Sweet virgin rose, farewell. Heaven has thy beauty,
That's only fit for Heaven. I'll live a little,
And then, most blessed soul, I'll climb up to thee.
Farewell. _The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief_.
The next morning he found upon his plate a letter in a strange hand.
The writing was firmly formed, but ugly. The letters had a way of
lying down upon each other towards the end of each word. It was not a
literary hand. It was from Lionel Heseltine.
"400A, PUMP COURT, TEMPLE.
"DEAR MR. NALDRETT (it ran),
"If you would like to see my relics, will you come round next Thursday
to my rooms between 4 and 5? You will see my name on the doorpost
outside. I am up at the top. Your best way would be Underground to
the Temple, and then up Middle Temple Lane. If the Lane door is shut
you will have to go up into the Strand and then round. I hope you will
be able to come.
"Yours sincerely,
"LIONEL HESELTINE."
He replied that he would gladly join him there on Thursday. He wished
that Thursday were not still six days away. He was drawn to all these
people who had known Ottalie. They were parts of her life. He
realised now how much people must be in a woman's life. A man has
work, and the busy interests created by it. A woman has friends and
the emotions roused by them. This world of Ottalie's friends was new
to him. He tried to look upon them as she would have looked upon them.
These had known her intimately since her childhood. They had been in
her mind continually. She had lived with them. He had often felt
vaguely jealous of them, when he had heard her talk of them with
Agatha; or if not jealous, sad, that he should not have access to that
side of her.
He was drawn to them all, but Lionel attracted him the most strongly.
Some of his liking for Lionel was mere instinctive recognition of an
inherent fineness and simplicity in the man's character. But there was
more than that. He had often felt that in life, as in nature, there is
a constant effort to remedy the unnatural. The inscrutable agency
behind life offers always wisely some restoration or readjustment of a
balance disturbed. He felt that a tide had quickened in his life, at
the last ebbing of the old. In the old life all had been to please
Ottalie. Life was more serious now. He could not go back all at once
to a life interrupted as his had been. Life was not what he had
thought it. In the old days it had sufficed to brood upon beautiful
images, till his mind had reflected them clearly enough for his hand to
write down their evocative symbols. He was not too young to perceive
the austerer beauty in the room of life beyond the room in which youth
takes his pleasure. But so far his life had been so little serious
that he had lacked the opportunity of perceiving it. Now the old world
of the beauty of external image, well-defined and richly coloured, was
shattered for him. He saw how ugly a thing it was, even as a plaything
or decoration, beside the high and tragical things of life and death.
It was his misfortune to have lived a life without deep emotions. Now
that sorrows came upon him together, smiting him mercilessly, it was
his misfortune to be without a friend capable of realising what the
issue warring in him meant. O'Neill had sent him a note from Ubrique
in Andaluz, asking him to order a supply of litharge for his
experiments, which were "wonderful." Pollock had sent him a note from
Lyme, repaying, "with many, many thanks," the loan of fifty guineas.
His "little girl was very well, and Kitty was wonderful." Besides
these two he had no other intimate friends. Leslie, a much finer
person than either of them, might have understood and helped his mood;
but Leslie had been away in Ireland since the first fortnight. Being,
therefore, much alone in his misery, Roger had come to look upon
himself in London as the one sentient, tortured thing in a callous
ant-swarm. He was shrinking from the sharp points of contact with the
world on to still sharper internal points of dissatisfaction with
himself. It was, therefore, natural that he should be strongly
attracted by a man who carried a mortal disease, with a grave and
cheerful spirit, serenely smiling, able, even in this last misfortune,
to feel that life had been ordered well, in accordance with high law.
The more he thought of Lionel, the more he came to envy that life of
mingled action and thought which had tempered such a spirit. In
moments of self-despising he saw, or thought that he saw, this
difference between their lives. He himself was like an old king
surprised by death in the treasure-house. He had piled up many jewels
of many-gleaming thought; he was robed in purple; his brain was heavy
from the crown's weight. And all of it was a heavy uselessness. He
could take away none of it. The treasure was all dust, rust, and rags.
