"Is the tsetse migrating, then, or can the thing be conveyed by contagion?"
"No. I don't think it's a contagious thing. I should say it almost certainly isn't. It needs direct inoculation. And as far as we know the tsetse keeps pretty near to one place all through its life."
"I know a writer who claims that we are spreading it. Is that so?"
"Indirectly. You see, East Africa is not like America or any other horse country. You haven't got much means of transport, except bearers, unless you go by river, and even then you may have to make portages. Going with natives from one district to another is sure to spread the infection. When infected people come to a healthy district, their germs are sure to be inoculated into the healthy by some tick or bug, even if there are no tsetses to do it. I believe there are trypanosomes in the hut-bugs. I don't know, though, that hut-bugs are guiltier than any other kind. It's impossible to say. From the hour you land until the hour you sail, you are always being bitten or stung by something. Bugs, ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, tsetses, ants, jiggers, gads, hippos, sandflies, wasps. You put on oil of lavender, if you have any. But even with that you are always being bitten."
"And what is the tsetse bite like?"
"You've been to Portobe, haven't you? I remember Ottalie Fawcett speaking of you, years ago, before I went out. You had that cottage at the very end of the loaning, just above the sea? Well. Did you ever go on along the cliff from there to a place where you have to climb over a very difficult barbed-wire fence just under an ash-tree? I mean just before you come to a nunnery ruin, where there is a little waterfall?"
"Yes," said Roger. "I know the exact spot. There used to be a hawk's nest in the cliff just below the barbed wire."
"Well, just there, there are a lot of those reddy-grey flies called clegs. You get them going up to Essna-Lara. That's another place. They bite the horses. You must have been bitten by them. Well, a tsetse is not much like a cleg to look at. It's duller and smaller. It's likest to a house-fly, except for the wings, which are unlike any other kind of insect wings. It comes at you not unlike a cleg. You know how savage a cleg is? He dashes at you without any pretence. He only feints when he is just going to land. And he follows you until you kill him. A tsetse is like that. He'll follow you for half a mile, giving you no peace. Like a cleg, he settles down on you very gently, so that you don't notice him. You'll remember the mosquitoes at Belize. Mosquitoes are like that. Then, when he has sucked his fill and unscrewed his gimlet, you feel a smarting itch, and see your hand swollen. If you are not very well at the time a tsetse bite can be pretty bad. If you'll come to my rooms some time I'll show you some tsetse. They're nothing to look at. They're very like common house-flies."
"And you have been studying all this on the spot? Will you tell me what made you take to it?"
"Oh, I was always interested in that kind of thing. I've always liked hot climates, and being in wild, lonely places. And then my old chief was a splendid fellow. He made me interested. I got awfully keen on it. I want to go out again. You know, I want to get at the bottom of the trypanosome. His life-history isn't known yet, as we know the cycle of the malaria parasite. We don't even know what it is in him which causes the disease. And we don't know very much really about the tsetse, nor what part the tsetse plays in the organism's life. There's a lot which I should like to find out, or try to find out. It's the trying which gives one the pleasure."
"But I think it's heroic of you," said Roger. "Are there many of you out there, doing this?"
"Not very many."
"It's a heroic thing to do," said Roger. "Heroic. The loneliness alone must make it heroic."
"You get used to the loneliness. It gives you nerves at first. But in my opinion the heat keeps you from thinking much about the loneliness. I like heat myself, but it takes it out of most of the griffs. The heat can be pretty bad."
"All the same, it is a wonderful thing to do."
"Yes. It's a good thing to spot the cause of a disease like that. But you over-rate the heroic part. It's all in the day's work. One takes it as it comes, and one has a pretty good time, too. One never thinks of the risk, which is really very slight. Doctors face worse things in London every day. So do nurses. A doctor was telling me only the other day how a succession of nurses went down to a typhus epidemic and died one after the other. There's nothing like that in the Protectorate with sleeping sickness."
"But being the only white man, away in the wilds, with the natives dying all round you!"
