There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors.
_Old Fortunatus_.
When he began to prepare to give the injection, he could not find the
atoxyl bottle. He searched anxiously through the hut for it, but could
not find it. It was an unmistakable glass bottle, half-full of
distilled water, at the bottom of which lay some of the white sediment
as yet undissolved. The bottle bore a square white label, marked
ATOXYL in big capitals, printed by Lionel with a blue pencil. Roger
could not see it anywhere. He looked in all the boxes, one after the
other. He looked in the gun-cases, under the folds of the tent, in the
chinks and crannies, everywhere. It was not there. When he had
searched the hut twice from end to end, in different directions, he
decided that it was not there. His next thought was that it must have
been left in the hut with the two patients, and that the patients must
have carried it off as treasure trove. In that case, perhaps, it would
be gone forever. He would have noticed it that morning had it been
still in the hut. Then he thought that it might still be in the hut.
It might have been put behind a box. He might have failed to see it.
It was necessary to make certain. He hurried to the hut and searched
it through. A couple of minutes of searching shewed him that the
bottle was not there.
He racked his brains, trying to think what had become of it. When had
he last seen it? Lionel and he had been at the hut during the
preceding afternoon. They had staked in the uprights of the shelter;
and had then knocked off for a rest, as Lionel was not feeling well.
During the rest he (Roger) had brought the atoxyl from "Portobe," and
had given the second injection to the two patients. So much was clear.
What had happened then? He tried to remember. After that he had gone
on with the building, while Lionel had rested. He distinctly
remembered Lionel sitting down on the wall-top with the atoxyl bottle
in his hands. What had he done with it after that? Surely he had
taken it back with him to "Portobe"? In any case there could be no
doubt that Lionel had been the last to touch it. Lionel had taken the
bottle to put it away; and it seemed now only too likely that he had
put it away in a place where no one else could find it.
Roger tried to remember exactly how ill Lionel had been when he had
gone back to "Portobe." He remembered that he had been flushed and
peevish, but he could not remember any symptoms of light-headedness.
He had crept off alone while Roger was fixing a roof-ridge. Roger,
suddenly noticing that he had gone, had followed him to "Portobe," and
had found him sitting vacantly on the floor, staring with unseeing
eyes. It was certain that the atoxyl bottle was not with him then.
"If that were so," said Roger to himself, "he must have dropped it or
put it down between 'Portobe' and this. Here is where he was sitting.
This is the path by which he walked. Is the bottle anywhere on the
path, or near it?" It was not. Careful search showed that it was not.
"Well," said Roger to himself, "he must have thrown it away. The fever
made him desperate or peevish for a moment, and he has thrown it away.
Where could he have thrown it?"
Unfortunately there was a wide expanse over which he might have thrown
it. If he had thrown it downhill it might have rolled far, after
hitting the ground. If he had thrown it uphill, it might have got
hidden or smashed among the loose stones from the ruins. Having
satisfied himself that Lionel for the moment was not appreciably worse,
Roger started down the village to find his two patients. He thought
that if they could be made to understand what was missing, the search
for the bottle might be made by three pairs of eyes instead of by one.
Some possibility, or, to be more exact, some hope of a possibility, of
the bottle being in the possession of the patients, occurred to him.
The thought that perhaps Lionel's life depended on the caprice of two
cheerful negro-boys made him tremble.
There was no trace of the patients in the village. They were not
there, nor was Roger enough skilled in tracking to know whether they
had been there. As they were not there, he could only suppose that, on
finding themselves whole, among the wreck of their tribe, they had set
out to follow their fellows by the tracks left by the cattle. He
thought it possible that they might return soon, in a day or two, if
not that very day. But there was not much chance of their returning
with the atoxyl bottle, even if they had set out with it. He figured
to himself the progression of a bottle in the emotional estimation of a
negro who had never before seen one. First, it would appear as a rich
treasure, something to be boldly stolen, but fearfully prized. Then it
would appear as something with cubic capacity, possibly containing
potables. Then, after sampling of the potable, in this case
unpleasant, it would be emptied. Its final position ranged between the
personal ornament and the cock-shy. Meanwhile, Roger had the sick to
feed.
After that he returned to Lionel. Lionel's temperature had dropped
slightly, but he was hardly conscious yet. Roger left him while he
began the weary, fruitless search over a space of Africa a hundred
yards long by eighty broad. He measured a space forty yards on each
side of the track between the hut and "Portobe." If the bottle had
been thrown away, it had been thrown away within that space. It was
unlikely to have fallen more than forty yards from the track. A squat
short-necked bottle is not an easy thing to throw. If it were not
there, then he would have to conclude that the patients had taken it.