He was a weak and fumbling human soul shut away from his bright
beloved, not only by death, but by his own swaddled insufficiency.
Lionel, on the other hand, was a crusader, dying outside the Holy City,
perhaps not in sight of it, but so fired with the idea of it that death
was a little thing to him. All his life had been death for an idea.
All his life had made dying easier. Roger's tortured mind was not
soothed by thinking how their respective souls would look after death.
Some men laid up treasures in heaven, others laid up treasures on
earth. The writer, doubting one and despising the other, laid up
treasures in limbo. He began to understand O'Neill's remark that it
was "the most difficult thing in the world for an artist both to do
good work and to save his own soul." Little, long-contemned scraps of
mediæval theology, acquired in the emotional mood during which he had
been pre-Raphaelite, appealed to him again, suddenly, as not merely
attractive but wise. Often, at times of deep emotion, in the fear of
death, the mind finds more significance in things learned in childhood
than in the attainments of maturity. This emotion, the one real
passionate emotion of his life, had humbled him. Life had suddenly
shewn itself in its primitive solemnity. The old life was all ashes
and whirling dust. He understood something, now, of the conflict going
on in life. But he understood it quakingly, as a prophet hears the
voice in the night. He saw his own soul shrivelling like a leaf in the
presence of a great reality. He had to establish that soul's
foundations before he could sit down again to work. The artist creates
the image of his own soul. When he sees the insufficiency of that
soul, he can either remedy it or take to criticism.
Thinking over the talk of the night before, he wondered at the train of
events which had altered the course of his thinking. Lionel, a few
weeks before, would have been to him a charming, interesting, but
misguided man, wandering in one of those sandy, sonorously named
Desarts where William Blake puts Newton, Locke, and those other fine
intellects, with whom he was not in sympathy. Now he saw that Lionel
was ahead of him on the road. Thinking of Lionel, and wishing that he,
too, had done something for his fellows, he traced the course of a tide
of affairs which had been setting into his mind. It had begun with
that blowing paper in the garden, as a beginning tide brings rubbish
with it. Now it was in full flood with him, lifting him over shallows
where he had long lain grounded. He began to doubt whether literature
was so fine a thing as he had thought. Science, so cleanly and
fearless, was doing the poet's work, while the poet, taking his cue
from Blake, maligned her with the malignity of ignorance. What if
poetry were a mere antique survival, a pretty toy, which attracted the
fine mind, and held it in dalliance? There were signs everywhere that
the day of _belles-lettres_ was over. Good intellects were no longer
encouraged to write, "pricked on by your popes and kings." More than
that, good intellects were less and less attracted to literature. The
revelation of the age was scientific, not artistic. He tried to
formulate to himself what art and science were expressing, so that he
might judge between them. Art seemed to him to be taking stock of past
achievement, science to be on the brink of new revelations.
He knew so little of science that his thought of it was little more
than a consideration of sleeping sickness. He reviewed his knowledge
of sleeping sickness. He thought of it no longer as an abstract
intellectual question, but as man's enemy, an almost human thing, a
pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in
the noonday, stifling the brains of men. It fascinated him. He
thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far
away in the wilds, in the midst of the disease, perhaps feeling it
coming on, as Lionel must have felt it. They were giving up their
lives cheerily and unconcernedly in the hope of saving the lives of
others. That was a finer way of living than sitting in a chair,
writing of what Dick said to Tom when Joe fell in the water. He went
over in his mind the questions which science had to solve before the
disease could be stamped out. He wondered if there were in the
literary brain some quickness or clearness which the scientific brain
wanted. He wondered if he might solve the questions. Great
discoveries are made by discoverers, not always by seekers. What was
mysterious about the sleeping sickness?
A little thought reduced his limited knowledge to order. The disease
is spreading eastwards from the West Coast of Africa between 16° north
and 16° south latitude, keeping pretty sharply within the thirty-two
degrees, north and south. It is caused by an organism called a
trypanosome, which enters the blood through the probosces of biting
flies. It kills, when the organism enters the cerebro-spinal fluid.
