Part 9

They talked animatedly for ten minutes about the prospects of French literature as compared with our own. Presently the little man caught sight of his wife. He nodded to Roger and passed on. Roger could not remember that he had ever seen him before.

He looked about for some one with whom to talk. A couple of novelists stood on the opposite side of the room talking to a girl. There was not much chance of getting to them. He looked to his left hand, where some of the waste of the party had been drifted by the tide. He did not know any of the people there. He was struck by the appearance of a young man who stood near the wall, watching the scene with an interest which was half contemptuous. The man was, perhaps, thirty years of age. What struck Roger about him was the strange yellowness of his face. The face looked as though it had been varnished with a clear amber varnish. The skin near the eyes was puckered into crows' feet. The brow was wrinkled and seamed. The rest of the face had the leanness and tightness of one who has lived much in unhealthy parts of the tropics. He was a big man, though as lean as a rake. Roger judged from his bearing that he had been a soldier; yet there was a touch of the doctor about him, too. His eyes had the direct questioning look of one always alert to note small symptoms, and to find the truth of facts through evasions and deceits. His hands were large, capable, clinical hands, with long, supple, sensitive fingers, broad at the tips. The mouth was good-humoured, but marred by the scar of a cut at the left corner.

Presently the man walked up to Roger with the inimitable easy grace which is in the movements of men who live much in the open.

"Excuse me," he said; "but who is the poet in the middle there?"

"Jerome Mongeron," said Roger.

"Thanks," said the man, retiring.

Roger noticed that the man's eyes were more bloodshot than any eyes he had ever seen. Soon after that Roger saw him lead an elderly lady, evidently his mother, out of the room. As he felt that he had bored himself sufficiently in homage to the man of intellect, he too slipped away as soon as he could.

The night following he dined with Mrs. Heseltine. She was an elderly lady, fragile-looking, but very beautiful, with that autumnal beauty which comes with the beginning greyness of the hair. Her face had the fineness of race in it. Looking at her, one saw that all the unwanted, unlovely elements had been bred away, by conscious selection, in many generations of Fawcetts. Her face had that simple refinement of feature which one sees in the women's faces in Holbein's drawing of Sir Thomas More's family. Only in Mrs. Heseltine the striving for rightness and fineness had been pushed a little too far at the expense of the bodily structure. There was a pathetic drooping of the mouth's corners, and a wild-bird look in the eye which told of physical weakness very bravely borne. Her husband was a brain specialist.

She wore black for her niece. There were few other guests. It was a family party. There were the two Heseltines, their cousins the Luscombes, the two Fawcetts, Ethel Fawcett (another cousin), a woman in morning dress who had just been speaking at a suffrage meeting, Roger, and one Lionel who was very late. They waited for Lionel. They were sure that Lionel would not be long. The suffrage speaker, Miss Lenning, asked if Lionel were better. Yes. The new treatment was doing him good. They were hoping that he would get over it. Roger started when Mrs. Heseltine's voice grew grave. There were notes in it strangely like Ottalie's voice. The voice reveals character more clearly than the face, more clearly than it reveals character, it reveals spiritual power. Until he heard those grave notes he had not seen much of Ottalie in her, except in the way in which she sat, the head a little drooped, the hands composed, in a pose which no art could quite describe, it was so like her. The words thrilled through him, as though the dead were in the room under a disguise. There was Leslie looking at him, with grave, kindly deliberation, putting up his glasses to Ottalie's eyes with Ottalie's hand. Ottalie's voice spoke to him through Mrs. Heseltine. They were away in one corner of the room now, looking at a drawing.

"I have so often heard of you," she was saying. "Somehow I always missed you when I was at Portobe. But I have heard of you from Leslie, and from poor Ottalie. I wanted to see you. I have been waiting to see you for the last month. I wanted to tell you something which Ottalie said to me, when my boy was killed in the war. She said that when a life ended, like that, suddenly and incomplete, it was our task to complete it, for the world's sake, in our own lives." She paused for an instant, and then added: "I have tried to realise what my boy would have done. I hope that you will come to talk to me whenever you like. Ottalie was very dear to me. She was in this room, looking at this drawing, only seven weeks ago." She faltered for a moment.

