He told himself that things would have to get done, and that he would have to do them. The resolution cheered him, but the prospect was not made brighter by his discovery soon afterwards that Lionel's temperature had shot up with a sudden leaping bound to 103°. That frightened him. Lionel was not going to be ill, he was ill, and very dangerously ill already. His temperature had risen four or five degrees in about half an hour. The discovery gave Roger a momentary feeling of panic. With a fever like that, Lionel might die, and if Lionel died, what then? He would be there alone, alone in the wilds, with drowsed, half-dead savages. He would be alone there with death, in the heart of a continent. He would go mad there, at the sight of his own shadow, like the Australian in the cheerful story. But for Lionel to die, to lose Lionel, the friend of all these days, the comrade of all these adventures, that was the desolating thought. It would not matter much what happened to himself if Lionel were to die.
It was borne in upon him that Lionel's life would depend on his exertions. He would be doctor, nurse, and chemist. Let him look to it. On the morrow, perhaps, there would be two vigorous natives to look to the sick in the village. Meanwhile, there was the night to win through; and that burning temperature to lower.
He managed to administer a dose of quinine. There was nothing more that he could do. Crouching down by the sick man's side made him feel queer. He remembered that he had left neither food nor water in the patients' hut. They ought to have food by them in case they woke hungry, as they probably would, after their long, irregular fast. He carried them some biscuit, and a bucket half full of water. They were sleeping heavily. Nature was resting in them. While coming back from the hut, he noticed that the night struck cold. He shivered. His teeth began to chatter. He felt that the cold had stricken to his liver. He wished that he had not gone out. Coming into the house, he felt the need of a fire; but he did not dare to light one, on account of Lionel. Lionel lay tossing deliriously, babbling the halves of words. Roger gave him more quinine, and took a strong dose himself. There was something very strange about the quinine. It seemed to come to his mouth from a hand immensely distant. There was a long, long arm, like a crooked railway, tied to the hand. It seemed to Roger that it could not possibly crook itself sufficiently to let the hand reach his mouth. After the strangeness of the hand had faded, he felt horribly cold. He longed to have fire all round him, and inside him. He regarded Lionel stupidly. He could do nothing more. He would lie down. If Lionel wanted anything, he would get up to fetch it. He could not sit up with Lionel. He was in for a fever. He got into his bed, and heaped the blankets round him, trembling. Almost at once the real world began to blur and change. It was still the real world, but he was seeing much in it which he had not suspected. Many queer things were happening before his eyes. He lay shuddering, with chattering teeth, listening, as he thought, to the noise made by the world as it revolved. It was a crashing, booming, resolute noise, which droned down and anon piped up high. It went on and on.
In the middle of all the noise he had the strange fancy that his body was not in bed at all, but poised in air. His bed lay somewhere below him. Sitting up he could see part of it, infinitely distant, below his outstretched feet. The ceiling was swelling and swelling just above him. It seemed as vast as heaven. All the time it swelled he seemed to shrink. He was lying chained somewhere, while his body was shrinking to the vanishing point. He could feel himself dwindling, while the blackness above grew vaster. He heard something far below him—or was it at his side?—something or somebody speaking very rapidly. He tried to call out to Lionel, but all that he could say was something about an oyster tree. There was a great deal of chattering. Somebody was trying to get in, or somebody was trying to get out. Something or somebody was in great danger, and, do what he could, he could not help growing smaller, smaller, smaller. At last the blackness fell in upon his littleness and blotted it out.
He awoke in the early morning, feeling as though his bones had been taken out. His mouth had a taste as though brown paper had been burnt in it. Wafts of foul smell passed over him as each fresh gust blew in at the doorway. Something was the matter with his eyes. He had an obscurity of vision. He could not see properly. Things changed and merged into each other. He lifted a hand to brush away the distorting film. He was thirsty. He was too weak to define more clearly what he wanted; it was not water; it was not food; it was not odour; but a bitter, pungent, astringent something which would be all three to him. He wanted something which would cleanse his mouth, supplant this foulness in his nostrils, and nerve the jelly of his marrow. Weakly desiring this potion, he fell asleep from exhaustion. He woke much refreshed after a sleep of about eight hours.
