Part 10

"Pretty bad," said Lionel. "I suppose that a couple of hundred thousand men and women have died of it during the last seven years. I don't know how many animals besides. The tsetse will bite pretty nearly every living thing, and everything it bites gets disease of some sort. You see, trypanosomiasis is probably a new thing in Uganda. New diseases are often very deadly, I believe."

"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.

VII

Sweet virgin rose, farewell. Heaven has thy beauty, That's only fit for Heaven. I'll live a little, And then, most blessed soul, I'll climb up to thee. Farewell. _The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief_.

The next morning he found upon his plate a letter in a strange hand. The writing was firmly formed, but ugly. The letters had a way of lying down upon each other towards the end of each word. It was not a literary hand. It was from Lionel Heseltine.

"400A, PUMP COURT, TEMPLE.

"DEAR MR. NALDRETT (it ran),

"If you would like to see my relics, will you come round next Thursday to my rooms between 4 and 5? You will see my name on the doorpost outside. I am up at the top. Your best way would be Underground to the Temple, and then up Middle Temple Lane. If the Lane door is shut you will have to go up into the Strand and then round. I hope you will be able to come.

"Yours sincerely, "LIONEL HESELTINE."

He replied that he would gladly join him there on Thursday. He wished that Thursday were not still six days away. He was drawn to all these people who had known Ottalie. They were parts of her life. He realised now how much people must be in a woman's life. A man has work, and the busy interests created by it. A woman has friends and the emotions roused by them. This world of Ottalie's friends was new to him. He tried to look upon them as she would have looked upon them. These had known her intimately since her childhood. They had been in her mind continually. She had lived with them. He had often felt vaguely jealous of them, when he had heard her talk of them with Agatha; or if not jealous, sad, that he should not have access to that side of her.

He was drawn to them all, but Lionel attracted him the most strongly. Some of his liking for Lionel was mere instinctive recognition of an inherent fineness and simplicity in the man's character. But there was more than that. He had often felt that in life, as in nature, there is a constant effort to remedy the unnatural. The inscrutable agency behind life offers always wisely some restoration or readjustment of a balance disturbed. He felt that a tide had quickened in his life, at the last ebbing of the old. In the old life all had been to please Ottalie. Life was more serious now. He could not go back all at once to a life interrupted as his had been. Life was not what he had thought it. In the old days it had sufficed to brood upon beautiful images, till his mind had reflected them clearly enough for his hand to write down their evocative symbols. He was not too young to perceive the austerer beauty in the room of life beyond the room in which youth takes his pleasure. But so far his life had been so little serious that he had lacked the opportunity of perceiving it. Now the old world of the beauty of external image, well-defined and richly coloured, was shattered for him. He saw how ugly a thing it was, even as a plaything or decoration, beside the high and tragical things of life and death. It was his misfortune to have lived a life without deep emotions. Now that sorrows came upon him together, smiting him mercilessly, it was his misfortune to be without a friend capable of realising what the issue warring in him meant. O'Neill had sent him a note from Ubrique in Andaluz, asking him to order a supply of litharge for his experiments, which were "wonderful." Pollock had sent him a note from Lyme, repaying, "with many, many thanks," the loan of fifty guineas. His "little girl was very well, and Kitty was wonderful." Besides these two he had no other intimate friends. Leslie, a much finer person than either of them, might have understood and helped his mood; but Leslie had been away in Ireland since the first fortnight. Being, therefore, much alone in his misery, Roger had come to look upon himself in London as the one sentient, tortured thing in a callous ant-swarm. He was shrinking from the sharp points of contact with the world on to still sharper internal points of dissatisfaction with himself. It was, therefore, natural that he should be strongly attracted by a man who carried a mortal disease, with a grave and cheerful spirit, serenely smiling, able, even in this last misfortune, to feel that life had been ordered well, in accordance with high law. The more he thought of Lionel, the more he came to envy that life of mingled action and thought which had tempered such a spirit. In moments of self-despising he saw, or thought that he saw, this difference between their lives. He himself was like an old king surprised by death in the treasure-house. He had piled up many jewels of many-gleaming thought; he was robed in purple; his brain was heavy from the crown's weight. And all of it was a heavy uselessness. He could take away none of it. The treasure was all dust, rust, and rags. He was a weak and fumbling human soul shut away from his bright beloved, not only by death, but by his own swaddled insufficiency. Lionel, on the other hand, was a crusader, dying outside the Holy City, perhaps not in sight of it, but so fired with the idea of it that death was a little thing to him. All his life had been death for an idea. All his life had made dying easier. Roger's tortured mind was not soothed by thinking how their respective souls would look after death. Some men laid up treasures in heaven, others laid up treasures on earth. The writer, doubting one and despising the other, laid up treasures in limbo. He began to understand O'Neill's remark that it was "the most difficult thing in the world for an artist both to do good work and to save his own soul." Little, long-contemned scraps of mediæval theology, acquired in the emotional mood during which he had been pre-Raphaelite, appealed to him again, suddenly, as not merely attractive but wise. Often, at times of deep emotion, in the fear of death, the mind finds more significance in things learned in childhood than in the attainments of maturity. This emotion, the one real passionate emotion of his life, had humbled him. Life had suddenly shewn itself in its primitive solemnity. The old life was all ashes and whirling dust. He understood something, now, of the conflict going on in life. But he understood it quakingly, as a prophet hears the voice in the night. He saw his own soul shrivelling like a leaf in the presence of a great reality. He had to establish that soul's foundations before he could sit down again to work. The artist creates the image of his own soul. When he sees the insufficiency of that soul, he can either remedy it or take to criticism.