It was a long, exhausting search. It was as wearisome as the search
for lost ball at cricket. But in this case the seeker knew that his
comrade's life depended on his success. He paced to and fro, treading
over every inch of the measured ground, beating it beneath his feet,
stamping to scare the snakes, feeling his blood leap whenever he struck
a stone. The sun filled earth and sky with wrinklings of brass and
glass at white, tremulous heat, oozing in discs from his vortex of
spilling glare. Many times in the agony of that search Roger had to
break off to look to Lionel, and to drink from the canvas bucket of
boiled water. He prayed that Lionel might recover consciousness, if
only for a minute, so that he might tell him in which direction the
bottle had been flung. But Lionel did not recover consciousness. He
lay in his bed, muttering to himself, talking nonsense in a little,
low, indifferent voice. The most that Roger could say for him was that
he was quieter. His hands were quieter; his voice was quieter. It was
nothing to be thankful for. It meant merely that the patient was
weaker.
After it was over, Roger thought that his search for the lost bottle
was the best thing he had ever done. He had trampled carefully over
every inch of the measured ground. He had taken no chances, he had
neglected no possible hole nor tussock. A wide space of trodden grass
and battered shrub testified to the thoroughness of his painful hunt.
And all was useless. The bottle was not there. The atoxyl was lost.
Once before, several years past, Roger had watched the approaching
death of one intimately known. He had seen his drunken father dying.
He had not loved his father; he had felt little grief for him. But the
sight of him dying woke in him a blind pity for all poor groping human
souls, "who work themselves such wrong" in a world so beautiful given
for so short a time. He had looked on that death as though it were a
natural force, grave and pitiless as wisdom, hiding some erring thing
which had been at variance from it. He had thought of Ottalie's death,
down in the cabin, among the wreck of the supper-tables. In his mind
he had seen Ottalie, so often, flung down on to the rank of revolving
chairs, and struggling up with wild eyes, but with noble courage even
then, to meet the flood shocking in to end her. That death seemed a
monstrous, useless horror to him. Now a link which bound him to
Ottalie was about to snap. He was watching the sick-bed of a man who
had often talked with her, a man, who had known her intimately.
Lionel, with the simple, charming spirit, so like in so many ways what
Ottalie would have been had she been born a man, was mortally sick.
The sight of him lying there unconscious struck him to the heart. That
mumbling body on the bed was his friend, his dear comrade, a link
binding him to everything which he cherished. A veil was being drawn
across his friend's mind. He was watching it come closer and closer,
and the house within grow dark. In a little while it would be drawn
down close, shutting in the life forever. If he did not act at once it
would be too late; Lionel would die. If Lionel were to die, he would
be alone in Africa, with that thing on the bed.
He knelt down by the cot in a whirl of jarring suggestions. What was
he to do? Anxiety had lifted him out of himself on to another plane, a
plane of torturing emotion. He felt a painful clearness of intellect
and an utter deadness of controlling will. His ideas swarmed in his
head, yet he had no power to select from them. He saw so many things
which he might be doing; building a raft to take them to Malakoto,
making, or trying to make, a serum, to nullify the infection; there
were many things. But how could he leave Lionel in this state, and how
was he to get Lionel out of this state? He told himself that large
doses of arsenic might be of use; the next moment he realised that they
would be useless. He had tried to make Lionel take arsenic on the
voyage upstream, as a prophylactic. Lionel had replied that arsenic
was no good to him. "Trypanosomes," he had said, "become inured to
particular drugs. Mine got inured to arsenic the last time I was out
here. If my trypanosomes recur you'll have to try something else."
What else was he to try?
He had read that marked temporary improvement shows itself after a
variety of treatments, after any treatment, in fact, which tends to
improve the health of particular organs. He tried the simplest and
least dangerous of those which he remembered. It could do no harm, in
any case. If it did good, he would feel braced to try something more
searching.
The mere act of administering the dose strengthened him. Action is
always a cordial to a mind at war with itself. At times of
conflagration the fiddle has saved more than Nero from disquieting
thought, tending to suicide. When at last he had forced his will to
the selection of a course, he felt more sure of himself. He set about
the preparation of food for the patient, and, when that was made and
given, he sterilised his hands for the beginning of the delicate task
of culture-making. He had plenty of tubes of media of different kinds.
