Part 16

"They must come out of here, now," he said. "They must live with us for to-night. We can't do more now. We've done enough for one day. To-morrow we must rig them up a shanty up on the hill. They'll be pretty well by to-morrow night."

They were doing finely by the next night, as Lionel had foretold. Their second dose was followed up with a preparation of mercury, which the wise men trusted to complete the cure. The patients were pretty well. But the work and excitement of settling them into quarters near "Portobe" made the doctors very far from pretty well. Though the sick-quarters were little more than a roofed-in wind-screen of tarpaulin, the strain of making it was too much for two over-wrought Europeans, not yet used to the heat. Lionel, complaining peevishly of headache, knocked off work before tea. Roger, feeling the boisterous good spirits which so often precede a fit of recurrent fever, helped Lionel into bed, and cheerfully did the sick man's share of building. After this he gave the two patients their supper of biscuit and bully beef (which they ate with very good appetites), and, when they had eaten, put them to bed under their wind-screen. As he worked, he hoped fervently that Lionel was not going to be ill again. He had been peevish, with a slight, irritable fever all the way up the river from Malakoto. If he fell ill again now, all the work would be delayed. Roger wanted to get to work. All their plans had been upset by the bearers' desertion. Any further upsetting of plans might ruin the expedition. The days were passing. Every day brought those poor drowsy devils in the village nearer to their deaths. Soon they would be too ill to cure. He wanted Lionel well and strong, working beside him towards the discovery of a serum. That was the crying need. With Lionel ill, he could do nothing, or nearly nothing. He had so little scientific knowledge. And besides that, he would have Lionel to watch, and the cleansing and feeding of all those twenty-seven sick. He did not see how things were going to get done.

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.

XI

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.