Thinking over the talk of the night before, he wondered at the train of events which had altered the course of his thinking. Lionel, a few weeks before, would have been to him a charming, interesting, but misguided man, wandering in one of those sandy, sonorously named Desarts where William Blake puts Newton, Locke, and those other fine intellects, with whom he was not in sympathy. Now he saw that Lionel was ahead of him on the road. Thinking of Lionel, and wishing that he, too, had done something for his fellows, he traced the course of a tide of affairs which had been setting into his mind. It had begun with that blowing paper in the garden, as a beginning tide brings rubbish with it. Now it was in full flood with him, lifting him over shallows where he had long lain grounded. He began to doubt whether literature was so fine a thing as he had thought. Science, so cleanly and fearless, was doing the poet's work, while the poet, taking his cue from Blake, maligned her with the malignity of ignorance. What if poetry were a mere antique survival, a pretty toy, which attracted the fine mind, and held it in dalliance? There were signs everywhere that the day of _belles-lettres_ was over. Good intellects were no longer encouraged to write, "pricked on by your popes and kings." More than that, good intellects were less and less attracted to literature. The revelation of the age was scientific, not artistic. He tried to formulate to himself what art and science were expressing, so that he might judge between them. Art seemed to him to be taking stock of past achievement, science to be on the brink of new revelations.

He knew so little of science that his thought of it was little more than a consideration of sleeping sickness. He reviewed his knowledge of sleeping sickness. He thought of it no longer as an abstract intellectual question, but as man's enemy, an almost human thing, a pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in the noonday, stifling the brains of men. It fascinated him. He thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far away in the wilds, in the midst of the disease, perhaps feeling it coming on, as Lionel must have felt it. They were giving up their lives cheerily and unconcernedly in the hope of saving the lives of others. That was a finer way of living than sitting in a chair, writing of what Dick said to Tom when Joe fell in the water. He went over in his mind the questions which science had to solve before the disease could be stamped out. He wondered if there were in the literary brain some quickness or clearness which the scientific brain wanted. He wondered if he might solve the questions. Great discoveries are made by discoverers, not always by seekers. What was mysterious about the sleeping sickness?

A little thought reduced his limited knowledge to order. The disease is spreading eastwards from the West Coast of Africa between 16° north and 16° south latitude, keeping pretty sharply within the thirty-two degrees, north and south. It is caused by an organism called a trypanosome, which enters the blood through the probosces of biting flies. It kills, when the organism enters the cerebro-spinal fluid. So much was sure. He could not say with certainty why the disease is spreading eastwards, nor why the trypanosome causes it, nor how the fly obtains the trypanosome, nor what happens to the trypanosome in the fly's body. His ignorance thus resolved itself into four heads.