So much was sure. He could not say with certainty why the disease is
spreading eastwards, nor why the trypanosome causes it, nor how the fly
obtains the trypanosome, nor what happens to the trypanosome in the
fly's body. His ignorance thus resolved itself into four heads.
As to the spreading of the disease eastwards, Lionel, who had lived in
the country, might know a reason for it. He would at least have heard
what the natives and the older settlers thought. Residents' reasons
generally range from stories of snake-headed women in the swamp, to
tales of a queer case of gin, or of "European germs changed by the
climate." The simple explanation was that in mid-Africa human
communications are more frequent from the west to the east than from
the east to the west. The Congo is the highway.
He knew that the trypanosome is carried by the wild game. In long
generations of suffering the African big game has won for itself the
power of resisting the trypanosomes. Although the trypanosomes abound
in their blood, the wild animals do not develop "nagana" or "surra,"
the diseases which the tsetse bite sets up in most domestic animals.
Something has been bred into their beings which checks the
trypanosome's power. The animals are immune, or salted. But although
they are immune, the wild animals are hosts to the trypanosome. In the
course of time, when they migrate before the advance of sportsmen, or
in search of pasture into tsetse country as yet uninfected with
trypanosome, the tsetses attacking them suck the infected blood and
receive the organisms into their bodies. Later on, as they bite, they
transfer the organisms to human beings, who develop the disease.
Plainly, a single migratory animal host, or a single infected slave,
suffering from the initial feverish stages, might travel for three or
four months, infecting a dozen tsetses daily, along his line of march.
One man or beast might make the route dangerous for all who followed.
Roger remembered how the chigoe or jigger-flea had travelled east along
the Congo, to establish itself as an abiding pest wherever there was
sand to shelter it.
As to the action of the trypanosome upon the human being, that was a
question for trained scientists. It probably amounted to little more
than a battle with the white corpuscles.
He passed the next few days at the Museum, studying the disease.
Mrs. Holder, who did for Lionel, let him in to Lionel's rooms on
Thursday. "Mr. Heseltine was expecting him, and would be in in a
minute. Would he take a seat?" He did so. The rooms were the top
chambers of a house in Pump Court. They were nice light airy chambers,
sparely furnished. The floor was covered with straw-matting. The
chairs were deck-chairs. There were a few books on a bookshelf. Most
of them were bound files of the _Lancet_ and _British Medical Journal_.
A few were medical books, picked up cheap at second-hand shops, as the
price labels on the backs testified. The rest were mostly military
history: _The Jena Campaign_; Hoenig's _Twenty-four Hours of Moltke's
Strategy_; Meckel's _Tactics_ and Sommernacht's _Traum;
Chancellorsville_; Colonel Henderson's _Life of Stonewall Jackson;
Essays on the Science of War_ and _Spicheren_; Wolseley's _Life of
Marlborough_; Colonel Maude's _Leipzig_; Stoffel's contribution to the
_Vie de Jules Cesar_; a battered copy of Mahan's _War of 1812_; and
three or four small military text-books on _Reconnaissance, Minor
Tactics, Infantry Formations,_ etc. A book of military memoirs lay
open, face downwards, in a deck-chair. It was a hot July day, but the
fire was not yet out in the grate. On the mantelpiece were some small
ebony curios inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Above the mantel were a few
pipes, spears, and knobkerries, a warrior's Colobus-monkey head-dress
and shield, from Masailand, a chased brass bracket-dish (probably made
in England) containing cigarette-butts, and a small, but very beautiful
Madonna and Child, evidently by Correggio. It was dirty, cracked, and
badly hung, but it was still a noble work. Lionel, coming in abruptly,
found Roger staring at it.
"I hope you've not been waiting," he said. "I've been to see my
monkey. Are you fond of pictures? That's said to be a rather good
one. It's by a man called Correggio. Do you know his work at all?
It's rather dingy. Do you like lemon or milk in your tea? Lemon? You
like lemon, do you? Right. And will you wait a minute while I give
myself a last dose?"
