Part 17

He knelt down by the cot in a whirl of jarring suggestions. What was he to do? Anxiety had lifted him out of himself on to another plane, a plane of torturing emotion. He felt a painful clearness of intellect and an utter deadness of controlling will. His ideas swarmed in his head, yet he had no power to select from them. He saw so many things which he might be doing; building a raft to take them to Malakoto, making, or trying to make, a serum, to nullify the infection; there were many things. But how could he leave Lionel in this state, and how was he to get Lionel out of this state? He told himself that large doses of arsenic might be of use; the next moment he realised that they would be useless. He had tried to make Lionel take arsenic on the voyage upstream, as a prophylactic. Lionel had replied that arsenic was no good to him. "Trypanosomes," he had said, "become inured to particular drugs. Mine got inured to arsenic the last time I was out here. If my trypanosomes recur you'll have to try something else." What else was he to try?

He had read that marked temporary improvement shows itself after a variety of treatments, after any treatment, in fact, which tends to improve the health of particular organs. He tried the simplest and least dangerous of those which he remembered. It could do no harm, in any case. If it did good, he would feel braced to try something more searching.

The mere act of administering the dose strengthened him. Action is always a cordial to a mind at war with itself. At times of conflagration the fiddle has saved more than Nero from disquieting thought, tending to suicide. When at last he had forced his will to the selection of a course, he felt more sure of himself. He set about the preparation of food for the patient, and, when that was made and given, he sterilised his hands for the beginning of the delicate task of culture-making. He had plenty of tubes of media of different kinds. He selected those most likely to give quick results. They were media of bouillon and agar. One of them, a special medium of rabbit's flesh and Witte's peptone, had been prepared by Lionel months before, in far-distant London. Roger remembered how they had talked together, in their enthusiasm, during the making of that medium. He had had little thought then of the circumstances under which it would come to be used. He had never before felt home-sick for London. He was home-sick now. He longed to be back in London with Lionel, in the bare, airy room in Pump Court, where the noise of the Strand seemed like the noise of distant trains which never passed. He longed to be back there, out of this loneliness, with Lionel well again. The memory of their little bickerings came back to him. Travel is said to knock off the angles of a man. If the man has fire in him, the process may burn the fingers of those near him. Little moments of irritation, after sleepless nights, after fever, after over-exertion, had flamed up between them. No Europeans can travel together for many hundreds of miles in the tropics without these irritable moments. They derive from physical weakness of some kind, rather than from any weakness of character, though the links which bind the two are, of course, close and subtle. He told himself this; but he was not to be comforted. The memory of those occasional, momentary jarrings gave him keen pain. If Lionel got over this illness, he would make it up to him. He thought of many means by which he might make their journey together more an adventure of the finer character. "Lionel," he said, aloud, looking down on the sick man, "I want you to forgive me."

There was no sign of comprehension from Lionel. He lay there muttering nervously. His skin was hot to the touch with that dry febrile heat which gives to him who feels it such a shocking sense of the body's usurpation by malign power. His temperature was beginning to show the marked and dreadful evening rise. Roger could guess from that that there would be no improvement until the morning fall. After feeling the fluttering, rapid pulse, and the weakness of the movements of the hands, he had grave doubts whether the body would be able to stand the strain of that sudden fall.

He dragged up a box and sat staring at Lionel, torn by many thoughts. One thought was that these moments would be less terrible if we could live always in this awakened sense of the responsibility and wonder of life. Life was not a succession of actions, planned or not planned, successful or thwarted, nor was it a "congressus materiai" held together for a time by food and exercise. It was something tested by and evolved from those things, which were, in a sense, its instruments, the bricks with which the house is built. He began to realise how hard it is to follow life in a world in which the things of life have such bright colours and moving qualities. He had not realised it before, even when he had been humbled by the news of Ottalie's death.

In his torment he "thought long" of Ottalie. He called back to his memory all those beautiful days, up the glens, among the hills. Words which she had spoken came back to him, each phrase a precious stone, carefully set in his imagination of what the prompting thought had been in her mind. Ottalie had lived. He could imagine Ottalie sitting in judgment upon all the days of her life ranked in coloured succession before her, and finding none which had been lived without reference, however unconscious, to some fine conception of what exists unchangingly, though only half expressed by us.

He roused himself. That was why women are so much finer than men; they are occupied with life itself, men with its products, or its management. Whatever his shortcomings had been, he was no longer dealing with the things of life, but with life itself.