He selected those most likely to give quick results. They were media
of bouillon and agar. One of them, a special medium of rabbit's flesh
and Witte's peptone, had been prepared by Lionel months before, in
far-distant London. Roger remembered how they had talked together, in
their enthusiasm, during the making of that medium. He had had little
thought then of the circumstances under which it would come to be used.
He had never before felt home-sick for London. He was home-sick now.
He longed to be back in London with Lionel, in the bare, airy room in
Pump Court, where the noise of the Strand seemed like the noise of
distant trains which never passed. He longed to be back there, out of
this loneliness, with Lionel well again. The memory of their little
bickerings came back to him. Travel is said to knock off the angles of
a man. If the man has fire in him, the process may burn the fingers of
those near him. Little moments of irritation, after sleepless nights,
after fever, after over-exertion, had flamed up between them. No
Europeans can travel together for many hundreds of miles in the tropics
without these irritable moments. They derive from physical weakness of
some kind, rather than from any weakness of character, though the links
which bind the two are, of course, close and subtle. He told himself
this; but he was not to be comforted. The memory of those occasional,
momentary jarrings gave him keen pain. If Lionel got over this
illness, he would make it up to him. He thought of many means by which
he might make their journey together more an adventure of the finer
character. "Lionel," he said, aloud, looking down on the sick man, "I
want you to forgive me."
There was no sign of comprehension from Lionel. He lay there muttering
nervously. His skin was hot to the touch with that dry febrile heat
which gives to him who feels it such a shocking sense of the body's
usurpation by malign power. His temperature was beginning to show the
marked and dreadful evening rise. Roger could guess from that that
there would be no improvement until the morning fall. After feeling
the fluttering, rapid pulse, and the weakness of the movements of the
hands, he had grave doubts whether the body would be able to stand the
strain of that sudden fall.
He dragged up a box and sat staring at Lionel, torn by many thoughts.
One thought was that these moments would be less terrible if we could
live always in this awakened sense of the responsibility and wonder of
life. Life was not a succession of actions, planned or not planned,
successful or thwarted, nor was it a "congressus materiai" held
together for a time by food and exercise. It was something tested by
and evolved from those things, which were, in a sense, its instruments,
the bricks with which the house is built. He began to realise how hard
it is to follow life in a world in which the things of life have such
bright colours and moving qualities. He had not realised it before,
even when he had been humbled by the news of Ottalie's death.
In his torment he "thought long" of Ottalie. He called back to his
memory all those beautiful days, up the glens, among the hills. Words
which she had spoken came back to him, each phrase a precious stone,
carefully set in his imagination of what the prompting thought had been
in her mind. Ottalie had lived. He could imagine Ottalie sitting in
judgment upon all the days of her life ranked in coloured succession
before her, and finding none which had been lived without reference,
however unconscious, to some fine conception of what exists
unchangingly, though only half expressed by us.
He roused himself. That was why women are so much finer than men; they
are occupied with life itself, men with its products, or its
management. Whatever his shortcomings had been, he was no longer
dealing with the things of life, but with life itself.
Here he was, for the first time, squarely face to face with a test of
his readiness to deal with life. He forced himself to work again,
following the process with a cautious nicety of delicate care which an
older artist would have despised as niggling and stippling. From time
to time he stopped to look at Lionel, and to take the temperature. The
temperature was swiftly rising.
After some days the fever left Lionel. It left him with well-marked
symptoms of sleeping sickness. The man was gone. The body remained,
weak and trembling, sufficiently conscious to answer simple questions,
but neither energetic enough to speak unprompted, nor to ask for food
when hungry. How long he might live in that state Roger could not
guess. He might live for some weeks; he might die suddenly, shaken by
the violent changing of the temperature between night and morning. It
was not till the power of speech was checked that the horror of it came
home to Roger. Lionel's monosyllables became daily less distinct,
until at last he spoke as though his tongue had grown too large for his
mouth. The sight of his friend turning brutish before his eyes made
Roger weep. The strain was telling on him; his recurrent fever was
shaking him. He felt that if Lionel were to die, he would go mad. He
could not leave his friend. Even in the day-time, with the work to be
done, he could hardly bear to leave him. At night his one solace was
to stare at his friend, in an agony of morbid pity, remembering what
that man had been to him before the closing in of the veil. The veil
was closing more tightly every day. Roger could picture to himself the
change going on inside the dead, on the surface of the brain, behind
the fine eyes, so drowsy now. Such a little thing would arrest that
change. Two cubic centimetres of a white soluble powder. He went over
it in his mind, day after day, till the craving for some of that powder
was more than he could bear. "Lionel," he would say. "Lionel,
Lionel." And the drowsy head would lift itself patiently, and grunt,
showing some sort of recognition. If Lionel had been a stranger (so he
told himself) it might have been endurable; but every attitude and
gesture of the patient was chained to his inmost life by a hundred
delicate links. That he had known Ottalie was the sharpest thing to
bear. In losing Lionel he was losing something which bound Ottalie to
him. Another torment was the knowledge of his own insufficiency. He
thought of the strongly efficient soldiers and scientists who had
studied the disease. He loathed the years of emotional self-indulgence
which had unfitted him for such a crisis. He longed to have for one
half-hour the knowledge and skill of those scientists, their scrupulous
clinical certainty, their reserve of alternative resource.