"Can I help you?" Roger asked. "It's hypodermic, isn't it?"
"Would you mind? You shove the snout of the thing into my arm, and
push the spirit. It won't take a minute." He shewed Roger into a
Spartan bedroom, furnished with a camp-bed and a Sandow's exerciser.
"Now," he said, producing a bottle and a syringe, "first I'll roll up
my sleeve, and then I'll shew you how to sterilise the needle. I
suppose you've never done this kind of thing before? Now, jab it in
just here where all the punctures are."
"You said it was your last dose," said Roger. "Does that mean that you
are cured?"
"Cured for the time. I may get a relapse. Still, that isn't likely."
"How do you know that you are cured? Do you feel better?"
"I don't get insomnia," said Lionel. "No. They inject bits of me into
a monkey, and then wait to see if the monkey develops the organism.
The monkey's very fit indeed, so they reckon that I'm cured. Thanks.
That'll do. Now I hear tea coming. Go on in, will you? I'll be out
in a minute. I must get out my slides."
After, tea they looked at relics, to wit, tsetse-flies, butterflies,
biting flies, fragments of the same, sections of them, slides of
trypanosomes, slides of filaria, slides of Laverania. "I've got these
photographs, too," said Lionel. "They aren't very good; but they give
you an idea of the place. This lot are all rather dark. I suppose
they were over-exposed. They shew you the sort of places the tsetse
likes. The hut in this one is a native hut. I lived in it while I was
out there the last time. I was studying the tsetse's ways."
"They're always near water, aren't they?" Roger asked.
"Yes, generally near water. They keep to a narrow strip of cover by
the side of a lake or stream. They don't like to go very far from
water unless they are pursuing a victim. In fact, you're perfectly
safe if you avoid fly-country. If you go into fly-country, of course
they come for you. They'll hunt you for some way when you leave it.
They like a shady water with a little sandy shady beach at the side.
They like sand or loose soil better than mud. Mud breeds sedge, which
they don't care about. They like a sort of scrubby jungle. One or two
trees attract them especially. Here's a tree where about a dozen
natives got it together merely from taking their siesta there."
"Does clearing the jungle do any good?"
"Oh, yes. It clears the flies out of that particular spot. But it
scatters them abroad. It doesn't destroy them. It doesn't destroy the
pupæ, which are buried under the roots in the ground. Burning is
better, perhaps. Burning may do for the pupæ, but then it doesn't
affect the grown flies."
"Tell me," said Roger, "is blood necessary to the tsetse?"
"I wish I knew."
"I've been thinking about the spread of the disease. Is it caused by
game, by slave-raiders, or by ivory-hunters? How is it spread?"
"We don't know. It seems to have followed the opening up of the Congo
basin to trade. The game are reservoirs, of course."
"Have the natives any cure?"
"None. They have a disinfectant for their cattle. They boil up some
bitter bark with one dead tsetse and make the cattle drink the brew.
Then they fumigate the cattle with bitter smoke. They go through this
business when they are about to trek cattle through fly-country. They
travel at night, because the flies don't bite after dark. But the
fumigation business is really useless."
"The tsetse is useless, I suppose?"
"All flies are useless."
"I like the ladybird and the chalk-blue butterfly."
"I see you're a sentimentalist. You might keep those. But all the
rest I would wipe out utterly. I wish that we could wipe out the
tsetse as easily as one can wipe out the germ-carrying mosquitoes."
"Has it been tried?"
"No. Well. It may have been. But in the mosquito there is a
well-marked grub stage, and in the tsetse there isn't. It is so
difficult to get at the chrysalids satisfactorily."
"What do the tsetses live upon? Do you mind all my questions?"
"No. Go ahead. But it must be rather boring to you. They live on
anything they can get, like the commissioners who study them."
"But why do they live near water?"
"Oh, that? Some think that they suck the crocodiles; but the general
opinion is that they go for air-breathing, fresh-water fish. The
theory is this. In the dry season the fish have very little water.