When he looked about him, he saw that Lionel was still unconscious. He was lying there uneasily, muttering and restless, with a much-flushed face. His hands were plucking and scratching at his chest. There was that about him which suggested high fever. Roger hurriedly brought a thermometer and took the sick man's temperature. It had sunk to less than 100°. He thrust aside the pyjama coat, and felt the heart with his finger. The pulse was beating with something of the batting motion of a guttering electric light. The chest was inflamed, with a slight reddish rash.
Roger sat down upon his bed and took a few deep breaths to steady himself. Afterwards he remembered telling himself in a loud, clear voice that he would have to go into this with a clear head, a very clear head. He swilled his head with water from the bucket. When he felt competent he remembered another and more certain symptom. He advanced to the sick man and looked anxiously at his throat glands. He had braced himself for the shock; but it was none the less severe when it came. The glands were visibly swollen. They were also very tender to the touch. Lionel had relapsed. He was suffering from trypanosomiasis. The disease was on him.
Roger passed the next few minutes biting his lips. From time to time he went back to the bed to look at the well-known symptoms. He was sure, only too sure, but each time he went he prayed to God that he might be mistaken. He went over these symptoms in his mind. High temperature, a rapid pulse, the glands of the neck swollen, a rash on the chest, hands, or shoulders, a flushed face, and feeble movements. There was no doubting the symptoms. Lionel was in a severe relapse.
Even when one is certain of something terrible, there is still a clinging to hope, a sense of the possibility of hope. Roger sitting there on the bed, staring at the restless body, had still a hope that he might be wrong. He dressed himself carefully, saying over and over again that he must keep a level head. There was still one test to apply. It was necessary to be certain. He got out the microscope, and sterilised a needle. When he was ready he punctured one of Lionel's glands, and blew out the matter on to a slide. Very anxiously, after preparing the slide for observation, he focussed the lens, and looked down onto the new, unsuspected world, bustling below him on the glass.
He was looking down on a strange world of discs, among which little wriggling wavy membranes, something like the tails of tadpoles, waved themselves slowly, and lashed out with a sort of whip-lash snout. Each had a dark little nucleus in his middle, and a minute spot near the anterior end. There was no room for hope in Roger's mind when he saw those little waving membranes, bustling actively, splitting, multiplying, lashing with their whips. They were trypanosomes in high activity. He watched them for a minute or two horrified by the bluntness and lowness of the organism, and by its blind power. It was a trembling membrane a thousandth part of an inch long. It had brought Lionel down to that restless body on the bed. It had reduced all Lionel's knowledge and charm and skill to a little plucking at the skin, a little tossing, a little babbling. It was the visible pestilence, the living seed of death, sown in the blood.
Roger made himself some tea. Having made it, he forced himself to eat, repeating that he must eat to keep strong, lest he should fail Lionel in any way. Food, and the hot diffusive stimulant, made him more cheerful. He told himself that Lionel was only in a fit of the frequently recurring trypanosome fever. After a day or two of fever he would come to again, weak, anæmic, and complaining of headache. A dose of atoxyl would destroy all the symptoms in a few hours. Even if he did not take the atoxyl, there was no certainty that the fever would turn to sleeping sickness. There was a chance of it; but no certainty. A doctor's first duty was to be confident. Well, he was going to be confident. He was going to pull Lionel through. He remembered a conversation between two Americans in a railway carriage. He had overheard them years before, while travelling south from Fleetwood. They were talking of a coming prize fight between two notorious boxers who, while training, spent much energy in contemning each other in the Press, threatening each other with annihilation, of the most final kind. "Them suckers chew the rag fit to beat the band," said one of the men. "Why cain't they give it a rest? Let 'em slug each other good, in der scrap. De hell wid dis chin music."
"Aw git off," said the other. "Them quitters, if they didn't talk hot air till dey believed it, dey'd never git near der ring."
He had always treasured the conversation in his memory. He thought of it now. Perhaps if doctors did not force themselves "to talk hot air" till their patients believed it, very few patients would ever leave their beds. He cleared away the breakfast things and made the house tidy. He gave Lionel an extra pillow. Then he went out into the morning to think of what he should do.
