Part 19

Again he was successful. The monkeys shewed no symptoms of poisoning. The sera, whatever they might be, were evidently harmless to the "homologous" animal. But the success made Roger even more doubtful of himself. It made him actually anxious, lest in adding disinfectant to the sera, he should have destroyed the protective forces in them, as well as the micro-organisms at which he had aimed. He delayed no longer. He injected Lionel with a large dose of the serum from the grown animal; he injected himself with the serum from the fawn. Going down to the village, he made a minute examination of those who were the least ill. Choosing out those who shewed no outward signs of the congenital or acquired forms of blood-poisoning, he injected them with sera, thinking that if they recovered he would use their sera for other cases. For his own part, he felt better already. The excitement of hope was on him. He had risen above his body.

For the next few days his life was a fever of hope, broken with hours of despair. One of his patients died suddenly the day after the injection. Lionel seemed no better. Another patient seemed markedly worse. He repeated the doses, and passed a miserable morning watching Lionel. The evening temperature shewed a marked decrease. An examination of the throat glands shewed that the trypanosomes had become less waggish. They were bunching into clumps, "agglutinising," with slow, irregular movements. That seemed to him to be the first hopeful sign. On studying his books he could not be sure that it really was a good sign. One book seemed to say that agglutination made the germs more virulent; another that it paralysed them. He could see for himself that they had ceased to multiply by splitting longitudinally. And from that he argued that their vitality had been weakened.

The next day Lionel was better; but the native patients were all worse. They were alarmingly worse. They shewed symptoms which were not in the books. They swelled slightly, as though the skin had been inflated. The flesh seemed bladdery and inelastic at the same time. The pigment of the skin became paler; the patients became an ashy grey colour. The blood of one of these sufferers killed a guinea-pig in three hours. After a short period of evident suffering they died, one after the other, apparently of the exhaustion following on high fever. Roger, in a dreadful state of mental anguish, stayed with them till they were dead, trying remedy after remedy. He felt that he had killed them all. He felt that their blood was on his hands. He felt that all those people might still have been alive had he not tried his wretched nostrum on them. There was no doubt that the sera had caused their deaths. Those who had had no serum injections were no worse than they had been. He wondered how long it would be before these symptoms of swelling and high fever appeared in himself and Lionel. He went back to "Portobe" expecting to find Lionel in high fever, going the road to Marumba.

He found Lionel weakly walking about outside the tent, conscious, but not yet able to talk intelligibly. He had not expected to see Lionel walk again. The sight made him forget the deaths down in the village. He shouted with joy. Closer examination made him less joyous. The skin of Lionel's arm, very dull and inelastic to the touch, was slightly swollen with something of the bladdery look which he had noticed in the men now dead. It was as though the body had been encased in a bladdery substance slightly inflated. He had no heart to test the symptoms upon the body of another animal. There was death enough about without that. He sat down over the microscope and examined his sera again and again. He could find no trace of any living micro-organisms. The sera seemed to be sterile. But he saw now that it had some evil effect upon those infected with trypanosomes. He could not guess the exact chemical nature of the effect. It probably affected the constituents of the blood in some way. The poison in the sera seemed to need the presence of trypanosomes to complete its virulence.

While he worked over the microscope, he noticed that his own flesh was developing the symptom. He put aside his work when he saw that. He concluded that Lionel and he were marked for death within twenty-four hours. Before death (as he had learned in the village) they might look to suffer much pain. After some hours of suffering they would become unconscious and delirious. After raving for a while they would die there in the lonely hut, and presently the ants would march in in regular ranks to give them cleanly burial. Their bones would lie on the cots till some thunderstorm swept them under mud. Nobody would ever hear of them. They would be forgotten. People in England would wonder what had become of them; they would wonder less as time went on, and at last they would cease to wonder. Newspapers would allude to him from time to time in paragraphs two lines long. Then, as his contemporaries grew older, that would stop, too. He would be forgotten, utterly, and nobody would know, and nobody would care.

It was dreadful to him to think that nobody would know. He could count on an hour or two of freedom from pain. Before the pain shut out the world from him, he would try to leave some record of what they were. He sat down to write a death-letter. It was useless, of course, and yet it might, perhaps, by a rare chance, some day, come to the knowledge of those whom he had known in England. He wondered who would find the letter, if it were ever found. Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sportsman, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe, and a stone of copper wire about his limbs. He wrote out a short letter:

"Lionel Uppingham Huntley Heseltine, Roger Monkhouse Naldrett. Dying here of blood poisoning, following the use of koodoo serum for trypanosomiasis. Should this come to the hands of a European, he is requested to communicate with Dr. Heseltine, 47A Harley Square, Wimpole Street, W., London, England, and with the British Consul at Shirikanga, C. F. S."

