Part 8

It was a double page from a year-old London paper entitled _Top-Knots_. It consisted of scraps of gossip, scraps of news, scraps of information, seasoned with imperial feeling. It had been edited by some one with a sense of the purity of the home. It was harmless stuff. The wisdom of the reader was flattered; the wisdom of the foreigner was not openly condemned. Though some fear of invasion was implied, its possibility was flouted. "It was a maxim of our Nelson that one Englishman was worth three foreigners." The jokes were feeble. The paper catered for a class of poor, half-educated people without more leisure than the morning ride to business, and the hour of exhaustion between supper and bed. It was well enough in its way. Some day, when life is less exhausting, men will demand stuff with more life. Something caught Roger's eye. He read it through. It was the first thing read by him since his arrival there.

"SLEEPING SICKNESS.

"It is not generally known that this devastating ailment is caused by the presence of a minute micro-organism in the human system. The micro-organism may exist in unsuspected harmlessness for many years in the victim's blood. It is not until it enters what is known to scientists as the cerebro-spinal fluid, or as we should call it, the marrow, that it sets up the peculiar symptoms of the dread disease which has so far baffled the ingenuity of our _soi-disant_ savants. This terrible affliction, which is not by any means confined to those inferior members of the human race, the dusky inhabitants of Uganda, consists of a lethargy accompanied with great variations of temperature. So far the dread complaint is without a remedy. Well may the medico echo the words of the Prince of Denmark:

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.'"

There was no more about the disease. The page ended with a joke about a mother-in-law. The paragraph made Roger remember an article which he had once read about the sudden rise of the sickness in some district in Africa. He remembered the photograph of a young African, who was dozing his life away, propped against a tree. The thought passed. In another instant he was full of his own misery again. But instead of throwing away the paper, he folded it, and put it in his pocket-case. It would remind him of that last visit to Ottalie's garden. He would keep it forever.

His wretchedness gave him a craving to be tender to something. He tried to attract the kitten, but the kitten, tiring of her romp, scampered to the garden wall to stalk sparrows. He plucked a leaf or two from the verbena. He went into the house.

Agatha welcomed him. She was writing replies to letters of condolence. The death had taken her hardness from her.

"Sit down and talk," she said. "What are you going to do?"

"That is like a woman," he said. "Women are wonderful. They use a man's vanity to protect themselves from his egotism. I came here to ask you that. What are you going to do?"

"I shall go on with my work," she said. "I am sure not to marry. I shall start a little school for poor girls."

"At Great Harley? But you were doing that before."

"Only in a very desultory sort of way. But now it is all different. Life has become so much bigger."

"Will you tell me about it? I should like to hear about it."

"Oh, it would only bore you. I shall just teach them the simplest things. How to darn clothes, how to cook, and perhaps a little singing. It isn't as though I were a learned person."

"How kind of you."

"It isn't kind at all."

"You will be taking girls of from thirteen to sixteen?"

"Yes. I've got no flair for very little children. Besides, there is nothing which I could teach them. I want to get hold of them at an age when I can really be of use to them."

She drummed a little with one foot.

"I wish that you would let me help you," he continued.

"Thank you very much. That is very kind of you. But I must do this quite by myself."

"What are you going to do with the flat in town?" he asked. "I should like to take it if you are going to give it up."

"Oh, I shall keep it on," she said. "I shall be up for week-ends a good deal, at any rate until I have got my class in working order."

"You will let me know if you ever want to give it up?"

"Yes. Certainly I will. Will you go back? I suppose you will be going back to your work. What are your plans? You never answered my question. You went flying off into apophthegms."

"I loved Ottalie, too," he answered. "I won't say as much as you did, for you knew her intimately. I never was soul to soul with her as you were; but I loved her. I want now to make my life worthy of her, as you do. But it won't be in my work. I don't know what it will be in. You women are lucky. You can know people like her."

