Part 18

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.

XII

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.