Here he was, for the first time, squarely face to face with a test of his readiness to deal with life. He forced himself to work again, following the process with a cautious nicety of delicate care which an older artist would have despised as niggling and stippling. From time to time he stopped to look at Lionel, and to take the temperature. The temperature was swiftly rising.

After some days the fever left Lionel. It left him with well-marked symptoms of sleeping sickness. The man was gone. The body remained, weak and trembling, sufficiently conscious to answer simple questions, but neither energetic enough to speak unprompted, nor to ask for food when hungry. How long he might live in that state Roger could not guess. He might live for some weeks; he might die suddenly, shaken by the violent changing of the temperature between night and morning. It was not till the power of speech was checked that the horror of it came home to Roger. Lionel's monosyllables became daily less distinct, until at last he spoke as though his tongue had grown too large for his mouth. The sight of his friend turning brutish before his eyes made Roger weep. The strain was telling on him; his recurrent fever was shaking him. He felt that if Lionel were to die, he would go mad. He could not leave his friend. Even in the day-time, with the work to be done, he could hardly bear to leave him. At night his one solace was to stare at his friend, in an agony of morbid pity, remembering what that man had been to him before the closing in of the veil. The veil was closing more tightly every day. Roger could picture to himself the change going on inside the dead, on the surface of the brain, behind the fine eyes, so drowsy now. Such a little thing would arrest that change. Two cubic centimetres of a white soluble powder. He went over it in his mind, day after day, till the craving for some of that powder was more than he could bear. "Lionel," he would say. "Lionel, Lionel." And the drowsy head would lift itself patiently, and grunt, showing some sort of recognition. If Lionel had been a stranger (so he told himself) it might have been endurable; but every attitude and gesture of the patient was chained to his inmost life by a hundred delicate links. That he had known Ottalie was the sharpest thing to bear. In losing Lionel he was losing something which bound Ottalie to him. Another torment was the knowledge of his own insufficiency. He thought of the strongly efficient soldiers and scientists who had studied the disease. He loathed the years of emotional self-indulgence which had unfitted him for such a crisis. He longed to have for one half-hour the knowledge and skill of those scientists, their scrupulous clinical certainty, their reserve of alternative resource.

In reality he was doing very creditably. One of the most marked qualities in his character was that extreme emotional tenderness, or sensibility, which is so strong, and in the lack of the robuster fibres, so vicious, an ingredient of the artistic or generating intellect. This sensitiveness had been the cause in him of a scrupulous aloofness from the world. It had made him maintain a sort of chastity of idea, not so much from an appreciation of the value of whiteness of mind as from an inherent fastidious dislike of blackness. As he yielded more and more to the domination of this aloofness, as the worker in an emotional art is tempted to do, his positive activities grew weaker till he had come to seek and appreciate in others those qualities which, essential to manly nature, had been etiolated in himself by the super-imposition of the unreal. This desire to be virtuous vicariously, by possessing virtuous friends, had been gratified pleasantly, with advantage to himself, and with real delight to those robuster ones who felt his charm. But the removal of the friends had shown the essential want. The man was like a childless woman, groping about blindly for an emotional outlet. In his misery he found an abiding satisfaction in an intense tenderness to the suffering near him. In his knowledge of himself he had feared that his own bodily discomfort would make him a selfish, petulant, callous nurse. Before Lionel had fallen ill, he had been prone to complain of pains, often real enough to a weak, highly sensitive nature, exposed, after years of easy living, to the hardships of tropical travel. Lionel's illness had altered that. It had lifted him into a state of mental exaltation. In their intenser, spiritual forms, such states have been called translation, gustation of God, ingression to the divine shadow, communion with the higher self. They may be defined as states in which the mind ceasing to be conscious of the body as a vehicle, drives it superbly to the dictated end, with the indifference of a charioteer driving for high stakes.