He added a few words more; but afterwards erased them. He had given the essentials. There was no need to say more. He translated the brief message into French, Spanish, and German, and signed the copies. He placed the document in a tin soap box which he chained to an iron rod driven into the floor of the hut. When that was done, he felt that he had taken his farewell to life.

He thought of Ottalie, without hope of any kind. He was daunted by the thought of her. He could not feel that his soul would ever reach to her soul, across all those wilds. He was heavy with the growing of the change upon him. This death of which he had thought so grandly seemed very stupid now that he was coming to know it. He remembered reproving a young poet for the remark that death could not possibly be so stupid as life. It was monstrous to suppose that the young poet could be right after all. And yet----

He went out hurriedly and released all the laboratory animals: guinea-pigs, monkeys, and white rats. They should not die of starvation, poor beasts. They squeaked and gibbered excitedly for a minute or two, as they moved off to explore. Probably the snakes had them all within the week.

After some hours of waiting for the agony to begin, Roger fell asleep, and slept till the next morning. When he woke he sat up and looked about him, being not quite sure at first that he was still alive. His pulse was normal, his tongue was normal, his heart was normal. He felt particularly well. He looked at his flesh. The bladdery look had relapsed, the skin was normal again. Looking over to Lionel's cot, he saw that Lionel was not in the hut. Fearing that he had wandered out to die in a fit of delirium, he went out into the open to look for him.

It was a bright, windy, tropic morning, with a tonic briskness in the air such as one feels sometimes in England, in April and late September. One of the released monkeys was fast by the neck again upon his perch. He was munching a biscuit with his entire vitality. Lionel sat upon the wall, sunning himself in a blanket. His attitude suggested both great physical weakness, and entire self-confidence.

"I say, Roger," he began. "It's too bad. You are a juggins! You've let all our menagerie go. What are we to do for laboratory animals? I caught McGinty here. Otherwise we'd have been without a single one. Every cage in the place is wide open. What have you been doing?"

"My God!" said Roger. "He's cured!"

"Cured, sir?" said Lionel. "Why shouldn't I be? There's been nothing wrong with me except fever. But I'm not joking. I want to know about these animals. What were you thinking of to let them out?"

"Lionel," said Roger, "for the last five weeks you've been dying of sleeping sickness. The atoxyl was lost. I believe you threw it away."

"There's the atoxyl," said Lionel, pointing. "In the hole in the wall there. I put it there yesterday, after dosing those two."

Sure enough, there stood the bottle in the dimness of a hole in the wall. Roger must have passed it some fifty times.

"I looked for it everywhere," said Roger.

Lionel's eyes narrowed to the sharpness of medical scrutiny. He examined Roger for some time.

"Let me take your pulse, Lionel," said Roger, staring back.

"My pulse is all right," said Lionel. "Be off and look for guinea-pigs." The pulse was all right; so was the flesh of the wrist.

"I suppose the next thing you'll want me to believe is that I've still got sleeping sickness? Well, look at my tongue. Perhaps that will convince you." Lionel waited for an answer for a moment with protruding tongue. The tongue was steady. Lionel returned to the charge. "What have you been playing at with those Weissner serum pans?" he asked. "Have you been bleeding the monkeys? You seem to have been having a field-day generally."

"I tell you," said Roger, "that you've been dying of sleeping sickness for five weeks. Look at your temperature chart. Look at my diary. After the atoxyl was lost, I tried every mortal thing we had. And nothing was any good. You were drowsing away to death for days. Don't you remember?"

"I remember having fever, and you or somebody messing around with a needle. But, five weeks, man! Five weeks. Come!"

"I tell you, you have. You've been unconscious half the time."

"Well. If I've had sleeping sickness, how comes it that I'm here, talking to you? You say yourself the atoxyl was lost."

"Lionel," said Roger, "I injected you with a dead culture. After that, I shot a couple of koodoos (if they were koodoos), a cow and a fawn. The fawn had nagana or something. I took sera from them, and injected the sera into both of us. Great big doses in both cases. I injected the sera into seven poor devils in the village, and they all swelled up and died. It was awful, Lionel. What makes people swell up?"