The rivers dry up, or very nearly dry up. I'm not talking of rivers
like the Zambesi and the Congo, of course. Well. They dry up, leaving
water-courses of shallow pools joined together by trickles. The fish
are perfectly horrible creatures. They burrow into the mud of the
shallows, and stay there till the rains. I suppose they keep their
snouts out of the mud, in order to breathe. It is thought that the
tsetses feed upon their snouts. It may not be true. Jolly interesting
if it is, don't you think? Look here, excuse me if I smoke. Tell me.
What is it which interests you so much in sleeping sickness? It seems
so queer that you should be interested."
"I met with accounts of it not long ago, at a time when various causes
had made me very sensitive to impressions. I don't know whether you
ever feel that what is happening to you is part of a great game
divinely ordained?"
Lionel shook his head. His look became a shade more medical.
"Well. It sounds foolish," said Roger. "But I was impressed by the
way in which sleeping sickness was brought to my notice again and
again. So I studied it, as well as one so ignorant of science could.
I am interested now, because you've been there and seen it all. It is
always very interesting to hear another man's life-experience. But it
is more than that. The disease must be one of the most frightful
things of modern times. I think it splendid of you to have gone out,
as you have, to study it for the good of mankind."
"That was only self-indulgence," said Lionel. "It's queer that you
should be interested. You're the only person I've met yet since I came
back who is really interested. Of course, the doctors have been
interested. But I believe that most Londoners have lost the faculty
for serious mental interest. It has been etiolated out of them. They
like your kind of thing, 'sugar and spice and all things nice.' They
like catchwords. They don't study hard nor get at the roots of things.
I met a Spaniard the other day, Centeno, a chemist, I don't mean a
druggist. He said that we had begun to wither at the top."
"I don't agree," said Roger. "Spain is too withered to judge. Our
head is as sound oak as it always was. Were you ever a soldier,
Heseltine?"
"Yes, in a sort of a way. I was in the militia."
"Did you want to be a soldier? Why did you leave it?"
"It isn't a life, unless you're on a General Staff. Everybody ought to
be able to be a soldier; I believe that; but it doesn't seem to me to
go very far as a life's pursuit. One can only become a good soldier by
passing all one's days in fighting. That doesn't lead to anything. I
would like best of all to be a writer, only, of course, I can't be. I
haven't got the brains. I suppose you'll say they're not essential."
"They are essential, and you've probably got as many as any writer; but
writing is an art, and success in art depends on all sorts of subtle,
instantaneous relations between the brain's various faculties and the
hand. Are you really serious, though?"
"Yes. I'd give the world to be able to write. To write poetry. Or
I'd like to be able to write a play. You see, what I believe is, that
this generation is full of all sorts of energy which ought not to be
applied to dying things. I would like to write a poem on the right
application of energy. That is the important thing nowadays. The
English have lots of energy, and so much of it is wasted. The energy
wasted is just so much setting back the clock. The energy wasted at
schools alone---- If I'd not been a juggins at school, I'd have been
fully qualified by this time, and been able to get a lot more fun out
of things, finding out what goes on. Don't you find writing awfully
interesting?"
"I find it makes the world more interesting. Writing lets one into
life. But when I meet a man like yourself I realise that it isn't a
perfect life for a man. It isn't active enough. It doesn't seem to me
to exercise enough of the essential nature. Have you ever tried to
write? I expect you have written a lot of splendid things. Will you
shew me what you have written?"
"Oh," said Lionel, "I've only written a few sonnets and things. Out
there alone at night when the lions are roaring, you can't help it.
They used to roar all round me. I was only in a native hut. It gives
one a solemn feeling. I used to make up verses every night."
"Have you got any? Won't you read them to me?"
"You can look at them if you like," said Lionel, blushing under his
tan. Like most Englishmen, he was a little ashamed of having any
intelligence at all. He pulled out a little penny account-book from
the drawer under the bookshelf. "They're pretty bad, I expect."
Roger looked at them.
"They're not bad at all," he said. "You've got something to say. You
haven't got much ear; but that's only a matter of training. People can
always write well if they are moved or interested. Great writing
happens when a carefully trained technician undergoes a deep emotion,
or, still better, has survived one. Have you written prose at all?"