Though in this mood he was supported to fine deeds, he was denied the knowledge of his success in them. His heart was wrung with pity for the sufferers for whom he cared so tenderly, day after day; but the depth of his pity made his impotence to help an agony. He saw too plainly that the most that he could do was nothing. In the darker recesses of his mind hovered a horror of giving way and relapsing to the barbarism about him. His nerve had begun to tremble under the strain. What he felt was the recurrence of an intense religious mood which had passed over his mind at the solemn beginning of manhood. He was finding, now, after years of indifference, the cogency of the old division into good and evil. As in boyhood, during that religious phase, he had at times a strange, unreasonable sense of the sinfulness of certain thoughts and actions, which to others, not awakened, and to himself, in blinder moods, seemed harmless. He began to resolve all things into terms of the spiritual war. All this external horror was a temptation of the devil, to be battled with lest the soul perish in him. Little things, little momentary thoughts, momentary promptings of the sense, perhaps only a desire for rest, became charged, in his new reckoning of values, with terrible significances. Often, after three hours of labour in the village, after feeding and cleaning those drowsy dying children, in the hot sun, till he was exhausted and sick at heart, a fear of giving way to the devil urged him to apply to them some of the known alleviations, arsenic, mercury, or the like. He would arise, and dose them all carefully, knowing that it was useless, that it would merely prolong a living death; but knowing also that to do so, at all costs, was the duty of one who had taken the military oath of birth into a Christian race. He learned that the higher notes of a whistle pleased those even far advanced in sleep. He found time each day to whistle to them in those few livelier minutes before meals, when the drowsy became almost alert. He judged that anything which stimulated them must necessarily be good for them. He tried patiently and tenderly many mild sensual excitations on them, giving them scent or snuff to inhale, letting them suck pieces of his precious sugar, burning blue lights at night before them, giving them slight electric shocks from his battery. He felt that by these means he kept alive the faculties of the brain for some few days longer. From Tiri, the wrinkled old crone, the only uninfected person there, he tried hard to learn the dialect; but age had frozen her brain, he could learn nothing from her except "Katirkama." He never rightly knew what Katirkama was. It was something very amusing, since it made her laugh heartily whenever it was mentioned. It had something to do with drumming on a native drum. Katirkama. He beat the drum, and the old body became one nod of laughter, bowing to the beat with chuckles. "Katirkama," she cried, giggling. "Katirkama." After Katirkama she would follow him about, holding his hand, squeaking, till he gave her some sugar.

When the work in the village was finished, he used to walk back to Lionel, whom he would find drowsed, just as he had left him. On good days he had some little experiment to make. He would repeat some trick or accidental gesture winch had caught the dying attention of a native. If he were lucky, the trick brought back some lively shadow of Lionel. Even if it passed away at once, it was cheering to see that shadow. More usually the trick failed. Having seen the occasional effect of them, he became studious of tricks which might help to keep the intelligence alert. The sight of Lionel gave him so crushing a sense of what was happening in the affected brain, that he found it easy to imagine fancies which, as he judged, would be arresting to it. The burning of magnesium wire and the turning of a policeman's rattle were his most successful efforts. One day, while carefully dropping some dilute carbolic acid into a chegua nest on Lionel's foot, he found that the burning sensation gave pleasure. It seemed to reach the brain like a numbed tickling. Lionel laughed a little uneasy, nervous laugh. It was the only laughter heard at "Portobe" for many days.

Though his work occupied him for ten hours daily, it did not occupy the whole of him. Much of it, such as the preparation of food and the daily disinfection of the huts, was mechanical. His mind was left free to console itself by speculation as best it could. His first impressions of the solitude were ghastly and overpowering. Waking and asleep he felt the horror of the prospect of losing Lionel. It was not that he dreaded the prospect of being alone. His fear was religious. He feared that the barbarism of the solitude would overpower his little drilled force of civilised sentiment. He was warring against barbarism. Lionel was his powerful ally. Looking out from his hut on the hill he could see barbarism all round him, in a vast and very silent menacing landscape, secret in forest, sullen in its red, shrinking river, brooding in the great plain, dotted with bones and stones. Even the littleness of an English landscape would have been hard to bear, but this immensity of savagery awed him. He doubted whether he would be able to bear the presence of that sight without his ally by him.

He knew that if he let it begin to get upon his nerves he would be ruined. He took himself in hand on the second day of Lionel's fever. His situation made him remember a conversation heard years before at his rooms in Westminster. O'Neill and a young Australian journalist, of the crude and vigorous kind nurtured by the _Bulletin_, had passed the evening in talk with him. The Australian had told them of the loneliness of Australia, and of shepherds and settlers who went mad in the loneliness on the clearings at the back of beyond. O'Neill had said that at present Australian literature was the product of home-sick Englishmen; but that a true Australian literature would begin among those lonely ones. "One of those fellows just going mad will begin a literature. And that literature will be the distinctive Australian literature. In the cities you will only get noisy imitations of what is commonest in the literature of the mother country." They had stayed talking till four in the morning. He had never seen the Australian since that time. He remembered now his stories of shepherds who bolted themselves into their huts in the effort to get away from the loneliness which had broken their nerve. He must take care, he said, not to let that state of mind take hold upon him.