When he got out into the air he remembered the two patients. It was his duty now to dose them and give them food. All that he had to do was to walk to their hut, see that they ate their breakfast, and give them each a blue pill afterwards. The drug would have taken a stronger hold during the night, and the action of atoxyl is magical even in bad cases. He expected to find them alert and lively, changed by the drug's magic to two intelligent merry negroes. It was not too much to hope, perhaps. He prayed that it might be so. There was nothing for which he longed so much as for some strong evidence of the power of atoxyl to arrest the disease. He topped the rise and looked down on his handiwork.
All was quiet in the clumsy hut. The negroes were not stirring. Roger was vaguely perplexed when he saw that they were not about. Even if they were no better than they had been the day before they ought still to be up and sunning. He wondered what had happened. A fear that the drug had failed him mingled with his memory of a book about man-eating lions. He broke into a run.
He had only to push aside the tarpaulin which served for door to see that the two patients had gone. When they had gone, there was no means of knowing; but gone they were. They had gone at a time when there had been light enough for them to see the biscuits and the bucket; for biscuits and bucket were gone with them. He could see no trace of the two men on the wide savannah which rolled away below him. He supposed that some homing instinct had sent them back to the village. He was cheered by the thought. They had been cured within two days. They had been changed from oafish lumps into thinking beings. Now he would cure Lionel in the same way. As he hurried back to "Portobe," he was thankful that some of the drug remained to them. He would have been in a strange quandary had they used all the drug two days before.
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 theBulletin, 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.
Let 'em be happy, and rest so contented,They pay the tribute of their hearts and knees.Thiery and Theodoret.
After passing some of his cultures through the filter, he injected subcutaneously the filtrate, composed of dead organisms and their toxins, into Lionel's arms and into his own. Taking one of the black-faced monkeys, which they had brought with them for the purpose, he shaved and cleansed a part of its neck, and injected a weak culture into the space prepared, after exposing the culture to a heat slightly below the heat necessary to kill the organisms. Into another monkey he injected a culture, weakened by a slight addition of carbolic. He had no great hope that the measure which he was preparing would be of use; he meant to try them all. "If I had had more time," he thought bitterly, "I might have succeeded." He had lost so much time in getting the culture to grow. As he sealed up the punctures with collodion, he said to himself that he had tried Lionel's cure, and that now he was free to try his own personal theories. He would kill some animal naturally immune, such as a wildebeest or a koodoo, and obtain serum from it direct, in as cleanly a manner as he could. Lionel had said that such a serum, so collected, would be useless and probably septic; but who cared for possible blood-poisoning when the alternative was certain death? Personally he would prefer a death by glanders to this drowsy dying. If he could disable an antelope, he might be able to obtain the blood by formal antiseptic methods in sterilised pots. It would be worth trying. He had taken serum from a horse in England. He knew the process. Unfortunately the heart of Africa is not like England, nor is a kicking, horned, wild beast, tearing the earth to tatters in the death-agony, like a staid and glossy horse neatly arranged to be tapped. "Besides," he thought, "the beast may be suffering from all manner of diseases, or it may hold germs in toleration which the blood of man could not tolerate. And how was he to go hunting with an equipment of sterile pots and pipes on his back?"
He liked the notion too well to be frightened by the difficulties. It offered the possibility of success; it gave him hope, and it kept his mind busily engaged. Even if he saw no wild game, the hunt would be a change to him. He was a moderately good rifle-shot. The foil was the only weapon at which he was really clever. As he looked to his rifle, he felt contempt for the unreality of his life in London. It had been a life presupposing an immense external artificiality. How little a thing upset it! How helpless he was when it had been upset. And what would happen to England when something upset London, and scattered its constituent poisons broadcast? He went out to the hunt.
The wind blew steadily from the direction of the forest. There was no chance of doing anything from that side. He could never approach game downwind. He would have to cross the river. He had never tried to cross the river. He did not even know if it were possible. The thought of the crocodiles and the mere sight of the swirling flood had kept him from examining the river. He had not been near it since he had sought with Lionel for the atoxyl bottles. What it looked like upstream he did not know. He went upstream to look for a ford.