"Yes. I shall always be glad of that," said Agatha. "Even the loss is bearable when I think that I knew her fully. Perhaps better than any one."

"Yes," he said. He paused, turning it over in his mind. "Life is a conspiracy against women," he added. "That is why they are so wonderful and so strange. I am only groping in the dark about her."

"Roger," said Agatha, speaking slowly, "I think I ought to tell you. I knew that you were in love with her. I was jealous of you. I did all that I could to keep you apart. She was in love with you. When she saw you at the theatre before the disturbance began, she would have gone to your box if I had not said that I was sure you would prefer to be alone. In the morning she saw what one of the papers said. She insisted on going to see you at your rooms. She said that she was sure you were expecting her, or that something had kept her letters from you. I told her that it wasn't a very usual thing to do. She said that she would talk about that afterwards. Afterwards, when she had gone, and failed to see you, she was horrified at what you might think of her."

It was very sweet to hear more of her, thus, after all was over. It was something new about her. He had never seen that side of her. He wondered how much more Agatha would tell him, or permit him to learn, in years to come. He saw that she was near tears. He was not going to keep her longer on the rack.

"Agatha," he said, "we have been at cross-purposes for a long time now. We have not been just to each other. Let it end now. We both loved her. Don't let it go on, now that she is dead. I want to feel that the one who knew her best is my friend. I want you to let me help you, as a brother might, whenever you want help. Will you?"

She said, "Thank you, Roger." They shook hands. He remembered afterwards how the lustre of the honesty shewed behind her head. A worn old panther skin, the relic of a beast which had been shot in India by Ottalie's father so many years before that the hairless hide was like parchment beneath the feet, crackled as she left the room. Roger plucked some of the silvery seed vessels for remembrance.

He stood in the hall for a moment trying to fix it in his mind. There was the barometer, by Dakins, of South Castle Street, in Liverpool, an old piece, handsome, but long since useless. There were the well-remembered doors. The dining-room door, the library door, the door leading into the jolly south room, the room sweet with the vague perfume, almost the memory of a perfume, as though the ghosts of flowers strayed there. The door of that room was open. Through its open windows he could see the blue of the bay, twinkling to the wind. Near the window was the piano, heaped with music. A waltz lay upon the piano: the Myosotis Waltz. Let no one despise dance music. It is the music which breaks the heart. It is full of lights and scents, the laughter of pretty women and youth's triumph. To the man or woman who has failed in life the sound of such music is bitter. It is youth reproaching age. It indicates the anti-climax.

He walked with Leslie through the village. The ragged men on the bridge, hearing them coming, turned, and touched what had once been their hats to them. They were not made for death, those old men. They were the only Irish things which the English tourist had not corrupted. They leant on the parapet all day. In the forenoons they looked at the road and at the people passing. In the afternoons, when the sun made their old eyes blink, they turned and looked into the water, where it gurgled over rusty cans, a clear brown peat-stream. A quarter of a mile up the stream was the graveyard, where the earth had by this time ceased to settle over Ottalie's face. On the grave, loosely tied with rushes, was a bunch of dog-roses.

They climbed the sharp rise beyond the bridge. Here they began to ride. They were going to ride thirty miles to the hotel. There they would sleep. In the morning Roger would take the steamer and return to London, where he would dree his weird by his lane as best he could.

The men on the quay were loading ore, as of old, into a dirty Glasgow coaster. One of them asked Roger which team had won at the hurling.

They ploughed through the red mud churned by the ore-carts. The schooner lay bilged on the sand, as of old, with one forlorn rope flogging the air. One or two golfers loafed with their attendant loafers on the links. They rode past them. Then on the long, straight, eastward bearing road, which rounds Cam Point, they began to hurry, having the wind from the glens behind them. Soon they were at the last gloomy angle from which the familiar hills could be seen. They rounded it. They passed the little turnpike. A cutter yacht, standing close inshore, bowed slowly under all sail before them. She lifted, poising, as the helm went down. Her sails trembled into a great rippling shaking, then steadied suddenly as the sheet checked. A man aboard her waved his hand to them, calling something. They spun downhill from the cutter. Now they were passing by a shore where the water broke on weed-covered boulders. From that point the road became more ugly at each turn of the wheel. It was the road to England.