"I don't know," said Lionel. "I suppose it might be anthrax. Was there fever?"

"Intense pain, very high fever, and death apparently from exhaustion. And you and I swelled up a little; and I made sure yesterday that we were both going to die too. I wrote letters, and stuck them up on a bar inside there."

"Oh, so that was what the rod was for? I thought it was something funny. And now we are both cured?"

"Yes. My God, Lionel, I'm thankful to hear your voice again. You don't know what it's been."

They shook hands.

"You're a public benefactor," said Lionel. He looked hard at Roger. "I give you best," he added. "I thought you were a griff. But you've found a cure, it seems. Eh? Look at him. It's the first time he's realised it!"

"But," Roger stammered, "I've killed seven with it; that's not what I call a cure."

"Did you inject the seven with the dead culture first?" Lionel asked.

"No. Only myself and you."

"There you are," said Lionel. "You griffs make the discoveries, and haven't got the gumption to see them. My good Lord! It's as plain as measles. You inject the dead culture. That's the first step. That makes the trypanosomes agglutinise. Very well, then. You inject your serum when they are agglutinised; not before. When they are agglutinised, the serum destroys them, after raising queer symptoms. When they are not agglutinised the serum destroys you by the excess of what causes the queer symptoms. I don't understand those symptoms. They are so entirely unexpected. Did you examine the blood?"

"One cubic centimetre of the venous blood killed a guinea-pig in three hours."

"Yes, no doubt. But did you look at the blood microscopically?"

"No," said Roger, ashamed. "I looked at my sera for streptococci."

"You juggins!" said Lionel. "Yet you come out and land on a cure. Well, well! You're a lucky dog. Let's go in and look at our glands." Roger noticed that he walked with the totter of one newly risen from a violent attack of fever.

Four months later, the two men reached Shirikanga in a canoe of their own making. They were paddled by four survivors from the village. All the rest were dead, either of sleeping sickness or of the serum. Lionel had not discovered what it was in the serum which caused the fatal symptoms. It contained some quality which caused the streptococci, or pus-forming microbes, to increase; but, as far as he could discover, this quality was exerted only when the patient's blood contained virulent trypanosomes, or some other active toxin-producing micro-organisms in the unagglutinised condition. They cured four of the villagers. They might have saved more had they been able to begin the treatment earlier in the disease. They were not dissatisfied with their success. They "had powler't up and down a bit," like the Jovial Huntsmen. They had come to some knowledge of each other, and to some extension of their faculties.

Scientifically, they had done less than they had hoped; but more than they had expected to do. They had been the first to cure cases with animal serum. They had been the first to study in any way the effect of nagana upon the young of wild game, and to prepare (as yet untested) vaccine from young antelopes, quaggas, and elands. They had discovered a wash of Paris green and lime which destroyed the tsetse pupas. They had cleared some three miles of fly belt. They had studied the tsetse. They had surveyed the whole and excavated a part of the Zimbabwe. Lastly, they had settled the foundations of friendship between them.

That was, perhaps, the best result of the expedition. They had settled a friendship likely to last through life. They were confident that they would do great things together. Shirikanga hove in sight at the river mouth. Two country barques lay at anchor there, with grimy awnings over their poops. Ashore, in the blaze of the day, were a few white-washed huts, from one of which a Union Jack floated. In the compound of another hut a negro was slowly hoisting the ball of a flag. He brought it to the truck and broke it out, so that it fluttered free. It was a red burgee, the letter B of the code.

"Mail day," said Lionel. "We shall be out of here to-night. We shall be at Banana by Wednesday. That means Antwerp by Wednesday three weeks. London's not far away."

"Good," said Roger. He was not thinking of London. He was thinking of a lonely Irish hill, where there were many yellow-hammers. The trees there stood up like ghosts. Round an old, grey, two-storied house the bees murmured. He was thinking that perhaps one or two roses might be in blossom about the house even a month later, when he would stand there.

He thought of his life in Africa, and of its bearing upon himself. It had done him good. He was worth more to the world than he had been a year before. He thought little of his success. It had been fortunate. It had saved Lionel. When he thought of his earlier life he sighed. He knew that he would have achieved more than that sorry triumph had he been trained. His life had been improvised, never organised. Great things are done only when the improvising mind has a great organisation behind it.