In reality he was doing very creditably. One of the most marked
qualities in his character was that extreme emotional tenderness, or
sensibility, which is so strong, and in the lack of the robuster
fibres, so vicious, an ingredient of the artistic or generating
intellect. This sensitiveness had been the cause in him of a
scrupulous aloofness from the world. It had made him maintain a sort
of chastity of idea, not so much from an appreciation of the value of
whiteness of mind as from an inherent fastidious dislike of blackness.
As he yielded more and more to the domination of this aloofness, as the
worker in an emotional art is tempted to do, his positive activities
grew weaker till he had come to seek and appreciate in others those
qualities which, essential to manly nature, had been etiolated in
himself by the super-imposition of the unreal. This desire to be
virtuous vicariously, by possessing virtuous friends, had been
gratified pleasantly, with advantage to himself, and with real delight
to those robuster ones who felt his charm. But the removal of the
friends had shown the essential want. The man was like a childless
woman, groping about blindly for an emotional outlet. In his misery he
found an abiding satisfaction in an intense tenderness to the suffering
near him. In his knowledge of himself he had feared that his own
bodily discomfort would make him a selfish, petulant, callous nurse.
Before Lionel had fallen ill, he had been prone to complain of pains,
often real enough to a weak, highly sensitive nature, exposed, after
years of easy living, to the hardships of tropical travel. Lionel's
illness had altered that. It had lifted him into a state of mental
exaltation. In their intenser, spiritual forms, such states have been
called translation, gustation of God, ingression to the divine shadow,
communion with the higher self. They may be defined as states in which
the mind ceasing to be conscious of the body as a vehicle, drives it
superbly to the dictated end, with the indifference of a charioteer
driving for high stakes.
Though in this mood he was supported to fine deeds, he was denied the
knowledge of his success in them. His heart was wrung with pity for
the sufferers for whom he cared so tenderly, day after day; but the
depth of his pity made his impotence to help an agony. He saw too
plainly that the most that he could do was nothing. In the darker
recesses of his mind hovered a horror of giving way and relapsing to
the barbarism about him. His nerve had begun to tremble under the
strain. What he felt was the recurrence of an intense religious mood
which had passed over his mind at the solemn beginning of manhood. He
was finding, now, after years of indifference, the cogency of the old
division into good and evil. As in boyhood, during that religious
phase, he had at times a strange, unreasonable sense of the sinfulness
of certain thoughts and actions, which to others, not awakened, and to
himself, in blinder moods, seemed harmless. He began to resolve all
things into terms of the spiritual war. All this external horror was a
temptation of the devil, to be battled with lest the soul perish in
him. Little things, little momentary thoughts, momentary promptings of
the sense, perhaps only a desire for rest, became charged, in his new
reckoning of values, with terrible significances. Often, after three
hours of labour in the village, after feeding and cleaning those drowsy
dying children, in the hot sun, till he was exhausted and sick at
heart, a fear of giving way to the devil urged him to apply to them
some of the known alleviations, arsenic, mercury, or the like. He
would arise, and dose them all carefully, knowing that it was useless,
that it would merely prolong a living death; but knowing also that to
do so, at all costs, was the duty of one who had taken the military
oath of birth into a Christian race. He learned that the higher notes
of a whistle pleased those even far advanced in sleep. He found time
each day to whistle to them in those few livelier minutes before meals,
when the drowsy became almost alert. He judged that anything which
stimulated them must necessarily be good for them. He tried patiently
and tenderly many mild sensual excitations on them, giving them scent
or snuff to inhale, letting them suck pieces of his precious sugar,
burning blue lights at night before them, giving them slight electric
shocks from his battery. He felt that by these means he kept alive the
faculties of the brain for some few days longer. From Tiri, the
wrinkled old crone, the only uninfected person there, he tried hard to
learn the dialect; but age had frozen her brain, he could learn nothing
from her except "Katirkama." He never rightly knew what Katirkama was.
