that she had been vaccinated
on the right.
The following letters were found in the house post
box after the lifting of the quarantine, and later
were presented to me by their writers, bound in white
kid (the letters, not the authors, of course).
From Thomas Harbison, late engineer
of bridges, Peruvian trunk lines,
South America, to Henry Llewellyn,
care of Union Nitrate company,
iquique, Chili.
Dear Old Man:
I think I was fully a week trying to drive out of
my mind my last glimpse of you with your sickly grin,
pretending to be tickled to pieces that the only white
man within two hundred miles of your shack was going
on a holiday. You old bluffer! I used to
hang over the rail of the steamer, on the way up,
and see you standing as I left you beside the car
with its mule and the Indian driver, and behind you
a million miles of soul-destroying pampa. Never
mind, Jack; I sent yesterday by mail steamer the cigarettes,
pipes and tobacco, canned goods and poker chips.
Put in some magazines, too, and the collars.
Don’t know about the ties—guess it
won’t matter down there.
Nothing happened on the trip. One of the engines
broke down three days out, and I spent all my time
below decks for forty-eight hours. Chief engineer
raving with D.T.’s. Got the engine fixed
in record time, and haven’t got my hands clean
yet. It was bully.
With this I send the papers, which will tell you how
I happen to be here, and why I have leisure to write
you three days after landing. If the situation
were not so ridiculous, it would be maddening.
Here I am, off for a holiday and congratulating myself
that I am foot free and heart free—yes,
my friend, heart free—here I am, shut in
the house of a man I never saw until last night, and
wouldn’t care if I never saw again, with a lot
of people who never heard of me, who are almost equally
vague about South America, who play as hard at bridge
as I ever worked at building one (forgive this, won’t
you? The novelty has gone to my head), and who
belong to the very class of extravagant, luxury-loving,
non-producing parasites (isn’t that what we called
them?) that you and I used to revile from our lofty
Andean pinnacle.