They stopped at the posting-house so that a puncture might be mended while they were at tea. Tea was served in a long, damp, decaying room, hung with shabby stuff curtains. Vividly coloured portraits of Queen Victoria and Robert Emmet hung from the walls. On the sideboard were many metal teapots. On the table, copies of _Commerce_, each surmounted by a time-table in a hard red cover, surrounded a tray of pink wineglasses grouped about an aspodesta. On a piano was a pile of magazines, some of them ten years old, all coverless and dog's-eared. Roger picked up one of the newest of them, not because he wanted to read it, but because, like many literary men, he was unable to keep his hands off printed matter. He answered Leslie at random as he looked through it. There was not much to interest him there. Towards the end of it there was a photograph of an African hut, against which a man and woman huddled, apparently asleep. A white man in tropical clothes stood beside them, looking at something in a sort of test-tube.

"A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS BELT," ran the legend. Underneath, in smaller type, was written, "This photograph represents two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present, is believed to be incurable. The man in white, to l. of the picture (reader's r.), is Dr. Wanklyn, of the Un. Kgdm. Med. Assn. The photograph was taken by Mr. A. S. Smallpiece, Dr. Wanklyn's assistant. Copyright."

"What do you know of sleeping sickness, Leslie?" he asked.

"Sleeping sickness?" said Leslie. "There was an article about it in _The Fortnightly_, or one of the reviews. There was a theory that it is caused in some way by the bite of a tsetse fly."

"Yes," said Roger, "I remember that."

"Then when Maggie and I were staying at Drumnalorry we met old Dr. MacKenzie. He was out in Africa a great deal, fifty or sixty years ago. He was a great friend of my mother's. He told us at dinner one night that sleeping sickness is not a new thing at all, but a very old thing. The natives used to get it even in his day. He said that the tsetse fly theory was really all nonsense. He called it a pure invention, based on the discovery that yellow fever is spread by the white-ribbed mosquito. His own theory was that it was caused by manioc intoxication."

"That seems to me to be the prejudice of an old man. What is manioc?"

"A kind of a root, like cassava, isn't it?"

"Probably. What is cassava?"

"It's what they make bread of; cassava bread. It's poisonous until you bake it. Isn't that the stuff? Are you interested in sleeping sickness?"

"Yes. It has been running in my head all day. Look here. Here's a picture of two Africans suffering from it. Do they just sleep away like that?"

"I suppose so. They become more and more lethargic, probably, until at last they cannot be roused."

"How long are they in that condition?"

"I believe for weeks. Poor fellows; it must be ghastly to watch."

"There is no cure. There's no cure for a lot of things. Tetanus, leprosy, cancer. I wonder how it begins. You wake up feeling drowsy. And then to feel it coming on; and to have seen others ill with it. And to know at the beginning what you will have to go through and become. It must be ghastly."

"Here is tea," said Leslie. "By the way, sleeping sickness must be getting worse. It attacks Europeans sometimes. MacKenzie said that in his time it never did."

"Well," said Roger, "Europeans have given enough diseases to the Africans. It is only fair that we should take some in return."

They rode on slowly in the bright Irish twilight. When they were near the end of their journey they came to a villa, the garden of which was shut from the road by a low hedge. The garden was full of people. Some of them were still playing croquet. Chinese lanterns, already lit, made mellow colour in the dusk. A black-haired, moustachioed man with a banjo sat in a deck-chair singing. The voice was a fine bass voice, somehow familiar to Roger. It was wailing out the end of a sentimental ditty:

"O, the moon, the moon, the moon,"

in which the expression had to supply the want of intensity in the writing. Hardly had the singer whined his last note when he twanged his banjo thrice in a sprightly fashion. He piped up another ditty just as the cyclists passed.