"Yes, Mrs. Heseltine?" he said.

"Talking about you," she added gently.

"Mr. Heseltine," said the maid, opening the door. The man with the yellow face and injected eyes entered.

"Ah, Lionel," said Mrs. Heseltine.

"I'm awfully sorry I'm so late," he said. "They've been trying a new cure on me. It's said to be permanent; but they've only tried it on one other fellow so far. I wish you hadn't waited for me." He glanced at Roger with a smile.

"D'you know Mr. Heseltine, Mr. Naldrett?"

"We met each other last night," said Roger. "At the MacElherans'."

"Yes. I think we did," he answered.

Dinner was announced. Roger took Miss Lenning. Mrs. Heseltine sat at his left. Miss Lenning was a determined young woman with no nonsense about her. Roger asked if her speech had gone well.

"Pretty well," she said. "I was on a wagon in the Park. A lot of loafers rushed the wagon once or twice. It's the sort of thing London loafers delight to do."

"Yes," said Roger. "That is because the part of London near the parks is not serious. It is a part given up to pleasure-mongers and their parasites. The crowds there don't believe in anything, they won't help anything, they can't understand anything. In the East of London you would probably get attention. I suppose the police sniggered and looked away?"

"You talk as though you had been at it yourself," said Miss Lenning.

"Been at it? Yes. Of course I have. But not very much, I'm afraid. I used to speak fairly regularly. Then at your big meeting in the Park I got a rotten egg in the jaw, which gave me blood poisoning. I had to stop then, because ever since then I've been behindhand with my work. A London crowd is a crowd of loafers loafing. But a crowd in a northern city, in Manchester, or Leeds, or Glasgow, is a very different thing. They are a different stock. They are working men, interested in things. Here they are idlers delighting in a chance of rowdyism. They are without chivalry or decent feeling. They go to boo and jeer, knowing that the police won't stop them. I think you women are perfectly splendid to do what you do, and have done."

"Oh, one doesn't mind going to prison," said Miss Lenning. "I've been three times now. Besides, we shall know how to reform the prisons when we get the vote. What makes my blood boil are the insults I get in the streets from the sort of men whose votes are responsible for disgraces like the war." She stopped. "What is your line?" she asked.

"I'm a writer."

"Why don't you write a play or a novel about us?"

"Because I don't believe in mixing art with propaganda. My province is to induce emotion. I am not going to use such talent as I have upon intellectual puzzles proper to this time. This is the work of a reformer or a leader-writer. My work is to find out certain general truths in nature, and to express them, in prose or verse, in as high and living a manner as I can. That seems absurd to you?"

"Not absurd exactly," she said, "but selfish."

"You think, then, that a man who passes his life in trying to make the world's thought nobler, and the world's character thereby finer, must necessarily be selfish?"

"Yes; I do," she said firmly. "There are all you writers trying, as you put it, to make the world's thought noble, and not one of you--I beg your pardon, only three of you--lift a finger to help us get the vote. You don't really care a rush about the world's thought. You care only for your own thought."

"And your own thought isn't thought at all," said Major Luscombe from over the table. "I don't mean yours, personally, of course. I like your play very much. But taking writers generally throughout the world, what does the literary mind contribute to the world's thought now? Can you point to any one writer, anywhere in the world, whose thoughts about the world are really worth reading?"

"Yes. To a good many. In a good many countries," said Roger.

"I have no quarrel with art," said Heseltine, taking up the cudgels. "It is moral occupation. But I feel this about modern artists, that, with a few exceptions, they throw down no roots, either into national or private life. They care no more for the State, in its religious sense, than they care (as, say, an Elizabethan would have cared) for conduct. They seem to me to be a company of men without any common principle or joint enthusiasm, working, rather blindly and narrowly, at the bidding of personal idiosyncrasy, or of some aberration of taste. A few of you, some of the most determined, are interested in social reform. The rest of you are merely photographing what goes on for the amusement of those who cannot photograph."