"Yes. That is pretty bad. I was in the middle of a pretty bad outbreak in a little place called Ikupu. It was rather an interesting epidemic, because it happened in a place where there weren't any of the tsetse which is supposed to do the harm. They may have been there; but I couldn't find any. It must have been another kind which did the damage at Ikupu. As a matter of fact, I did find trypanosomes in another kind there, which was rather a feather in my cap. Well, I was alone there. My assistant died of blackwater fever. And there I was with a sleeping village. There were about twenty cases. Most of the rest of the natives ran away, and no doubt spread the infection. Those twenty cases were pretty nearly all the society of Ikupu. Some were hardly ill at all. They just had a little fever, perhaps, or a skin complaint on the chest, and tender, swollen glands. Others were just as bad as they could be. They were in all stages of the disease. Some were just beginning to mope outside their huts. Others were sitting still there, not even caring to ask for food, just moping away to death, with their mouths open. Generally, one gets used to seeing that sort of thing; but I got nerves that time. You see, they were rather a special tribe at Ikupu. They called themselves Obmali, or some such name. Their lingo was rather rummy. Talking with the chief I got the impression that they were the relics of a tribe which had been wiped out further west. They believed that sleeping sickness was caused by a snake-woman in a swampy part of the forest. Looking after all those twenty people, and taking tests from them, gave me fever a good deal. That is one thing you have to get used to—fever. You get used to doing your work with a temperature of one hundred and two degrees. It's queer about fever. Any start, or shock, or extra work, may bring it on you. I had it, as I said, a good deal. Well, I got into the way of thinking that there was a snake-woman. A woman with a puff-adder head, all mottled. I used to barricade my hut at night against her."
Dr. Heseltine drew his chair up. "What are you two discussing? Talking about sleeping sickness?" he asked. "How does the new treatment suit you, Lionel? No headache, I hope? It's apt to make you headachy. There's a subject for a play for you, Mr. Naldrett. 'Man and the Trypanosome.' You could bring the germs on to the stage, and kill them off with a hypodermic syringe."
"Yes," said Roger. "It has all the requirements of a modern play: strength, silence, and masculinity. There's even a happy ending to it."
Lionel began to talk to Dr. Heseltine. Roger crossed the room to talk to Leslie. He heard Lionel saying something about "waiting to give the monkey a chance." He did not get another talk with Lionel that night. After they joined the ladies, Ethel Fawcett sang. She had a good, but not very strong voice. She sang some Schumann which had been very dear to Ottalie. Her voice was a little like Ottalie's in the high notes. It haunted Roger all the way home, and into his lonely room. Sitting down before the fireplace he had a sudden vision of drenching wet grass, and a tangle of yellowing honeysuckle, heaped over a brook which gurgled. For an instant he had the complete illusion of the smell of meadowsweet, and Ottalie coming singing from the house, so sharply that he gasped.
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 ofbelles-lettreswas 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 theLancetandBritish 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'sTwenty-four Hours of Moltke's Strategy; Meckel'sTacticsand Sommernacht'sTraum; Chancellorsville; Colonel Henderson'sLife of Stonewall Jackson; Essays on the Science of WarandSpicheren; Wolseley'sLife of Marlborough; Colonel Maude'sLeipzig; Stoffel's contribution to theVie de Jules Cesar; a battered copy of Mahan'sWar of 1812; and three or four small military text-books onReconnaissance, 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.
And here will I, in honour of thy love,Dwell by thy grave, forgetting all those joysThat former times made precious to mine eyes.The Faithful Shepherdess.
Ten months later Roger sat swathed in blankets under mosquito netting, steering a boat upstream. He was in the cold fit of a fever. The bows of the boat were heaped with the cages of laboratory animals and with boxes, on the top of which a negro sat, singing a song. The singer clapped gravely with his hands to mark the time. "Marumba is very far away," he sang. "Yes. It is far away, and nobody ever got there." At times, pausing in his song to lift a hand to Roger, he pointed out a snag or shoal. At other times the rowers, lifting their paddles wearily, sang for a few bars in chorus, about the bones on the road to Marumba. Then the chorus died; the paddles splashed; the tholes grunted. The boat lagged on into the unknown, up the red, savage river, which loitered, and steamed, and stank, like a river of a beginning earth.