"No. Prose is much more difficult. I never know when to stop."
"Nor do I. Prose becomes hard directly one begins to make it an art
instead of a second nature."
He wanted to talk with Lionel about Portobe. He was in that mood in
which the wound of a grief aches to be stricken. He wanted to know
what Lionel had said to Ottalie, and what she had said to him. He had
that feeling which sometimes comes to one in London. "Here you are, in
London, before me. And you have been in such a place and such a place,
where I myself have been, and you have talked with people known to me.
How wonderful life is!" To his delight, Lionel began to talk about
Ireland unprompted.
"I wish I could write prose like yours," he said. "It was your prose
first made me want to write. I was stopping with the Fawcetts at
Portobe. It was the year before Leslie married, just before I went to
India, to do Delhi-sore. Ottalie had just got that book you wrote
about the Dall. You'd sent it to her. That was a fine book. I liked
your little word-pictures."
"I am sorry you liked that book. It is very crude. I remember Ottalie
was down on me for it."
"Ottalie was a fine person," said Lionel. "She had such a delicate,
quick mind. And then. I don't know. One can't describe a woman. A
man does things and defines himself by doing them, but a woman just is.
Ottalie just was; but I don't know what she was. I think she was about
the finest thing I've ever seen."
"Yes," said Roger, moistening dry lips. "She was like light."
"What I noticed most about her," said Lionel, taking on now the tone of
a colonial who has lived much away from the society of women, "was her
fineness. She did things in a way no other woman could. When I came
back from the East, and went to see her--of course I used to go to
Portobe fairly often when Leslie was there--it was like being with some
one from another world. She was so full of fun, too. She had a way of
doing things simply. I'm not good at describing; but you know how some
writers write a thing easily because they know it to the heart.
Ottalie Fawcett seemed to do things simply, because she understood them
to the heart, by intuition."
"Yes," said Roger. "I shall always be proud to have lived among a race
which could bear such a person."
"She must be a dreadful loss," said Lionel, "to anybody who knew her
well. I'm afraid you knew her well. I used to think of her when I was
in Africa. She was wonderful."
"She was a wonderful spirit," Roger answered. "Tell me. I seem to
know you very well, although I have hardly met you. I don't even know
if your people are alive. Is your mother living?"
"No," said Lionel. "You're thinking of my old aunt who was at the At
Home with me. I was stopping with her for a few days, before she left
town. My people are dead."
"Are you thinking of going out again to Africa to examine sleeping
sickness?"
"Yes," said Lionel. "I want to go soon. I want to go in the rains, so
that I can test a native statement, that the rains aggravate the
disease and tend to bring it out where it is latent. I believe it is
all nonsense. Natives observe, but never deduce. Still, one ought to
know."
"Would you go alone?"
"I should go out alone, I suppose. There are lots of men who would
come with me to shoot lions, but trypanosomes are less popular. You
don't bring back many trophies from trypanosomes, except a hanging jaw
and injected eyes."
"Are the rains very unhealthy?"
"Yes. If they bring out the latent disease, they do so by lowering the
constitution. But I don't believe that they do anything of the kind.
Still, the natives say that they can bring out nagana in a bitten cow
by pouring a bucket of water over her."
"Look here," said Roger, "I don't want you to decide definitely till
you know me better. I know how risky a thing it is to choose a
companion for a journey into the wilderness, or for any undertaking of
this kind. But I am dissatisfied with my work. I can't tell you more.
I don't think that my work is using enough of me, or letting me grow up
evenly. Besides, for other reasons, I want to give up writing. I am
deeply interested in your work, and I should like to join you, if you
would let me, after you know me better. I have a theory which I should
like to work out."