"Yes," said Roger. "At present you are condemning modern society. When you were a boy, Dr. Heseltine, you lived in an ordered world, which was governed by supernatural religion, excited by many material discoveries, and kept from outward anxiety by prosperity and peace. All that world has been turned topsy-turvy in one generation. We are no longer an ordered world. I believe there is a kind of bacillus, isn't there, which, when exposed to the open air, away from its home in the blood, flies about wildly in all directions? That is what we are doing. A large proportion of English people, having lost faith in their old ruler, supernatural religion, fly about wildly in motor-cars. And, unfortunately, material prosperity has increased enormously while moral discipline has been declining; so that now, while we are, perhaps, at the height of our national prosperity, there is practically no common enthusiasm binding man to man, spirit to spirit. It is difficult for an artist to do much more than to reflect the moral conduct of his time, and to cleanse, as it were, what is eternal in conduct from its temporary setting. If the world maintains, as I hold that it does, that there is nothing eternal, and that moral conduct consists in going a great deal, very swiftly, in many very expensive motor-cars, with as many idle companions as possible, then I maintain that you must respect the artist for standing alone and working, as you put it, 'rather blindly and narrowly,' at whatever protest his personal idiosyncrasy urges him to make."

"That's just what I was saying," said Major Luscombe. "I was dining with Sir Herbert Chard last night, down at Aldershot. We were talking military shop rather. About conscription. I said that I thought it was a great pity that universal discipline of some kind had not been substituted for the old moral discipline, which of course we all remember, and I dare say were the last to get. You can't get on without discipline."

"Ah, but that is preaching militarism," said Mrs. Heseltine; "and preaching it insidiously."

"The military virtues are the bed-rock of character," said the Major.

"I cannot believe that character is taught by drill-sergeants and subalterns," said Mrs. Heseltine. "If it is taught at all, it is taught (perhaps unconsciously) by fine men and women; and to some extent by the images of noble character in works of art. I see no chance of moral regeneration in conscription, only another excuse for vapouring, and for that kind of casting off of judgment and responsibility which goes under the name of patriotism."

"I would rather establish a compulsory study of Equity," said Roger. "Then nations might judge a _casus belli_ justly, on its merits, instead of accepting the words of newspapers inspired by unscrupulous usurers, as at present. A few unprincipled men, mostly of the lowest kind of commercial Jew, are able to run this country into war whenever they like. And the Briton believes himself to be a level-headed business man."

"If that is the case," said the Major triumphantly, "it proves my point. If we are likely to go to war, we ought to be prepared for war. And we can only be prepared if we establish conscription. And if we are not prepared, we shall cease as a nation. It is your duty, as an English writer, to awaken the national conscience by a play or novel, so that when the time comes we may be prepared."

"My duty is nothing of the kind," said Roger. "I believe war to be a wasteful curse; and the preparation for war to be an even greater curse, and infinitely more wasteful. I am not a patriot, remember. My State is mind. The human mind. I owe allegiance to that first. I am not going to set Time's clock back by preaching war. War belongs to savages and to obsolete anachronisms like generals. You think that that is decadence. That I am a weak, spiritless, little-Englander, who will be swept away by the first 'still, strong man' who comes along with 'a mailed fist.' Very well. I have no doubt that brute force can and will sweep away most things not brutal like itself. It may sweep me away. But I will not disgrace my century by preaching the methods of Palæolithic man. If you want war, go out and fight waste. I suppose that two hundred and fifty million pounds are flung away each year on drink and armaments in this country alone. I suppose that in the same time about five hundred pounds are spent on researches into the causes of disease. About the same amount is given away to reward intellectual labours. I mean labours not connected with the improvement of beer or dynamite. Such labours as noble imaginings about the world and life." He looked at Miss Lenning, whose eye was kindling. No one who has dabbled in politics can resist rhetoric of any kind.