It was something very amusing, since it made her laugh heartily
whenever it was mentioned. It had something to do with drumming on a
native drum. Katirkama. He beat the drum, and the old body became one
nod of laughter, bowing to the beat with chuckles. "Katirkama," she
cried, giggling. "Katirkama." After Katirkama she would follow him
about, holding his hand, squeaking, till he gave her some sugar.
When the work in the village was finished, he used to walk back to
Lionel, whom he would find drowsed, just as he had left him. On good
days he had some little experiment to make. He would repeat some trick
or accidental gesture winch had caught the dying attention of a native.
If he were lucky, the trick brought back some lively shadow of Lionel.
Even if it passed away at once, it was cheering to see that shadow.
More usually the trick failed. Having seen the occasional effect of
them, he became studious of tricks which might help to keep the
intelligence alert. The sight of Lionel gave him so crushing a sense
of what was happening in the affected brain, that he found it easy to
imagine fancies which, as he judged, would be arresting to it. The
burning of magnesium wire and the turning of a policeman's rattle were
his most successful efforts. One day, while carefully dropping some
dilute carbolic acid into a chegua nest on Lionel's foot, he found that
the burning sensation gave pleasure. It seemed to reach the brain like
a numbed tickling. Lionel laughed a little uneasy, nervous laugh. It
was the only laughter heard at "Portobe" for many days.
Though his work occupied him for ten hours daily, it did not occupy the
whole of him. Much of it, such as the preparation of food and the
daily disinfection of the huts, was mechanical. His mind was left free
to console itself by speculation as best it could. His first
impressions of the solitude were ghastly and overpowering. Waking and
asleep he felt the horror of the prospect of losing Lionel. It was not
that he dreaded the prospect of being alone. His fear was religious.
He feared that the barbarism of the solitude would overpower his little
drilled force of civilised sentiment. He was warring against
barbarism. Lionel was his powerful ally. Looking out from his hut on
the hill he could see barbarism all round him, in a vast and very
silent menacing landscape, secret in forest, sullen in its red,
shrinking river, brooding in the great plain, dotted with bones and
stones. Even the littleness of an English landscape would have been
hard to bear, but this immensity of savagery awed him. He doubted
whether he would be able to bear the presence of that sight without his
ally by him.
He knew that if he let it begin to get upon his nerves he would be
ruined. He took himself in hand on the second day of Lionel's fever.
His situation made him remember a conversation heard years before at
his rooms in Westminster. O'Neill and a young Australian journalist,
of the crude and vigorous kind nurtured by the _Bulletin_, had passed
the evening in talk with him. The Australian had told them of the
loneliness of Australia, and of shepherds and settlers who went mad in
the loneliness on the clearings at the back of beyond. O'Neill had
said that at present Australian literature was the product of home-sick
Englishmen; but that a true Australian literature would begin among
those lonely ones. "One of those fellows just going mad will begin a
literature. And that literature will be the distinctive Australian
literature. In the cities you will only get noisy imitations of what
is commonest in the literature of the mother country." They had stayed
talking till four in the morning. He had never seen the Australian
since that time. He remembered now his stories of shepherds who bolted
themselves into their huts in the effort to get away from the
loneliness which had broken their nerve. He must take care, he said,
not to let that state of mind take hold upon him.
He began to school himself that night. He forced himself up the hill,
into the Zimbabwe, at the eerie moment when the dusk turns vaguely
darker, and the stars are still pale. All the dimness of ruin and
jungle brooded malignantly, informed by menace. Faint noises of
creeping things rustled in the alley between the walls. Dew was fast
forming. Drops wetted him with cold splashes as he broke through
creepers. Below him stretched the continent. No light of man burned
in that expanse. There was a blackness of forest, and a ghostliness of
grass, all still. Out of the night behind him came a stealthiness of
approach, more a sense than a sense perception. Coming in the night so
secretly, it was hard to locate. It had that protective ventriloquism
of sounds produced in the dark. There is an animal sense in us, not
nearly etiolated yet, which makes us quick to respond to a light noise
in the night. It makes us alert upon all sides; but with a tremulous
alertness, for we have outgrown the instinctive knowledge of what comes
by night. Roger faced round swiftly, with a knocking heart. The
noise, whatever it was, ceased. After an instant of pause a spray,
till then pinned, swept loose, as though the talon pinning it had
lifted. It swept away with a faint swishing noise, followed by a
pattering of drops. After that there came a silence while the listener
and the hidden watcher stared into the blackness for what should
follow. The noise of the spattering gave Roger a sense of the
direction of the danger, if it were danger. He drew out his revolver.