He began to school himself that night. He forced himself up the hill, into the Zimbabwe, at the eerie moment when the dusk turns vaguely darker, and the stars are still pale. All the dimness of ruin and jungle brooded malignantly, informed by menace. Faint noises of creeping things rustled in the alley between the walls. Dew was fast forming. Drops wetted him with cold splashes as he broke through creepers. Below him stretched the continent. No light of man burned in that expanse. There was a blackness of forest, and a ghostliness of grass, all still. Out of the night behind him came a stealthiness of approach, more a sense than a sense perception. Coming in the night so secretly, it was hard to locate. It had that protective ventriloquism of sounds produced in the dark. There is an animal sense in us, not nearly etiolated yet, which makes us quick to respond to a light noise in the night. It makes us alert upon all sides; but with a tremulous alertness, for we have outgrown the instinctive knowledge of what comes by night. Roger faced round swiftly, with a knocking heart. The noise, whatever it was, ceased. After an instant of pause a spray, till then pinned, swept loose, as though the talon pinning it had lifted. It swept away with a faint swishing noise, followed by a pattering of drops. After that there came a silence while the listener and the hidden watcher stared into the blackness for what should follow. The noise of the spattering gave Roger a sense of the direction of the danger, if it were danger. He drew out his revolver. Another spray spilled a drop or two. Then, for an instant, near the ground, not far away, two greenish specks burned like glow-worms, like crawling fireflies, like two tiny electric lights suddenly turned on. They were shut off instantly. They died into the night, making it blacker. After they had faded there came a hushed rustling which might have been near or far off. When that, too, had died, there was a silence.

It was so still that the dripping of the dew made the night like a death vault. Terrible, inscrutable stars burned aloft. Roger pressed his back against the wall. Up and up towered the wall, an immense labour, a cynical pile, stamped with lust's cruelties. It almost had life, so seen. In front was the unknown; behind, that uncanny thing. Roger waited, tense, till the darkness was alive with all fear. Everything was in the night there, gibbering faces, death, the sudden cold nosing of death's pig-snout on the heart. He swung his revolver up, over his left elbow, and fired.

The report crashed among the ruin, sending the night rovers fast and far. Chur-ra-rak! screamed the scattering fowl. Roger paid little heed to them. He was bending down in his tracks hugging his forehead. The hammer of the kicking revolver had driven itself into his brow with a welt which made him sick. He groped his way down the hill again, thinking himself lucky that the iron had not smashed his eye. He thought no more of terror for that night.

But the next night it came with the dark. The old savage devil of the dark was there; the darkness of loneliness, the loneliness of silence, the immanent terror of places not yet won, still ruled by the old unclean gods, not yet exorcised by virtue. Looking at it, after night had fallen, from the door of "Portobe," it seemed full of the promise of death. The little rustling noises were there; the suggestion of stealthy death; the brooding of it all. A braver man would have been awed by it. It was not all cowardice which daunted Roger. It was that animal something not yet etiolated, which on a dark night in a lonely place at a noise of stirring makes a man's heart thump like a buck's heart. To stare into the blackness with eyes still dazzled from the camp-fire gave a sense of contrast not easy to overcome. The comfort of the fire was something, something civilised, conquered, human. And the beloved figure lying ill was one of his own kind, leagued with him against the inhuman. The vastness of the inhuman overpowered his will. He dared not face it. Sudden terror told him of something behind him. He hurried into the hut and heaped boxes against the tarpaulin door.

The moment of fear passed, leaving him ashamed. He was giving way to nerves. That would not do. He must brace himself to face the darkness. He forced himself down the hill to the village, and into the village. Kneeling down he peered into the hut where old Tiri rocked herself by a fire of reeds, like the withered beauty in Villon. She did not see him. She was crooning a ditty. From time to time, with a nervous jerk of the arm, she flung on a handful of reed, which crackled and flared, so that she chuckled. He was comforted by the sight of her. Any resolute endurance of life is comforting to the perplexed. He walked back up the hill without the tremors he had felt in going down. Something in the walk, the coolness and quiet of it, made him forget his fears. He experienced an animal feeling of being, for the moment, at one with the night. "Surely," he thought, "if man can conceive a spiritual state, calm and august like the night, he can attain it." It might even be that by brooding solitary, like the night itself, one would arrive at the truth sooner than by the restless methods left behind. Standing by the door of his hut again, the darkness exalted him, not, in the common way, by giving him a sense of the splendour of nature, but by heightening for an instant his knowledge of the superior splendour of men.