"You send women to prison for wanting to control such folly," he went on. "Doesn't he, Miss Lenning? If I am to become a propagandist, I will do so in the cause of liberty or knowledge. I would write for Miss Lenning, or for Dr. Heseltine there, but for a military man, who merely wants food for powder, for no grand, creative principle, I would not write even if the Nicaraguans were battering St. Paul's."

"Some day," said Mrs. Heseltine, "we may become great enough to give up all this idea of Empire, and set out, like the French, to lead the world in thought and manners. We might achieve something then. France was defeated. She is now the most prosperous and the most civilised country in the world."

"And the least vital," said the Major's wife.

"But what do you mean by vital?" said Roger, guessing that she was repeating a class catch-word. "Vitality is shewn by a capacity for thought."

Maggie Fawcett interposed. "It's a very curious state of things," said she. "The intellect of the world is either trading, fighting for trade, or preparing to fight for trade. It is, in any case, pursuing a definite object. But the imagination of the world is engaged in finding a stable faith to replace the old one. It is wavering between science and superstition, neither of which will allow a compromise. You, Mr. Naldrett, if you will excuse my saying so, belong to the superstition camp. You believe that a man is in a state of grace if he goes to a tragedy, and can tell a Francesca from a Signorelli. I belong to the science camp, and I believe that that camp is going to win. It's attracting the better kind of person; and it has an enthusiasm which yours has not. You are looking for an indefinite, rare, emotional state, in which you can apprehend the moral relations of things. We are looking for the material relations of things so that the rare emotional state can be apprehended, not by rare, peculiar people, such as men of genius, but by everybody."

"What you had better do," said Dr. Heseltine, "is, give up all this 'obsolete anachronism' of art. Science is the art of the twentieth century. You cannot paint or write in the grand manner any longer. That has all been done. Men like you ought to be stamping out preventable disease. Instead of that, you are writing of what Tom said to James while Dick fell in the water. With a fortieth part of what is wasted annually on the army alone, I would undertake to stamp out phthisis in these islands. With another fortieth part there is very little doubt that cancer could be stamped out too. With another fortieth part, wisely and scientifically administered without morbid sentiment, we could stamp out crime and other mental diseases."

"The motor-car and golf, for instance?" said Ethel Fawcett.

"Yes. And betting, 'sport,' war, idleness, drink, vice, tobacco, tea, all the abominations of life. All the reversions to incompleted types. You ought to write a play or a novel on these things. I'm not speaking wildly. I'm speaking of a proved scientific possibility of relative human perfection. When life has been made glorious, as I can see that it could be made, then you artists could set to work to decorate it as much as you like."

"So, then," said Roger, "there are three ways to perfection, by admitting women to the suffrage, by driving men into the army, and by substituting the College of Surgeons for the Government. Now an artist is concerned above all things with moral ideas. He is not limited, or should not be, to particular truths. His world is the entire world, reduced, by strict and passionate thinking, to its imaginative essence. You and your schemes, and their relative importance, are my study, and, when I have reduced them to the ideas of progress which they embody, my material. I think that you have all made the search for perfection too much a question of profession. It is not a question of profession. It is a question of personal character." After a short pause he went on. "At the same time, there is nothing the man of thought desires so much as to be a man of action. English writers (I suppose from their way of bringing up) have been much tempted to action. Byron went liberating Greece. Chaucer was an ambassador, Spenser a sort of Irish R.M., Shakespeare an actor-manager and money-lender, or, as some think, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Writing alone is not enough for a man."

Leslie, who had been chatting to Ethel Fawcett, looked at Roger without speaking. Dinner came slowly to an end. The ladies left the room. The men settled into their chairs. Dr. Heseltine moved the port to Lionel, with, "I suppose you're not allowed this?"