Another spray spilled a drop or two. Then, for an instant, near the
ground, not far away, two greenish specks burned like glow-worms, like
crawling fireflies, like two tiny electric lights suddenly turned on.
They were shut off instantly. They died into the night, making it
blacker. After they had faded there came a hushed rustling which might
have been near or far off. When that, too, had died, there was a
silence.
It was so still that the dripping of the dew made the night like a
death vault. Terrible, inscrutable stars burned aloft. Roger pressed
his back against the wall. Up and up towered the wall, an immense
labour, a cynical pile, stamped with lust's cruelties. It almost had
life, so seen. In front was the unknown; behind, that uncanny thing.
Roger waited, tense, till the darkness was alive with all fear.
Everything was in the night there, gibbering faces, death, the sudden
cold nosing of death's pig-snout on the heart. He swung his revolver
up, over his left elbow, and fired.
The report crashed among the ruin, sending the night rovers fast and
far. Chur-ra-rak! screamed the scattering fowl. Roger paid little
heed to them. He was bending down in his tracks hugging his forehead.
The hammer of the kicking revolver had driven itself into his brow with
a welt which made him sick. He groped his way down the hill again,
thinking himself lucky that the iron had not smashed his eye. He
thought no more of terror for that night.
But the next night it came with the dark. The old savage devil of the
dark was there; the darkness of loneliness, the loneliness of silence,
the immanent terror of places not yet won, still ruled by the old
unclean gods, not yet exorcised by virtue. Looking at it, after night
had fallen, from the door of "Portobe," it seemed full of the promise
of death. The little rustling noises were there; the suggestion of
stealthy death; the brooding of it all. A braver man would have been
awed by it. It was not all cowardice which daunted Roger. It was that
animal something not yet etiolated, which on a dark night in a lonely
place at a noise of stirring makes a man's heart thump like a buck's
heart. To stare into the blackness with eyes still dazzled from the
camp-fire gave a sense of contrast not easy to overcome. The comfort
of the fire was something, something civilised, conquered, human. And
the beloved figure lying ill was one of his own kind, leagued with him
against the inhuman. The vastness of the inhuman overpowered his will.
He dared not face it. Sudden terror told him of something behind him.
He hurried into the hut and heaped boxes against the tarpaulin door.
The moment of fear passed, leaving him ashamed. He was giving way to
nerves. That would not do. He must brace himself to face the
darkness. He forced himself down the hill to the village, and into the
village. Kneeling down he peered into the hut where old Tiri rocked
herself by a fire of reeds, like the withered beauty in Villon. She
did not see him. She was crooning a ditty. From time to time, with a
nervous jerk of the arm, she flung on a handful of reed, which crackled
and flared, so that she chuckled. He was comforted by the sight of
her. Any resolute endurance of life is comforting to the perplexed.
He walked back up the hill without the tremors he had felt in going
down. Something in the walk, the coolness and quiet of it, made him
forget his fears. He experienced an animal feeling of being, for the
moment, at one with the night. "Surely," he thought, "if man can
conceive a spiritual state, calm and august like the night, he can
attain it." It might even be that by brooding solitary, like the night
itself, one would arrive at the truth sooner than by the restless
methods left behind. Standing by the door of his hut again, the
darkness exalted him, not, in the common way, by giving him a sense of
the splendour of nature, but by heightening for an instant his
knowledge of the superior splendour of men.
He stood looking out for a little while before some rally of delirium
called him within to his friend. Later, when he had finished his work
for the night, he thought gloomily of what his fate would be if the
death of Lionel left him alone there, so many miles from his fellows.
What was he to do? How was he to cross four hundred miles of tropical
country to the nearest settlement of whites? No civilised man had been
there since the Phoenicians fought their last rearguard fight round the
wagons of the last gold train. Four hundred miles meant a month's hard
marching, even if all went well. He could not count on doing it in
less than a month. And how was he to live during that month, how guide
himself? Even in mere distance it was a hard walk. It was much such a
walk as, say, from the Land's End to Aberdeen, but with all the natural
difficulties multiplied by ten, and all the artificial helps removed.
It was going to be forced on him. He would have to attempt that walk
or die alone, where he was, after watching his friend die. He glanced
anxiously at Lionel to see if there were any chance of Lionel's being
dragged and helped over that distance. He saw no chance. He would
have to watch Lionel dying. He would have to try to stave off Lionel's
death by all the means known to him, knowing all the time that all the
means were useless. Then he would bury Lionel, after watching him die.