At a little distance beyond the hill he came upon something which made him pause. The earth there had been torn into tracks by the waters of a recent thunder-storm. The cleanness of the cuttings reminded Roger of the little bog-bursts which he had seen in Ireland after excessive rains. In one of the tracks the rushing water had swept bare the paving of an ancient road, leaving it clear to the sky for about twenty yards. The road was of a hard even surface, like the flooring of a Zimbabwe. To the touch the surface was that of a very good cycling road in the best condition. The ruts of carts were faintly marked upon it in dents. The road seemed to have been made of hewn stones, covered over and bound with the powdered pounded granite used for the floors of the ruins. It was five of Roger's paces in breadth. The edges were channelled with gutters. Beyond the gutters were borders of small hewn blocks neatly arranged, so that the growths near the road might not spread over it. Judging by the direction of the uncovered part, the road entered the Zimbabwe through a gate in the west wall. In the other direction, away from the Zimbabwe, it led slantingly towards the river, keeping to the top of a ridge (possibly artificial), so as to avoid a low-lying tract still boggy from the flood. The river made a sharp bend at the point where the road impinged upon it. Below the bend the lie of the bank had an odd look, which recalled human endeavour even now, after the lapse of so many centuries. Greatly excited, Roger hurried up to look at the place.
It had been the port of the Zimbabwe. The bank had been cut away, so as to form a kind of dock. The stumps of the piles were still in the mud in places. They were strong, well-burnt wooden piles, such as are used for jetties everywhere. By the feel of the ground on the jetty top there was paved-work not far below it. A dig or two with a knife blade shewed that this was the case. The bank was paved like the road. Looking back towards the ruin, Roger could mark the track of the road running up to the wall. Even where it was overgrown he could tell its whereabouts by the comparative lightness of the colour of the grass upon it. Beyond the ruin, running almost straight to the south-east, he noticed a similar ribbon of light grass, marking another road. So this was a port, this Zimbabwe, a port at the terminus of a road. The road might lead direct to Ophir, whence Solomon obtained his ivory and apes and peacocks. Probably there were gold mines near at hand. This place, so quiet now, had once seen a gold-rush. The wharf there had been thronged by jostlers hurrying to the fields. The basin of ill-smelling red mud had once been full of ships. And what ships? What people? And when? "A brachycephalic people of clever gold-workers of unknown antiquity."
Just above the "port" the river was extremely narrow. Sticking out of the water in the narrow part were masses of masonry, which may at one time have served as the piers of a bridge. They were so close together that Roger crossed the river by them without difficulty. On the other side, as he had expected, the mark of the road was ruled in a dim line in the direction of the forest. The country was rougher on that side. The line of the road was marked less plainly.
Late that afternoon, after an exhausting stalk, he got two shots at what he took to be a koodoo[*] cow. He went forward out of heart, believing that both had missed. Bright blood on the grass shewed him that he had hit her. A little further on he found the cow down, with her hindquarters paralysed. She struggled to get up to face him, poor brute; but she was too hard hit; she was dying. When she had struggled a little, he was able to close with her, avoiding the great horns. He was even able to prepare the throat in some measure for the operation. Lastly, avoiding a final struggle, he contrived to sterilise his hands with a solution from one of the pots slung about him. The sight of his hands even after this made him despair of getting an uncontaminated serum. But there was no help for it. He took out the knife, made the incision in the throat, and inserted the sterilised tube.
[*] It was probably an oryx.
When he turned with his booty to go home, he noticed a little fawn which stood on a knoll above him, looking at him. She stood quite still, so shaded off against the grasses that only a lucky eye could distinguish her. She was waiting, perhaps, for him to go away, so that she might call her mother. She made no effort to run from him. Something in her appearance made him think that she was ill. The carriage of her head seemed queer. Her coat had a look of staring. He wished then, that he had brought his glasses, so that he might examine her narrowly. Moving round a little, he made sure that her coat was in poor condition. He judged that she might have been mauled by a beast of prey.
He was just about to move on when a thought occurred to him. What if the young of the wild game should not be immune? What if the bite of the infected tsetse should set up a mild form of nagana in them from which they recover? What if that mild sickness should confer a subsequent immunity on the inflicted individual? Surely the result would be obvious. "Vaccination" with the blood of the afflicted calf or fawn would set up a mild attack of the disease in man, and, perhaps, give him subsequent immunity from more virulent infection. The ailments of wild animals are few. What if this fawn should be suffering from a mild attack of the disease? He crept a little nearer to her, bending low down to see if he could see the swellings on the legs and belly which mark the disease in quadrupeds. He could not be sure of them. He could only be sure that the coat was staring, and that the nose and eyes were watery. He whistled gently to the little creature, hoping that she would be too young to be frightened of him. She stared at him with wide eyes, trembling slightly, flexing her ears. He whistled to her again. She called plaintively to her dam. She lowered her little head, ready to attack, pawing the ground like a warrior. Roger fired. Afterwards he felt as though he had killed a girl.