"It would be very nice," said Lionel. "I mean it would be very nice
for me. But it means pretty severe work, remember. And then, how
about scientific training? I'm not properly qualified myself; but I've
been at this game for seven years, and I had a hard year's training
under my old chief, Sir Patrick Hamlin. I began by doing First Aid and
Bearer-Party in camp. Then, when I gave up soldiering, I got a job on
famine relief in India. Then old Hamlin took me under his wing, and
got me to help with the plague at Bombay, and so I went on, learning
whatever I could. I was very lucky. I mean, I was able to learn a
good deal, being always with Hamlin. You ought to know Hamlin. He's a
very remarkable man. He stamped out Travancore ophthalmia. He made me
very keen and taught me all that I know. Not that that's much. Now
you are rather a griff, if you'll excuse my saying so. I wonder how
soon you could make yourself useful?"
"Well, what is wanted?" said Roger. "Surely not much? What can you do
with the disease? You can only inject atoxyl into a man, and pump
trypanosomes out of him? I can learn how to mount and stain objects
for the microscope. I have kept meteorological records. I could
surely keep records of temperatures. I have no experience and no
scientific knowledge; but I am not sure that my particular theory will
need much more than prolonged, steady observation. Probably all the
attainable scientific facts about the structures of the different
varieties of tsetse are known, but the habits of the flies are very
little known. I was thinking that a minute observation of the flies
would be useful. It is a kind of work which a trained scientist might
find dull. Now, who has really observed the tsetse's habits? It is
not even known what their food is. And another thing. What is it
which keeps them near the water, even when (for all that we know) the
air-breathing fish are no longer burrowed in the mud? And why should
they be so fond of certain kinds of jungle? And why should there not
be some means of exterminating them? I could experiment in many ways."
"Yes. That is true. You could," said Lionel, puckering his face.
"How do you stand heat? You're slight. You can probably stand more
than a big beefy fellow."
"I did not find Belize very trying."
"Then it's an expensive business," said Lionel. "When I go out I
shan't be attached to any commission. One has to go into all these
sordid details pretty closely. Of course, you won't mind my giving you
one or two tips. Here's my account book for a quite short trip to
Ikupu. You will see that it is very costly and very wasteful."
Roger looked at the account-book. The cost of the Ikupu trip was
certainly heavy. The relatives of two bearers who had been eaten by
lions had received compensation. The widow of the dead assistant had
received compensation. A month's stores had been thrown away by
deserting bearers. The dirty, dog's-eared pages gave him a sense of
the wasteful, deathy, confused life which goes on in new countries
before wasteful, cruel, confused nature has the ideas of her
"rebellious son" imposed upon her. "We went out seventy strong," said
Lionel, "to go to Ikupu. We had bad luck from the very start. Only
twelve of us ever got there. You see, my assistant, Marteilhe, was
frightfully ill. I had fever on and off the whole time. So the
bearers did what they liked. It's a heart-breaking country to travel
in. It's like Texas. 'A good land for men and dogs, but hell for
women and oxen.' What do you think? Does it seem to you to be worth
the waste?"
"Very well worth," said Roger, handing back the book. "If I fail to do
one little speck of good there, it will have been very well worth, both
for my own character and for my own time."
"I don't quite see your point," said Lionel.
"Well," said Roger, moved. "I want to be quite sure of certain
elements in myself, before I settle down to a literary life. That
life, if it be in the least worthy, is consecrated to the creation of
the age's moral consciousness. In the old time a writer was proved by
the world before he could begin to create his "ideas of good and evil."
Homer never existed, of course, but the old idea of a poet's being
blind is very significant. Poets must have been men of action, like
the other men of their race. They only became poets when they lost
their sight, or ceased, through some wound or sickness, to be efficient
in the musters, when, in fact, their lives were turned inwards.
Nowadays that is changed, Heseltine. A man writes because he has read,
or because he is idle, or greedy, or vicious, or vain, for a dozen
different reasons; but very seldom because his whole life has been
turned inward by the discipline of action, thought, or suffering. I am
not sure of myself. Miss Fawcett's death has brought a lot into my
life which I never suspected. I begin to think that a writer without
character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the
written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ."
He rose from his chair. He paced the room once or twice. "Jacob
Boehme was right," he went on. "We are watery people. Without action
we are stagnant. If you sit down to write, day after day, for months
on end, you can feel the scum growing on your mind." He sat down
again, staring at the Correggio. "There," he said, "that is all it is.