"O, I'm so seedy, So very seedy, I don't know what to do. I've consumption of the liver And a dose of yellow fever And sleeping sickness, too. O, my head aches And my heart..."

The banjo came to ground with a twang: the song stopped.

"Fawcett!" the singer shouted; "Fawcett! Come in here. Where are you going?"

"I can't stop," cried Leslie, over his shoulder. He turned to Roger. "Let's get away," he said.

They rode hard for a few minutes. "Who was that?" Roger asked. "I seemed to know his voice."

"It's a man called Maynwaring," said Leslie. "I don't think you've met him, have you? He's in the Navy. He met us at a dance. He proposed to Ottalie about a year ago. Now he has married one of those pretty, silly doll-women, a regular officer's wife. They are not much liked here."

"Curious," said Roger; "he was singing about sleeping sickness. Somehow, I think I must have met him. His voice seems so familiar." He stopped suddenly, thinking that the voice was the voice of the singer in his dream. "Yes," he said to himself. "Yes. It was."

A few minutes later they were sliding down the long hill to the hotel.

VI

Man is a lump of earth, the best man's spiritless, To such a woman. _John Fletcher_.

London was too full of memories. He could not get away from them. He could not empty his mind sufficiently to plan or execute new work. He was too near to his misery. He had been in town, now, for a month; but he had done nothing. He was engaged daily in trying to realise that his old life had stopped. If he thought at all he thought as those stunned by grief always will, in passages of poignant feeling. His nights were often sleepless. When he slept he often dreamed that he was alone in the night, looking into a lit room where Ottalie stood, half-defined, under heavy robes. Then he would wake with a start to realise that he would never see any trace of her again, beyond the few relics which he possessed.

Only one little ray of light gave him hope. He wanted to rebuild his life for her. He wanted to become all that she would have liked him to become. In any case, whatever happened, he would have the memory of her to guide him in all that he did. But he felt, every now and then, when he could feel at all hopefully, that she was trying to help him to become what she had longed for him to be. He thought that little chance happenings in life were signals from her in the other world, or, if not signals, attempts to move him, attempts to make him turn to her; things full of significance if only he could interpret them. He felt that in some way she was trying to communicate. It was as though the telephone had broken. It was as though the speaker could not say her message directly; but had to say it in fragments to erring, forgetful, wayward messengers, who forgot and lost their sequence. They could only hint, stammeringly, at the secret revealed to them. He thought that she had sent him some message about sleeping sickness, using the torn page, the magazine, and the naval officer, as her messengers. There were those three little words from her, romantic, like words heard in dream. If they were not from her, then they were none the less holy, they were intimately bound with his last memories of her. Often he would cry out in his misery that she might be granted to come to him in dream to complete her message. What did she want to say about sleeping sickness?

He could not guess. He could only say to himself that for some hidden reason that disease had been brought to his notice at a time when he was morbidly sensitive to impressions. He spent many hours in the British Museum studying that disease as closely as one not trained to medical research could hope to do. He read the Reports of the Commission, various papers in _The Lancet_, the works of Professor Ronald Ross and Sir Patrick Manson, the summary of Low in Allbutt, the deeply interesting articles in the _Journal of Tropical Medicine_, and whatever articles he could find in reviews and encyclopædias.

He called one day at the theatre office in answer to a telegram from Falempin. Falempin had something to say to him. He had flung down the glove to the "peegs," he said, by keeping on _The Roman Matron_ for the usual weekly eight performances, in spite of the Press and the public wrath. For three weeks he had played it to empty or abusive houses. Then, at the end of the third week, a man had written in a monthly review that _The Roman Matron_ was the only play of the year, and that all other English plays then running in London were so many symptoms of our national rottenness. The writer was not really moved by _The Roman Matron_. He was a town wit, trying to irritate the public by praising what it disliked, and by finding a moral death in all that it approved. It may be said of such that they cast bread upon the waters; but the genius, as a rule, does not find it until many days. In this case, as the wit was at the moment the fashion, his article was effectual from the day of its publication. The actors found one evening an attentive, not quite empty house. Three nights later the piece went very well indeed. On the fourth night they were called. By the end of the week _The Roman Matron_ was a success, playing to a full house.