He returned to "Portobe" weighted down with jars, which he emptied carefully into sterilised pans. The result made "Portobe" look like a cannibal's dairy. An examination of the blood shewed that both animals had harboured trypanosomes in large numbers. When the blood had coagulated, he decanted the serum into sterilised bottles, to which he added minute quantities of antiseptic. That operation gave him his serum. He had now to test it for bacteria and for toxins. He added a portion from each bottle to various culture-mediums in test-tubes. He added these test portions to all his media, to glycerine-agar and glucose as well as to those better suited to the growth of trypanosomes.
He set them aside to incubate.
If there were bacteria in the sera they would increase and multiply on the delightful food of the media. When Roger came to examine the media, he came expecting to find them swarming with bacteria of all known kinds. He was naturally vain of the success of his hunting; but he knew that crude surgery out in the open is not so wholesome a method of obtaining serum as might be. Still, a close examination shewed him that the cultures had not developed bacteria. He was pleased at this; but his pleasure was dashed by the thought that it was rather too good to be true. He might have muddled the experiment by adding too much disinfectant to the sera while bottling, by using cultures which had in some way lost their attractiveness, or by some failure in the preparation of the slides. After going through his examination the second time, he decided to proceed. He injected large doses of the sera into two monkeys.
Again he was successful. The monkeys shewed no symptoms of poisoning. The sera, whatever they might be, were evidently harmless to the "homologous" animal. But the success made Roger even more doubtful of himself. It made him actually anxious, lest in adding disinfectant to the sera, he should have destroyed the protective forces in them, as well as the micro-organisms at which he had aimed. He delayed no longer. He injected Lionel with a large dose of the serum from the grown animal; he injected himself with the serum from the fawn. Going down to the village, he made a minute examination of those who were the least ill. Choosing out those who shewed no outward signs of the congenital or acquired forms of blood-poisoning, he injected them with sera, thinking that if they recovered he would use their sera for other cases. For his own part, he felt better already. The excitement of hope was on him. He had risen above his body.
For the next few days his life was a fever of hope, broken with hours of despair. One of his patients died suddenly the day after the injection. Lionel seemed no better. Another patient seemed markedly worse. He repeated the doses, and passed a miserable morning watching Lionel. The evening temperature shewed a marked decrease. An examination of the throat glands shewed that the trypanosomes had become less waggish. They were bunching into clumps, "agglutinising," with slow, irregular movements. That seemed to him to be the first hopeful sign. On studying his books he could not be sure that it really was a good sign. One book seemed to say that agglutination made the germs more virulent; another that it paralysed them. He could see for himself that they had ceased to multiply by splitting longitudinally. And from that he argued that their vitality had been weakened.
The next day Lionel was better; but the native patients were all worse. They were alarmingly worse. They shewed symptoms which were not in the books. They swelled slightly, as though the skin had been inflated. The flesh seemed bladdery and inelastic at the same time. The pigment of the skin became paler; the patients became an ashy grey colour. The blood of one of these sufferers killed a guinea-pig in three hours. After a short period of evident suffering they died, one after the other, apparently of the exhaustion following on high fever. Roger, in a dreadful state of mental anguish, stayed with them till they were dead, trying remedy after remedy. He felt that he had killed them all. He felt that their blood was on his hands. He felt that all those people might still have been alive had he not tried his wretched nostrum on them. There was no doubt that the sera had caused their deaths. Those who had had no serum injections were no worse than they had been. He wondered how long it would be before these symptoms of swelling and high fever appeared in himself and Lionel. He went back to "Portobe" expecting to find Lionel in high fever, going the road to Marumba.