He thought it all over again when he lay in his bunk in a cabin of the _Kabinda_, on his way up-coast. He was at peace with the world. Clean sheets, the European faces, and the civilised meals in the saloon, had wiped out the memory of the past. Africa was already very dim to him. The Zimbabwe rose up in his mind like something seen in a dream, a dim, but rather grand shape. The miseries of the camp were dim. He had been sad that morning in bidding farewell to the four whose lives he had saved. Jellybags, Toro, Buckshot, and Pocahontas. He repeated their names and considered their engaging traits. Jellybags was the best of them. He had liked Jellybags. Jellybags had wanted to come with them. He would never see Jellybags again. He didn't care particularly. The sheets of the bunk were very comfortable. At the end of a great adventure things are seen in false proportions. Only the thought that those men had shared his life for a while gave him the suggestion of a qualm before he put them from his mind.

He thought of Ottalie. He saw her more clearly than of old. In the old days he had seen her through the pink mists of amatory sentiment. The sentiment was gone. Action had knocked it out of him. He saw her now as she was. She was more wonderful in the clearer light; more wonderful than ever; a fine, trained, scrupulous mind, drilled to a beautiful unerring choice in life. She was near and real to him, so real that he seemed to be within her mind, following its fearlessness. He felt that he understood her now. With a rush of emotion he felt that he could bring what she had been into the life of his time.

In the steamer at Banana was a German scientist bound to Sierra Leone. He spoke English. He asked the two friends about their achievement. Lionel told him that they had discovered a serum for the cure of trypanosomiasis. The German smiled. "Ah," he said. "There is already sera. The Japanese bacteriologist, what was his name? Shima? Oshima? Shiga? No, Hiroshiga. He have found a good serum, which makes der peoples die sometimes. Then there is Mühlbauer who have improved the serum of Hiroshiga. He have added a little trypanroth or a little mercury or somedings. Now he have cured everymans. I wonder you have not seen of Hiroshiga in der newspapers. He have make his experiments in der spring; and Mühlbauer he is now at Nairobi curing everymans. He have vaccination camps."

"Well," said Lionel. "We've been beaten on the post. You hear, Roger? All that we have done has been done."

"You wait," said Roger. "We're only beginning."

Afterwards he was sad that it was ending thus. He would have been proud to have given a cure to the world. It would have been an offering to Ottalie. She would have loved to share that honour. He had plucked that poor little flower for her at the risk of his life. It was hard to find that it was only a paper flower after all. He thought of Ottalie as standing at the window of the upper passage looking out for him. She seemed to him to be something of all cleanness and fearlessness, waiting for him to lead her into the world, so that men might serve her.

In Ottalie's old home, a month later, he saw his way. Leslie, Lionel, and himself sat together in the twilight, talking of her. Roger was deeply moved by a sense of her presence there. He leaned forward to them and spoke earnestly, asking them to join hands in building some memorial to her. "She was like a new spirit coming to the world," he said. "Like the new spirit. We ought to bring that new spirit into the world. Let us form a brotherhood of three to do that. We are three untrained enthusiasts. Let us prepare an organisation for the enthusiasts who come after us. Let us build up an interest in the new hygiene and the new science; in all that is cleanly and fearless. We could start a little school and laboratory together, and run a monthly paper preaching our tenets. All the ills of modern life come from dirt and sentiment, and the cowardice which both imply. If we stand together and attack those ills, year in and year out, we shall get rid of them. Little by little, if one stands at a street corner, the crowd gathers."

"Yes," said Leslie. "And you think dirt and sentiment the bad things? Well, perhaps you're right. They're both due to a want of order in the mind. What do you think, Lionel?"

"I?" said Lionel. "I say, certainly. We three are living in a most wonderful time. The world is just coming to see that science is not a substitute for religion, but religion of a very deep and austere kind. We are seeing only the beginning of it."

They settled a plan of action together.

Roger went out into the garden, and down the hill, thinking of the crusade against the weariness and filth of cities. There was an afterglow upon the hills. It fell with a ruddy glare on the window of his dream. It thrilled him. The light would fall there long after the house had fallen. It had lighted Ottalie. It had burned upon the pane when Ottalie's mother stood there. Nature was enduring; Nature the imperfect; Nature the enemy, which blighted the rose and spread the weed. Thinking of the woman who had waited for him there in his vision, he prayed that her influence in him might help to bring to earth that promised life, in which man, curbing Nature to his use, would assert a new law and rule like a king, where now, even in his strength, he walks sentenced, a prey to all things baser.

THE END

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