"Naldrett," said Falempin, "I 'ave lost twelve thousand pounds over your play. What so? I go to make perhaps forty thousand. Always back your cards. The peegs they will eat whatever they are told. Some of the papers they are eating their words. You see? Here; here is anozzer. By the same men, I think. Criticism? Next to the peegs, I do lof the critic. It likes not me, these funny men. What is the English people coming to? You 'ave critics; you 'ave very fine critics. But they 'ave no power. Zese men in zese gutter rags--Pah. We go to make you many motor-cars out of zis play."

Leslie brought his wife to town a week later. She wished to consult an oculist. Roger dined with them the night after their arrival.

"Roger," said Leslie, "I want you to meet my cousin, Mrs. Heseltine. She wants you to dine with her to-morrow night. We said that we would bring you if you were free. I hope that you will come; she's such a splendid person."

Roger said that he would go.

That evening he went to an At Home given in honour of a great French poet who was staying in London. He had no wish to attend the function. He went from a sense of duty. He went from a sense of what was due to the guardian of intellect. The At Home was in Kensington, in a big and hideous house. A line of carriages stood by the kerb, each with its tortured horses tossing their heads piteously against the bearing-reins. Flunkeys with white, sensual faces stood at the door. There was a glitter of varnish everywhere, from boots, carriages, and polished metal. There was not much noise, except the champ-champing of the bits and the spattering of foam. Carriage doors slammed from time to time. Loafers insulted those who entered. Women and children, standing by the strip of baize upon the sidewalk, muttered in awed hatred.

Roger went into a room jammed with jabberers. In the middle of the room there was a kind of circle, a sort of pugilists' ring, in which the poet stood. He was a little stocky man, powerfully built. He had a great head, poised back on his shoulders so that his jaw protruded aggressively. It needed only one glance to see that he was the one vital person in the room. The big, beefy, successful English novelists looked like bladders beside him. He talked in a voice which boomed and rang. People crowded up. Ladies in wonderful frocks broke on him, as it were, in successions of waves. He bowed, he was shaken by the hand, he was pulled by the arm. Questions and compliments and platitudes came upon him in every known variety of indifferent French. He never ceased to talk. He could have talked the room to a standstill, and gone on fresh to a dozen like it. He was talking wisely, too. Roger heard half of one booming epigram as he caught his hostess' eye. She was bringing up relays of platitudes to take the place of those already exploded. His host, sawing the air with one hand, was expounding something which he couldn't explain. Roger saw him compliment the poet for taking his point without exposition. Exploded platitudes ran into Roger and apologised. Roger ran into platitudes not yet exploded and apologised. There was a gabble everywhere of unintelligent talk, dominating but not silencing the great voice. Roger heard an elegant young man speak of the poet as "a bounder, an awful bounder." Then somebody took him by the arm. Somebody wanted to talk to him. He said his say to the great man while being dragged to somebody. Somebody in a strange kind of chiton below a strange old gold Greek necklace was telling him about _The Roman Matron_. Did he write it?

"Yes," he said. "I wrote it."

The hostess interposed. The chiton was borne off to a lady in Early Victorian dress. A little grey man, very erect and wiry, like a colonel on the stage, bumped into Roger.

"Rather a crowd, eh?" he said, as he apologised. "Have you seen my wife anywhere?"

"No," said Roger. "Is she here?"

"Yes," said the other. "I believe she is. Awfully well the old fellow looks, doesn't he? I met him in Paris in 1890."