I sometimes feel that all the thoroughly good artists, like Dürer,
Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Dante, all of them, sit in judgment on the
lesser artists when they die. I think they forgive bad art, because
they know how jolly difficult art of any kind is. I don't believe that
art was ever easy to anybody, except perhaps to women, whose whole
lives are art. But they would never forgive faults of character or of
life. They would exact a high strain of conduct, mercilessly. Good
God, Heseltine, it seems to me terrible that a man should be permitted
to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the
State."
"Well," said Lionel, picking up his cigarette, which had fallen to the
floor, scattering sparks. "Yes." He pressed his forefinger
reflectively on each crumb of fire one after the other. "Yes. But
look here. I met that French poet fellow, Mongeron, the other day, the
day before yesterday. He said that action was unnecessary to the man
of thought, since the imagination enabled him to possess all experience
imaginatively."
"Yes. I know that pleasant theory. I agree," said Roger. "But only
when action has formed the character. I take writing very seriously,
but I want to be sure that it is the thing which will bring out the
best in me. I am doubtful of that. I am doubtful even whether art of
any kind is not an anachronism in this scientific century, when so much
is being learned and applied to the bettering of life. As I said the
other night, my State is the human mind. If this art, about which I
have spilled such a lot of ink, be really a survival, what you call in
dissecting-rooms 'a fossil,' then I am not helping my State, but
hindering her, by giving all my brains' vitality to an obsolete cause.
One feels very clever, with these wise books in one's head; but they
don't go down to bed-rock. They don't mean much in the great things of
life. They don't help one over a death."
"No," said Lionel reflectively. "I think I see all your points." He
made the subject practical at once, feeling a little beyond his depth
in ethics. "It would be a very interesting experience for you to go
out," he said. "A fine thing, too; for it is very difficult to get a
good brain to take up a subject in that particular way. Still, one
ought not to waste a good brain like yours in watching tsetses."
"No imaginative work is wasted," said Roger. "The experience would add
a great deal to me. I should feel more sure of being able to face the
judge after death."
"How about the practice of your art?"
"That will not be hurt by the deepening of my interests."
"Come on out to dinner," said Lionel. "I generally go to Simpson's.
We'll go into Committee of Supply. The first thing we shall have to do
is to try to get you the job of bottle-washer to somebody's clinic.
What I want to do when I get out there is this, Naldrett. I want to
get right away into the back of beyond, into the C.F.S., or wherever
there is not much chance of the natives having mixed with Europeans. I
want to find out if there is any native cure, if any native tribes are
immune, as they are to malaria, and whether their cattle, if they have
any, are immune, like the game. You will guess that what I want to do
is to prepare anti-toxins strong enough to resist the disease at any
stage, and also to act as preventives. That's the problem as it seems
to me. It may sound a little crazy."
"Is the tsetse immune?" said Roger. "Does anybody know anything about
flies? If the tsetse is immune, why could not an anti-toxin be
prepared from the tsetse? It would be more than science. It would be
equity."
They walked along the Strand together.
"Anti-toxins must wait," said Roger, as they stopped before crossing
Wellington Street. "The first thing we had better do is to go for a
long tramp together, to see how we get along."
"We might charter a boat, and try to get round the north of Ireland,"
said Lionel. "Dublin to Moville. It would be a thorough eye-opener.
Then we might walk on round the coast to Killybegs. Old Hamlin will be
back by the end of August. He would prescribe you a course of study.
We might do some reading together."
In the Strand, outside Simpson's, a procession of dirty boys followed a
dirty drunkard who was being taken to Bow Street by two policemen.
Newsboys, with debased, predatory faces, peered with ophthalmic eyes
into betting news. Other symptoms of disease passed.
"Plenty of disease here," said Roger.
"All preventable," said Lionel. "Only we're not allowed to prevent it.
People here would rather have it by them to reform. Science won't mix
with sentiment, thank God!" They entered Simpson's.