Lionel, heaped with blankets, lay at Roger's feet. His teeth were chattering. The wet rag round his forehead had slipped over his eyes. The debile motion of the hand which tried to thrust the rag away, so that he might see, told of an intense petulant weakness. By him lay a negro, wasted to a skeleton, who watched Roger with a childish grave intentness out of eyes heavy with death.
The boat ground slowly past a snag. Roger, raising himself upon a box, looked out painfully over the river bank to the immense distance beyond, where, in a dimness, mists hung. To the right, a mile or two from the river, was forest, sloping to an expanse of water, intensely blue. Beyond the water was grass sloping up to forest. The forest jutted out, immense, dark, silent. Nothing lay beyond it but forest, trees towering up, trees fallen, uprooted, rotting, a darkness, a green gloom. Over it was the sky, of hard, bright blue metal, covered with blazing films. Outside it, like captains halted at the head of a horde, were solitary, immense trees, with ruddy boles. To each side of them, the forest stretched, an irregular wilderness of wood, grey, rather than green, in the glare aloft; below, darker. The water at the foot of the slope opened out in bays, ruffled by the wind, shimmering. Reeds grew about the bays. A cluster of tall, orange-blossomed water-plants hid the rest from Roger's sight as the boat loitered on.
To the left it was a sometimes swampy plain-land, reaching on into the mists, with ants' nests for milestones. Little gentle hills rose up, some of them dotted with thorn-trees. They were like the stumps of islands worn away by the river, when, long ago, it had brimmed that plain-land from the forest to the far horizon.
Far ahead, to the left of the river, Roger noticed a slightly larger hill. It held his gaze for a few minutes. It stood up from the plain exactly like a Roman camp which he had visited in England long before, one Christmas Day. He liked to look at it. There was comfort in looking at it. It was like a word from Europe, that hill beyond there, greyish in the blinding light. It was like a Roman camp, like military virtue, order, calm, courage, dignity. He needed some such message. He was in command of a shipload of suffering. He was wandering on into the unknown, in charge of dying men. Smoke was rising from below the hill, a single spire of smoke. He hailed the singer.
"Merrylegs," he cried, "what is the smoke there?"
"Jualapa," said the man, standing up to look. "Jualapa."
"It can't be Jualapa," said Lionel petulantly, struggling to lift his blankets. "Oh, stop that noise, Roger. It shakes my head to pieces."
"Jualapa," cried the rowers excitedly. "Jualapa." They dropped their paddles. Standing on the thwarts they peered under the sharps of their hands at the rising smoke. They rubbed their bellies, thinking of meat. One of them, beating his hands together, broke into a song about Jualapa.
Roger, stumbling forward, shaken by sickness, bade them to give way, quietly. The jabbering died down as the tholes began again to grunt. Merrylegs, still clapping his hands, broke into another song.
Jualapa is near. Yes, Jualapa is near. Not like Marumba.We will eat meat in Jualapa. Much meat. Much meat.The men of Little Belly will eat meat in Jualapa.
"Shut your silly head, Merrylegs," cried Roger angrily. The song broke off. Merrylegs began to tell the bow-oar what meat there would be in Jualapa. He said that there would be cattle, and perhaps a diseased cow among them. The rowing seemed to freshen a little. The boat dragged on a little quicker.
"How are you, Lionel?" Roger asked. It was a foolish question.
"Oh, for God's sake don't ask silly questions," said Lionel very weakly. "Do leave me alone."
For answer, Roger gently renewed the compress round the sick man's head. From the thirst which was torturing him he guessed that his fever's hot fit would soon begin. He prayed that it might keep off until they had reached the smoke. They were probably nearing some village. They might camp at the village. Only he would have to be well when they reached the village. He would have to get Lionel ashore, into some comfortable hut. He would have to feed him there with some strong comforting broth. Before he could do that, he would have to see the village headman. He would have to look after the bearers. The boat would have to be moored. Some of her gear would have to be unloaded.
There could be no thought of going on, upstream, to Jualapa, in their present state. A native had told them, the day before, that Jualapa, three days' journey upstream, was stricken with sleeping sickness. "All were sleeping," he said. "Men, women, and little children. The cattle were not milked at Jualapa." It was the first time that they had heard of the disease since leaving the coast. They had decided to attempt Jualapa.