After that he would have to watch the villagers dying; and then, when
quite alone, set forth.
And to what would he set forth? What had life to give him, if, as was
very unlikely, he should win back to life? His life was Ottalie's. He
had consecrated his talent to her, he had devoted all his powers to
her. The best of his talent had been a shadowy sentimental thing, by
which no great life could be lived, no great sorrow overcome. The best
of his powers had left him in the centre of a continent, helpless to do
what he had set out to do. He had not made the world "nobler for her
sake." Ah, but he would, he said, starting up, filled suddenly with a
vision of that dead beauty. He would help the world to all that it had
lost in her. He must be Ottalie's fair mind at work still, blessing
the world. So would his mind possess her, creeping in about her soul,
drinking more and more of her, till her strength was the strength by
which he moved. She was very near him then, he felt. He felt that all
this outward world of his was only an image of his mind, and that she
being in his mind, was with him. His heart was a wretched heart in
Africa, in which a sick man babbled to a weary man. But there in his
heart, he felt, was that silent guest, beautiful as of old, waiting in
the half-darkness, waiting quietly, watching him, wanting him to do the
right thing, waiting till it was done, so that she might rise, and walk
to him, and take his hands. He must not fail her.
He turned to the corner in which he felt her presence. "Ottalie!
Ottalie!" he said in a low voice. "Ottalie, dear, help me to do this.
I'm going to fail, dear. Help me not to." Lionel moaned a little,
turning on his side again. A draught ruffled the fire slightly. No
answer moved in his heart. He had half expected that the answer would
speak within him, in three short words. No words came. Instead, he
felt burningly the image of Ottalie as he had seen her once up the
Craga' Burn, one summer at sunset. They had stood among the moors
together, on the burn's flat grassy bank, near a little drumming fall,
which guggled over a sway of rushes. Sunset had given a glory to the
moors. All the great hills rose up in the visionary clearness of an
Irish evening after rain. A glow like the glow of health was on them.
It was ruddy on Ottalie's cheek, as she turned her grave hazel eyes
upon him, smiling, to ask him if he saw the Rest House. She meant a
magic rest-house, said, in popular story, to be somewhere on the hill
up Craga' way. Roger had talked with men who claimed to have been
beguiled there by "them" to rest for the night. Ottalie and he had
narrowed down its possible whereabouts almost to the spot where they
were standing; and she had turned, smiling, with the sun upon her, to
ask him if he saw it. They had never seen it, though they had often
looked for it at magical moments of the day. Now looking back he saw
that old day with all the glow of the long-set sun. Ottalie, and
himself, and the Craga' Burn, the rush sway trailing, the pleasant,
faint smell of the blight on the patch beyond, the whiff of turf smoke.
Ottalie. Ottalie. Ottalie in the blind grave with the dogrose on her
breast.
Living alone fosters an intensity of personal life which sometimes
extinguishes the social instinct, even in those who live alone by the
compulsion of accident. It had become Roger's lot to look into himself
for solace. Most of those things which society had given to him during
his short, impressionable life were useless to him. He had to depend
now upon the intensity of his own nature. He reckoned up the extent of
his civilisation, as shewn by the amount retained in his memory. It
amounted, when all was said, when allowance had been made for the
amount absorbed unconsciously into character, to a variety of
smatterings, some of them pleasant, some interesting, and all tinged by
the vividness of his personal predilection. He had read, either in the
original or in translation, all the masterpieces of European
literature. He had seen, either in the original or in reproduction,
all the masterpieces of European art. His memory for art and
literature was a good general one; but general knowledge was now
useless to him. What he wanted was particular knowledge, memory of
precise, firm, intellectual images, in words, or colour, or bronze, to
give to his mind the strength of their various order, as he brooded on
them menaced by death. It was surprising to him how little remained of
all that he had read and seen. The tale of Troy remained, very
vividly, with many of the tragedies rising from it. Dante remained.
The Morte D'Arthur remained. Much of the Bible remained. Of
Shakespeare he had a little pocket volume containing eight plays.
These, and the memories connected with them, were in his mind with a
reality not till then known to him. Among the lesser writers he found
that his memory was kinder to those whom he had learned by heart as a
boy than to those whom he had read with interest as a man. He knew
more Scott than Flaubert, and more Mayne Reid than Scott. From
thinking over these earlier literary idols, with a fierceness of
tenderness not to be understood save by those who have been forced, as
he was forced, to the construction of an intense inner life, he began
to realise the depth and strength of the emotion of the indulgence of
memory.
