In September David began to write his tone poem, _Marco Polo_.
It was not Marco Polo alone, but every man of extraordinary
aspirations, who took that long journey, through semimythical deserts,
into the realm of the Great Khan, and there for many years lived a life
unrelated to the lives of his boyhood companions.
In far-off Cambulac the Venetian adventurer steeped himself in sights,
odors, and sounds that were the antithesis of those which he had known,
till at last he took on the strangeness of his surroundings. Yet in
the course of time, though covered with wealth and honors, and
habituated to bizarre delights, he began, with the perversity of human
nature, to long for the land of his birth. With a sense of necessity
and foreboding he tore himself loose from the paradise of Cambulac,
traversed the deserts again, regained his own house. None knew him,
for he was old, savory with antipodal spices, outlandishly garbed; and
even his countenance had become like those Oriental faces amid which he
had found unheard-of griefs and joys. In Venice, his birthplace,
instead of a greeting that might ease his nostalgia, he encountered
disbelief in his identity, and ridicule of his tales. He could not
make them credulous of that delicious Cambulac where he had dwelt like
a god: his tidings of unearthly felicities--free to all who would make
that journey--fell upon brutish ears. The very children came to laugh
him to scorn. So finally, stunned by this ingratitude, cut to the
heart by the gibes of these Venetian wretches to whom he had brought
such fine news, he sank into a stupor, and wondered, as he sat alone in
his shame, whether indeed he had been a great and dazzled man in
Cambulac--which, perhaps, after all, had no existence in reality!
The idea mapped out, there began for David Verne the period of complex
mental tension, of intense concentration, during which an interruption
might scatter forever a sequence of valuable thought. Lilla, knowing
how great this mental and emotional strain must be, wondered that he
was strong enough to bear it.
But the desire to be to Lilla, despite his infirmity, something that no
other man could be, made him prodigious. As the tone poem expanded
from this inspiration, he gained still greater impetus from the mere
tonic of success. Toward the end of October, his asthenia had
diminished enough to allow him to play the piano weakly in three
octaves.
Dr. Fallows, on one of his visits a witness of this achievement, went
out thunderstruck to his car, muttering to himself:
"It is impossible!"
He looked sternly across the sunny garden, where the last of the summer
flowers--giant daisies above beds of tufted pansies--were triumphantly
flaunting themselves. He had never heard, and he doubted if any one
else had ever heard, of a similar case--the checking and diminishing of
such a prostration. But, knitting his brows, he pondered on the still
chaotic state of the whole data concerning the "endocrine chain," and
on the fallibility of previous unequivocal pronouncements in the
science of medicine. He had a slight feeling of deflation, followed by
a glow of curiosity; and he returned into the house to change his
orders about the medicine.
He had been prescribing a solution of arsenic, the dose increasing
little by little toward the point of tolerance. Now, for the purpose
of experiment, he ordered that the dose was to remain the same. And in
order to impress his instructions upon the mind of Hamoud-bin-Said, he
said to the Arab severely:
"Remember, not one drop more!"