They were both suffering from fever. They would have been glad to camp for a few days before pushing on; but Lionel forbade it. The rowers were getting homesick. Three of them had contracted dysentery. He felt that if they called a halt anywhere their men would desert them. The important thing was to push on, he said, to carry the men so far that they would be afraid to run. If the men deserted after the leaders had engaged the disease, well and good, there would be the work to do. But if they deserted before that, the expedition would end before Roger took his first lumbar puncture. It was the last sensible decision Lionel had been able to make. His fever had recurred within the hour. Since then he had been dangerously ill, so ill, and with such violent changes of temperature, that his weakness, now that the fever lifted, frightened Roger.
Roger shook and chattered, trying to think. He was ill; so ill that he could not think clearly. The horrible part of it, to him, was to be just clear enough in his head to fear to change Lionel's decision. He wanted to change for Lionel's sake; but with this fever smouldering in his brain, surging and lifting, like a hot blast withering him, the plan seemed august, like a law of the Medes and Persians. He was afraid of changing. At last, in a momentary clearing of the head, he made up his mind to change. He would anchor. They would halt at the smoke. They would land and camp. Nothing could be done till the leaders were cured. If the men deserted, he would trust to luck to be able to hire new men. He could not go on like this; Lionel might die. The fever closed in upon his mind again, surging and withering. The air seemed strangely thick. Merrylegs wavered and blurred. The boat grounded on a mud-bank, and brushed past some many-shimmering reeds with a long swish. The dying negro, stirred by some memory, which the noise had awakened in him, raised himself faintly, asking something. He fell back faint, closing his eyes, then opening them. He beat with one hand, jabbering the name Mpaka. His teeth clenched. He was in the death agony. One of the stroke-oars, clambering over the boxes in the stern-sheets, beat the dying man upon the chest. He was beating out the devil, he explained. He soon grew tired. He shouted in the sick man's ear, laughed delightedly at his groans, and went forward to explain his prowess. He broke out into a song about it.
Kilemba has a big devil in his belly.Big devil eat up Kilemba. Eat all up.But Muafi a strong man. Very strong man. Devil no good.Not eat Muafi.
They swept round a bend, where crocodiles, like great worm-casts, sunned and nuzzled, with mud caking off their bellies. The boat passed into a broad, above which, the hill like a Roman camp rose up. Pink cranes stood in the shallows. Slowly, one of them rose aloft, heavily flagging. Another rose, then another, then another, till they made a pinkish ribbon against the forest. Following the line of their flight Roger saw a few delicate deer leave their pasture, startled by the starting of the cranes. They moved off daintily, looking uneasily behind them. Soon they broke into a run.
On the left bank, in a space of poor soil, covered with shingle by a freshet, some vultures cowered and sidled about a dead thing. Roger stared stupidly at them. Something of a warning of death moved through the surging of his fever. He said to himself that there was death here. Words spoke in his brain, each word like a fire-flash. "No white man has ever been here before. You are the first. Take care. There is death here." Some vague fear of possible war, so vague that he was not quite certain that it was not a memory of a war-scare at home, made him look to his revolver. He thrust up the catch with his thumb, and stared at the seven dull brass discs pulled slightly forward by the extractor. There were seven, and we are seven, and there were seven planets. The fever made him stare at the opened breech for a full minute.
Out of some tall water-plants, whose long, bluish-grey leaves looked very cool in the glare of heat, came flies. They came to the attack with a whirling fierceness like clegs. They were small, brown, insignificant flies. They were tsetse flies. The boat pulled out into the open to avoid them. After a few more minutes Roger called upon the rowers to stop rowing.
He was in the middle of the broad, looking at the left bank, where a trodden path led to the water's edge. For many centuries men and beasts had watered there. The path had worn a deep rut into the bank. What struck Roger about it was its narrowness. It was the narrow track of savages. The people who made it had used it fearfully, one at a time, full of suspicion, like drinking deer. Their fear had had a kind of idealism about it. It might truly be said of those nervous drinkers that when they drank, they drank to the good health of their State. Even in his fever, the sight of the path shocked Roger with a sense of the danger of life in this place. What was the danger? What was the life?