He found Lionel weakly walking about outside the tent, conscious, but not yet able to talk intelligibly. He had not expected to see Lionel walk again. The sight made him forget the deaths down in the village. He shouted with joy. Closer examination made him less joyous. The skin of Lionel's arm, very dull and inelastic to the touch, was slightly swollen with something of the bladdery look which he had noticed in the men now dead. It was as though the body had been encased in a bladdery substance slightly inflated. He had no heart to test the symptoms upon the body of another animal. There was death enough about without that. He sat down over the microscope and examined his sera again and again. He could find no trace of any living micro-organisms. The sera seemed to be sterile. But he saw now that it had some evil effect upon those infected with trypanosomes. He could not guess the exact chemical nature of the effect. It probably affected the constituents of the blood in some way. The poison in the sera seemed to need the presence of trypanosomes to complete its virulence.
While he worked over the microscope, he noticed that his own flesh was developing the symptom. He put aside his work when he saw that. He concluded that Lionel and he were marked for death within twenty-four hours. Before death (as he had learned in the village) they might look to suffer much pain. After some hours of suffering they would become unconscious and delirious. After raving for a while they would die there in the lonely hut, and presently the ants would march in in regular ranks to give them cleanly burial. Their bones would lie on the cots till some thunderstorm swept them under mud. Nobody would ever hear of them. They would be forgotten. People in England would wonder what had become of them; they would wonder less as time went on, and at last they would cease to wonder. Newspapers would allude to him from time to time in paragraphs two lines long. Then, as his contemporaries grew older, that would stop, too. He would be forgotten, utterly, and nobody would know, and nobody would care.
It was dreadful to him to think that nobody would know. He could count on an hour or two of freedom from pain. Before the pain shut out the world from him, he would try to leave some record of what they were. He sat down to write a death-letter. It was useless, of course, and yet it might, perhaps, by a rare chance, some day, come to the knowledge of those whom he had known in England. He wondered who would find the letter, if it were ever found. Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sportsman, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe, and a stone of copper wire about his limbs. He wrote out a short letter:
"Lionel Uppingham Huntley Heseltine, Roger Monkhouse Naldrett. Dying here of blood poisoning, following the use of koodoo serum for trypanosomiasis. Should this come to the hands of a European, he is requested to communicate with Dr. Heseltine, 47A Harley Square, Wimpole Street, W., London, England, and with the British Consul at Shirikanga, C. F. S."
He added a few words more; but afterwards erased them. He had given the essentials. There was no need to say more. He translated the brief message into French, Spanish, and German, and signed the copies. He placed the document in a tin soap box which he chained to an iron rod driven into the floor of the hut. When that was done, he felt that he had taken his farewell to life.
He thought of Ottalie, without hope of any kind. He was daunted by the thought of her. He could not feel that his soul would ever reach to her soul, across all those wilds. He was heavy with the growing of the change upon him. This death of which he had thought so grandly seemed very stupid now that he was coming to know it. He remembered reproving a young poet for the remark that death could not possibly be so stupid as life. It was monstrous to suppose that the young poet could be right after all. And yet——
He went out hurriedly and released all the laboratory animals: guinea-pigs, monkeys, and white rats. They should not die of starvation, poor beasts. They squeaked and gibbered excitedly for a minute or two, as they moved off to explore. Probably the snakes had them all within the week.
After some hours of waiting for the agony to begin, Roger fell asleep, and slept till the next morning. When he woke he sat up and looked about him, being not quite sure at first that he was still alive. His pulse was normal, his tongue was normal, his heart was normal. He felt particularly well. He looked at his flesh. The bladdery look had relapsed, the skin was normal again. Looking over to Lionel's cot, he saw that Lionel was not in the hut. Fearing that he had wandered out to die in a fit of delirium, he went out into the open to look for him.
It was a bright, windy, tropic morning, with a tonic briskness in the air such as one feels sometimes in England, in April and late September. One of the released monkeys was fast by the neck again upon his perch. He was munching a biscuit with his entire vitality. Lionel sat upon the wall, sunning himself in a blanket. His attitude suggested both great physical weakness, and entire self-confidence.
"I say, Roger," he began. "It's too bad. You are a juggins! You've let all our menagerie go. What are we to do for laboratory animals? I caught McGinty here. Otherwise we'd have been without a single one. Every cage in the place is wide open. What have you been doing?"
"My God!" said Roger. "He's cured!"
"Cured, sir?" said Lionel. "Why shouldn't I be? There's been nothing wrong with me except fever. But I'm not joking. I want to know about these animals. What were you thinking of to let them out?"
"Lionel," said Roger, "for the last five weeks you've been dying of sleeping sickness. The atoxyl was lost. I believe you threw it away."