Thenceforward he indulged his memory whenever his work spared his
intelligence. He lived again in his past more intensely than he had
ever lived. His life in Ireland, his days with Ottalie, her words and
ways and looks, he realised again minutely with an exactness which was,
perhaps, half imaginative. He troubled his peace with the sweetness of
those visions. The more deeply true they were, the more strong their
colour; the more intense the vibration of their speech, the more sharp
was the knowledge of their unreality, the more bitter the longing for
the reality. He was home-sick for the Irish hills which rose up in his
mind so clearly, threaded by the flash of silver. He thought of them
hour after hour with a yearning, brooding vision which gnawed at his
heart-strings.
After a few weeks he found that he could think of them without that
torment. He had perfected his imagination of them by an intensity of
thought. They had become, as it were, a real country in his brain,
through which his mind could walk at will, almost as he had walked in
the reality. By mental effort, absorbing his now narrowed external
life, he could imagine himself walking with Ottalie up the well-known
waters and loanings, so poignantly, with such precision of imagined
detail, that the country seen by him as he passed through it was as
deeply felt as the real scene. The solemnity of his life made his
imagination of Ottalie deeper and more precious. At times he felt her
by him, as though an older, unearthly sister walked with him, half
friend, half guide. At other times, when he was lucky, in the intense
and splendid dreams which come to those of dwarfed lives, he saw her in
vision. Such times were white times, which made whole days precious;
but at all times he had clear, precise memories of her; and, better
still, a truer knowledge of her, and, through that, a truer knowledge
of life. He thought of her more than of his work. In thinking of her
he was thankful that all his best work had been written in her praise.
"His spirit was hers, the better part of him." If he had anything good
in him, or which strained towards good, she had put it there in the
beauty of her passing. If he might find this cure, helping poor
suffering man, it would be only a spark of her, smouldering to sudden
burning in a heap of tow.
His efforts to make a culture succeeded. With very great difficulty he
obtained a vigorous culture of trypanosomes, of the small kind usually
obtained by culture. He strove to make the culture virulent, by
growing it at the artificial equable temperature most favourable to the
growth of the germ (25° C.), and by adding to the bouillon on which the
germs fed minute quantities of those chemical qualities likely to
strengthen them in one way or another.
It was a slow process, and Roger could ill spare time in his race with
death. He had grown calmer and less impulsive since he had left the
feverish, impulsive city; but he had not yet acquired the detachment
from circumstance of the doctor or soldier. The question "Shall I be
in time?" was always jarring upon the precept "You must not hurry." At
last, one day when Lionel had shewn less responsiveness than usual, a
temporary despondency made him give up hope. He saw no chance of
having his anti-toxin ready before Lionel died. He picked up a book on
serum therapy, and turned the pages idly. A heading caught his eye.
"_The treatment should begin soon after the disease has declared
itself_" ran the heading. The paragraph went on to say that the
anti-toxin was little likely to be of use after the toxin had taken a
strong hold upon the patient's system. The treatment was more likely
to be successful if a large initial injection of the anti-toxin were
given directly the disease became evident. There it was, in black and
white; it was no use going on. He had tried all his ameliorative
measures, with temporary success. Latterly he had tried them
sparingly, fearing to immunise the germ. He had wanted to keep by him
unused some strong drug which would hold off the disease at the end.
Now there was nothing for it but to give the strong drug. His friend
was dying. He might burn his ships and comb his hair for death. He
had tried and failed.
The mood of depression had been ushered in by an attack of fever
different from his other attacks. It did not pass off after following
a regular course, like the recurrent malaria. It hung upon him in a
constant, cutting headache, which took the strength out of him. He sat
dully, weak as water, with a clanging head, repeating that Lionel was
dying. Lionel was dying. One had only to think for a moment to see
that it was hopeless. Lionel was going to die.
He raised his hand, thinking that something had bitten his throat. His
throat glands were swollen. For a moment he thought that the swelling
was only a mosquito bite; but a glance in the mirror shewed him that it
was worse than that. The swollen glands were a sign that he, too, was
sickening for death. His fever of the last few hours was the initial
fever. Sooner or later he would drowse off to death as Lionel was
drowsing. He might have only two more months of life. Two months.
Ottalie had had two startling, frightened seconds before death choked
her. So this was what Ottalie had felt in those two seconds, fear, a
blind longing of love for half a dozen, a thought of sky and freedom, a
craving, an agony, and then the fear again. He rose up. "Even if it
be all useless," he said to himself, "I will fire off all my cartridges
before I go." He brought out the Chamberland filter and set to work.