Beyond the track, at a little distance from the river, was a thick thorn hedge surrounding a village. From the midst of the village a single stream of smoke arose. It went up straight for a foot or two, behind the shelter of the hedge. Then it blew down gustily, in wavering puffs. There was no other sign of life in the village. A few hens were picking food in the open. A cow, standing with drooped head above the corpse of her calf, awaited death. Her bones were coming through her skin, poor beast. There were black patches of flies upon her. Three vultures waited for her. One of them was stretching his wings with the air of a man yawning. Vultures were busy about a dead cow in the middle distance. Dark heaps, further off, had still something of the appearance of cows. The men, looking earnestly about from the tops of the boxes, jabbered excitedly, pointing. Roger unslung his binoculars and stared at the silent place. He could see no one. There were dead cows, a dying cow, and those few clucking hens. He wondered if there could be an ambush. The grass was tall enough, in the clumps, to shelter an enemy; but the wild birds passed from clump to clump without fear. In a bare patch two scarlet-headed birds were even fighting together. Their neck feathers were ruffled erect. They struck and tugged. They rose, flapping, to cuff each other with their wings. Leaping aloft they thrust with their spurs. A hen, less brilliantly coloured, watched the battle. But for these birds the place was peaceful. The wind ruffled the grass; the smoke was gusty; one of the poultry crooned with a long gurgling cluck.
Something made Roger look from the village to the hill like a Roman camp. It glistened grey in the sun-blaze. The dance of the air above it was queer, almost like smoke. He stared at it through his glasses. After a long look he turned to stare into the water to rest his eyes. "I am mad," he said to himself. "I am dreaming this. Presently I shall wake up." He looked again. There could be no doubt of it. The hill was covered with a grey stone wall at least thirty feet high. There, about three-quarters of a mile away, was the ruin of an ancient town, as old, perhaps, as the Pharaohs. There was no doubt that it was old. Parts of it, undermined by burrowing things, or thrust out by growing things, were fallen in heaps. Other parts were overgrown twelve feet thick, with vegetation. Trees grew out of it. A few cacti upon the wall-top were sharply outlined against the sky. On the further end of the wall there was a fire-coloured blaze, where some poisonous weed, having stifled down all weaker life, triumphed in sprawling yellow blossoms, spotted and smeared with drowsy juice. There were dense swarms of flies above it as Roger could guess from the movements of the birds across the path. He watched the ruin. There was no trace of human occupation there. No smoke shewed there. Apparently the place had become a possession for the bittern. Wild beasts of the forests lay there, owls dwelt there, and satyrs danced there. It was as desolate as Babylon at the end of Isaiah xiii.
He looked at the men to see what effect the ruin had upon them. They did not look at it. They had the limited primitive intelligence, which cannot see beyond the facts of physical life. They were looking at the village, jabbering as they looked.
"What are we stopping for?" said Lionel.
"There's a village," said Roger. "It seems to have cattle plague." Lionel struggled weakly to a sitting position, and looked out with vacant eyes.
"There's a ruin on the hill, there," said Roger.
"Plague and ruin are the products of this land," said Lionel. "Don't stand there doddering, Naldrett. Find out what's happening here."
"Look here, you rest," said Roger with an effort. "Just lie back on the blankets here, and rest."
"How the devil am I to rest when you won't keep the gang quiet?"
"You just close your eyes, Lionel," said Roger. "Close them. Keep them closed." He sluiced a rag in the shallow water. "Here's a new compress for you."
He ordered the men to pull in to the watering-place, while he looked about in what he called the toy box for presents for the village chief. He took some copper wire, a few brass cartridge shells, some green beads, some bars of brightly coloured sealing wax, a doll or two, of the kind which say, "Mamma," when stricken on the solar plexus, a doll's mirror, a knife, an empty green bottle, and a tin trumpet. He tilted a white-lined green umbrella over Lionel's head. He slipped over the side as the boat grounded. Merrylegs followed him, carrying the presents. They slopped through shallow water, and climbed the bank.