Lionel refused the port, smiling. He put a white tabloid into a little soda-water and settled into the chair next to Roger. He pulled out his cigarette case. "Will you smoke?" he asked. "These are rather a queer kind."

"No, thanks," said Roger. "I've given it up."

"I don't think I could do that," said Lionel, selecting a strange-looking cigarette done up in yellow paper, with twisted ends. "I smoke a good deal. When one's alone one wants tobacco; one gets into the way of it."

He lit a cigarette with a brown hand which trembled. Roger, noticing the tremor, and the redness of the man's eyes, wondered if he were a secret drinker. "Are you much alone?" he asked.

"A good deal," Lionel answered. "I've just been reading a book by you; it's called _The Handful_. I think you wrote it, didn't you? So you've been in the tropics, too?"

"I went to stay with an uncle at Belize, five years ago," said Roger. "I only stayed for about a month."

"Belize," said Lionel. "My chief was in Belize. Was there any yellow fever there, when you were there?"

"There was one case," said Roger.

"Did you see it?"

"No," said Roger; "I didn't."

"I should like to see yellow fever," said Lionel simply. "I suppose there was a good deal of fuss directly this case occurred?"

"Yes," said Roger. "A gang came round at once. I think they put paraffin in the cisterns. They sealed the infected house with brown paper and fumigated it."

"And that stopped it?"

"Yes. There were no other cases."

"It's all due to a kind of mosquito," said Lionel. "The white-ribbed mosquito. He carries the organism. You put paraffin on all standing puddles and pools to prevent the mosquito's larvæ from hatching out. My old chief did a lot of work in Havana, and the West Indies, stampin' out yellow fever. It has made the Panama Canal possible."

"Are you a doctor, then, may I ask?" said Roger.

"No," said Lionel. "I do medical research work; but I don't know much about it. I never properly qualified. I'm interested in all that kind of thing."

"What medical research do you do? Would it bore you to tell me?"

"I have been out in Uganda, doing sleeping sickness."

"Have you?" said Roger. "That's very interesting. I've been reading a lot of books about sleeping sickness."

"Are you interested in that kind of thing?" Lionel asked.

"Yes."

"If you care to come round to my rooms some time I would shew you some relics. I live in Pump Court. I'm generally in all the morning, and between four and six in the evening. I could shew you some trypanosomes. They're the organisms."

"What are they like?" Roger asked.

"They're like little wriggly flattened membranes. Some of them have tails. They multiply by longitudinal division. They're unlike anything else. They've got a pretty bad name."

"And they cause the disease?"

"Yes. You know, of course, that they are spread by the tsetse fly? The tsetse fly sucks them out of an infected fish or mammal, and develops them, inside his body probably for some time, during which the organism probably changes a good deal. When the tsetse bites a man, the developed trypanosome gets down the proboscis into the blood. About a week after the bite, when the bite itself is cured, the man gets the ordinary trypanosome fever, which makes you pretty wretched, by the way."

"Have you had it?"

"Yes; rather. I have it now. It recurs at intervals."

"And how about sleeping sickness?"

"You get sleeping sickness when the trypanosome enters the cerebro-spinal fluid. You may not get it for six or seven years after the bite. On the other hand, you may get it almost at once."

"Then you may get it?" said Roger, startled, looking at the man with a respect which was half pity.

"I've got it," said Lionel.

"Got it? You?" said Roger. He stumbled in his speech. "But, forgive my speaking like this," he said; "is there a cure, then?"

"It's not certain that it's a permanent cure," said Lionel. "I've just started it. It's called atoxyl. Before I tried atoxyl I had another thing called trypanroth, made out of aniline dye. It has made my eyes red, you see? Dyed them. You can have 'em dyed blue, if you prefer. But red was good enough, I thought. Now I'm afraid I'm talking rather about myself."

"No, indeed; I'm intensely interested," said Roger. "Tell me more. Tell me about the sickness in Uganda. Is it really bad?"