As to the spreading of the disease eastwards, Lionel, who had lived in the country, might know a reason for it. He would at least have heard what the natives and the older settlers thought. Residents' reasons generally range from stories of snake-headed women in the swamp, to tales of a queer case of gin, or of "European germs changed by the climate." The simple explanation was that in mid-Africa human communications are more frequent from the west to the east than from the east to the west. The Congo is the highway.

He knew that the trypanosome is carried by the wild game. In long generations of suffering the African big game has won for itself the power of resisting the trypanosomes. Although the trypanosomes abound in their blood, the wild animals do not develop "nagana" or "surra," the diseases which the tsetse bite sets up in most domestic animals. Something has been bred into their beings which checks the trypanosome's power. The animals are immune, or salted. But although they are immune, the wild animals are hosts to the trypanosome. In the course of time, when they migrate before the advance of sportsmen, or in search of pasture into tsetse country as yet uninfected with trypanosome, the tsetses attacking them suck the infected blood and receive the organisms into their bodies. Later on, as they bite, they transfer the organisms to human beings, who develop the disease. Plainly, a single migratory animal host, or a single infected slave, suffering from the initial feverish stages, might travel for three or four months, infecting a dozen tsetses daily, along his line of march. One man or beast might make the route dangerous for all who followed. Roger remembered how the chigoe or jigger-flea had travelled east along the Congo, to establish itself as an abiding pest wherever there was sand to shelter it.

As to the action of the trypanosome upon the human being, that was a question for trained scientists. It probably amounted to little more than a battle with the white corpuscles.

He passed the next few days at the Museum, studying the disease.

Mrs. Holder, who did for Lionel, let him in to Lionel's rooms on Thursday. "Mr. Heseltine was expecting him, and would be in in a minute. Would he take a seat?" He did so. The rooms were the top chambers of a house in Pump Court. They were nice light airy chambers, sparely furnished. The floor was covered with straw-matting. The chairs were deck-chairs. There were a few books on a bookshelf. Most of them were bound files of the _Lancet_ and _British Medical Journal_. A few were medical books, picked up cheap at second-hand shops, as the price labels on the backs testified. The rest were mostly military history: _The Jena Campaign_; Hoenig's _Twenty-four Hours of Moltke's Strategy_; Meckel's _Tactics_ and Sommernacht's _Traum; Chancellorsville_; Colonel Henderson's _Life of Stonewall Jackson; Essays on the Science of War_ and _Spicheren_; Wolseley's _Life of Marlborough_; Colonel Maude's _Leipzig_; Stoffel's contribution to the _Vie de Jules Cesar_; a battered copy of Mahan's _War of 1812_; and three or four small military text-books on _Reconnaissance, Minor Tactics, Infantry Formations,_ etc. A book of military memoirs lay open, face downwards, in a deck-chair. It was a hot July day, but the fire was not yet out in the grate. On the mantelpiece were some small ebony curios inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Above the mantel were a few pipes, spears, and knobkerries, a warrior's Colobus-monkey head-dress and shield, from Masailand, a chased brass bracket-dish (probably made in England) containing cigarette-butts, and a small, but very beautiful Madonna and Child, evidently by Correggio. It was dirty, cracked, and badly hung, but it was still a noble work. Lionel, coming in abruptly, found Roger staring at it.

"I hope you've not been waiting," he said. "I've been to see my monkey. Are you fond of pictures? That's said to be a rather good one. It's by a man called Correggio. Do you know his work at all? It's rather dingy. Do you like lemon or milk in your tea? Lemon? You like lemon, do you? Right. And will you wait a minute while I give myself a last dose?"

"Can I help you?" Roger asked. "It's hypodermic, isn't it?"

"Would you mind? You shove the snout of the thing into my arm, and push the spirit. It won't take a minute." He shewed Roger into a Spartan bedroom, furnished with a camp-bed and a Sandow's exerciser.

"Now," he said, producing a bottle and a syringe, "first I'll roll up my sleeve, and then I'll shew you how to sterilise the needle. I suppose you've never done this kind of thing before? Now, jab it in just here where all the punctures are."

"You said it was your last dose," said Roger. "Does that mean that you are cured?"

"Cured for the time. I may get a relapse. Still, that isn't likely."

"How do you know that you are cured? Do you feel better?"