Merrylegs, clapping his hands loudly, called to the villagers in the Mwiri dialect that a king, a white man, a most glorious person, was advancing to them. Roger asked him if he had heard of this village at their stopping-place the day before. No, he said, he had never heard of this village. It was a poor place, very far away; he had never heard of it. He called again, batting with his hands. No answer came. Roger, looking anxiously about, saw no sign of life. No sign shewed on the city wall. A new vulture, lighting by the dying cow, eyed him gravely, without enthusiasm. One of those already there flapped his wings again as though yawning. "Merrylegs," said Roger, "we must go into the village." He shifted round his revolver holster, so that the weapon lay to hand. They skirted the zareba till they came to the low hole, two feet square, which led through the thorns into the town. The mud of the road was pounded hard by the continual passing of the natives. Fragments of a crudely decorated pottery were trodden in here and there. Lying down flat, Merrylegs could see that the stakes which served as door to the entrance, were not in place inside the stockade. The visitor was free to enter. "Think all gone away," said Merrylegs. "Slave man he catch."
Roger did not now believe in the theory of slave man.
"It is nonsense," he said. "Nonsense. There must be death here." He stood by the gate, breathing heavily, not quite knowing, from time to time, what he was doing, at other times knowing clearly, but not caring. Little things, the crawling of a tick, the cluck of a hen, the noise of his own breath, seemed important to his fever-clogged brain. "I'll go in," he said, at last.
"Not go in," said Merrylegs promptly. "Perhaps inside. Perhaps make him much beer. All drunk him." He called again in Mwiri, but no answer came. A hen, perhaps expecting food, came clucking through the hole, cocking her eyes at the strangers. Roger, finding a bit of biscuit in his pocket, dropped it before her. She worried it away from his presence, and gulped it down gluttonously before the other hens could see.
Roger knelt down. Peering up the tunnel he tried to make out what lay within. He could not see. The entrance passage had been built with a bend in the middle for the greater safety of the tribe. For all that he could know, a warrior might lie beyond the bend, ready to thrust a spear into him. He did not think of this till a long time afterwards. He began to shuffle along the passage on all fours. Nothing lay beyond the bend. He clambered to his feet inside the village. "Come on in, Merrylegs," he called. Merrylegs came. They looked about them.
The village formed an irregular circle about two hundred yards across. Inside the thorn hedge it was strongly palisaded with wooden spikes, nine feet high, bound together with wattle, and plastered with a mud-dab. The huts stood well away from the palisade. They formed a rough avenue, shaped rather like a sickle. There were thirty-five huts still standing. The frames of two or three others stood, waiting completion. One or two more had fallen into disrepair. Several inhabitants were in sight, both men and women.
They were sitting on the ground, propped against the palisades or the walls of their huts, in attitudes which recalled the attitude of the negro, seen long before in the photograph in the Irish hotel. One of the men, rising unsteadily to his feet, walked towards them for some half-dozen paces, paused, seemed to forget, and sank down again, with a nodding head. A child, rising up from a log, crawled towards a hen. The hen, suspecting him, moved off. The child watched it strut away from him as though trying to remember what he had planned to do to it. He stood stupidly, half asleep. Slowly he laid himself down upon the ground, with the movement of an old man careful of the aches of his joints. It seemed to Roger that the child had never really been awake. It was the slow deliberate movement of the child which convinced him, through his fever, that he was in the presence of the enemy. "These people have sleeping sickness," he said. The words seemed to echo along his brain, "sleeping sickness, sickness, sickness." This was what he had come out to see. Here was his work cut out for him. This was sleeping sickness. Here was a village down with it. It was shocking to him. Had he been in health it would have staggered him. These sleepers were never going to awake. All these poor wasting wretches were dying. He had never seen death at work on a large scale before. He checked a half-formed impulse to bolt by stepping forward into the enclosure, into the reek of death. The place was full of death. He drove Merrylegs before him. Merrylegs knew the disease. Merrylegs had no wish to see more of it. He was for bolting. "Go on, Merrylegs," said Roger. "Sing out to them."
Merrylegs got no answer. "Only dead men here," he said. "Young men, no catch him, run."
"Come on round the huts then," said Roger. "We'll see how many have run." They went to the hut from which the smoke rose.
An old, old hideous woman was crouched there over a little fire. She was trembling violently, and mumbling with her gums. She cowered away from Roger with a wailing cry, very like the cry of a rabbit caught by a weasel. "Tiri," she said, "tiri," expecting death. Merrylegs asked her questions; Roger tried her. It was useless. She did not understand them. She mumbled something, shaking her poor old head, whimpering between the words. Roger gave her a doll, which she hugged and whimpered over. She was like a child of a few months old in the body of a baboon. They tried another hut.
From the number of food pots stored there, Roger guessed that this hut had once belonged to a chief. Two women lay there, one in the last stages of the sickness, very ill, and scarcely stirring, the other as yet only apathetic. She blinked at them as they entered the hut, without interest, and without alarm, just like an animal. She might once have been a comely woman, but the drowsiness of the sickness had already brought out the animal in her face. Her ornaments of very thin soft gold shewed that she was the wife of an important person; she may perhaps have been the chief's favourite. She did not understand Merrylegs' dialect, nor he hers. Possibly, as sometimes happens in the disease, she had no complete control over her tongue. Roger thought that she might be thirsty. He poured water for her. She did not drink. It occurred to Roger then that she might be welcoming the disease, giving way to it without a struggle, after losing husband and child. He could see that she had had a child, and there was no child there. "Poor woman," he said to himself. "Poor wretch." They went out into the open again.
At the further end of the village Roger found evidence which helped him to make a theory of what had happened. Just outside the palisade were the bones of a few bodies, which, as he supposed, were those who had died, after the first breaking out of the epidemic. If the epidemic had begun two months before, as seemed likely, these men and women must have been dead for about a fortnight. The sickness and mortality had steadily increased since then. The able, uninfected inhabitants, had at last migrated together. They had gone off with their arms and cattle to some healthier place, leaving the infected to die. He could make no other explanation. Many of the huts were deserted. In others, still living sleepers lay among corpses. Three young men, a boy, and an old man were the liveliest of the remaining inhabitants. Roger had only to look at their tongues to see that they, too, were sealed for death. The tongue moved from the root with a helpless tremor. Their lymphatic glands were swollen. They themselves were under no delusions about their state. The cloud was on them. They would not speak unless they were spoken to with some sharpness. They were gloomily waiting until the ailment should blot everything away from them. Merrylegs tried to understand them; but gave it up. "Very poor men," he said. "Know nothing." They were some relic (or outpost) of a strange tribe, speaking an unknown tongue. Perhaps they were the descendants of some little wandering band, separated from its parent tribe, by war, pestilence, or mischance. They had had their laws, their arts, their customs. They had even thriven. The game of life had gone pleasantly there. Life there had been little more than a sitting in the sun, between going to the river for a drink and to the patch for a mealie. The beauties had sleeked themselves with oil, and the strong ones had made themselves fat with butter. They had lived "naturally," like plants or animals, sharing the wild things' immunity from ailments. They were completely adjusted. Now some little change had altered their relations to nature. Something had brought the trypanosome. Now they died like the animals, deserted by their kind.
The first shock of the sight of this harvest of death came upon Roger dully, through the shield of his fever. He did not realise the full horror of it. Nor was he conscious of the passage of time. He stayed in the village for a full hour before he returned to the boat. In that hour he made rough notes of the twenty-nine cases still present there. Sixteen of them, he hoped, might yield to treatment. The others were practically dead already from wasting. The preparation of the notes, brief as they were, was a great drain upon his strength. The fever was gaining on him. He found himself staring vacantly between the writing of two words. His brain was a perpetual surging tumult. His eyes seemed to burn in their sockets. He remembered Lionel with a great start. "Lionel," he repeated. "I must tell Lionel. We shall stop here."
Outside the infected village he looked for tracks. A track led towards the ruin. Another led away across the plain. Both were as narrow as a horse's girth, and beaten as hard as earthenware. The old tracks of cattle crossed them. Merrylegs, looking about upon the ground, cried out that the tribe had gone over the plain with their cattle ten or eleven days before. He pointed to marks on the ground. Roger took his word for it.
He climbed into the stern-sheets of the boat, feeling as though hot metal were being injected into his joints. "How are you now, Lionel?" he asked. "You're looking pretty bad. This is a plague spot. They've got the sickness here. They're dying of it."