Multitude and Solitude

by John Masefield

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."

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?"

"Pretty bad," said Lionel. "I suppose that a couple of hundred thousand men and women have died of it during the last seven years. I don't know how many animals besides. The tsetse will bite pretty nearly every living thing, and everything it bites gets disease of some sort. You see, trypanosomiasis is probably a new thing in Uganda. New diseases are often very deadly, I believe."

"Is the tsetse migrating, then, or can the thing be conveyed by contagion?"

"No. I don't think it's a contagious thing. I should say it almost certainly isn't. It needs direct inoculation. And as far as we know the tsetse keeps pretty near to one place all through its life."

"I know a writer who claims that we are spreading it. Is that so?"

"Indirectly. You see, East Africa is not like America or any other horse country. You haven't got much means of transport, except bearers, unless you go by river, and even then you may have to make portages. Going with natives from one district to another is sure to spread the infection. When infected people come to a healthy district, their germs are sure to be inoculated into the healthy by some tick or bug, even if there are no tsetses to do it. I believe there are trypanosomes in the hut-bugs. I don't know, though, that hut-bugs are guiltier than any other kind. It's impossible to say. From the hour you land until the hour you sail, you are always being bitten or stung by something. Bugs, ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, tsetses, ants, jiggers, gads, hippos, sandflies, wasps. You put on oil of lavender, if you have any. But even with that you are always being bitten."

"And what is the tsetse bite like?"

"You've been to Portobe, haven't you? I remember Ottalie Fawcett speaking of you, years ago, before I went out. You had that cottage at the very end of the loaning, just above the sea? Well. Did you ever go on along the cliff from there to a place where you have to climb over a very difficult barbed-wire fence just under an ash-tree? I mean just before you come to a nunnery ruin, where there is a little waterfall?"

"Yes," said Roger. "I know the exact spot. There used to be a hawk's nest in the cliff just below the barbed wire."

"Well, just there, there are a lot of those reddy-grey flies called clegs. You get them going up to Essna-Lara. That's another place. They bite the horses. You must have been bitten by them. Well, a tsetse is not much like a cleg to look at. It's duller and smaller. It's likest to a house-fly, except for the wings, which are unlike any other kind of insect wings. It comes at you not unlike a cleg. You know how savage a cleg is? He dashes at you without any pretence. He only feints when he is just going to land. And he follows you until you kill him. A tsetse is like that. He'll follow you for half a mile, giving you no peace. Like a cleg, he settles down on you very gently, so that you don't notice him. You'll remember the mosquitoes at Belize. Mosquitoes are like that. Then, when he has sucked his fill and unscrewed his gimlet, you feel a smarting itch, and see your hand swollen. If you are not very well at the time a tsetse bite can be pretty bad. If you'll come to my rooms some time I'll show you some tsetse. They're nothing to look at. They're very like common house-flies."

"And you have been studying all this on the spot? Will you tell me what made you take to it?"

"Oh, I was always interested in that kind of thing. I've always liked hot climates, and being in wild, lonely places. And then my old chief was a splendid fellow. He made me interested. I got awfully keen on it. I want to go out again. You know, I want to get at the bottom of the trypanosome. His life-history isn't known yet, as we know the cycle of the malaria parasite. We don't even know what it is in him which causes the disease. And we don't know very much really about the tsetse, nor what part the tsetse plays in the organism's life. There's a lot which I should like to find out, or try to find out. It's the trying which gives one the pleasure."

"But I think it's heroic of you," said Roger. "Are there many of you out there, doing this?"

"Not very many."

"It's a heroic thing to do," said Roger. "Heroic. The loneliness alone must make it heroic."

"You get used to the loneliness. It gives you nerves at first. But in my opinion the heat keeps you from thinking much about the loneliness. I like heat myself, but it takes it out of most of the griffs. The heat can be pretty bad."

"All the same, it is a wonderful thing to do."

"Yes. It's a good thing to spot the cause of a disease like that. But you over-rate the heroic part. It's all in the day's work. One takes it as it comes, and one has a pretty good time, too. One never thinks of the risk, which is really very slight. Doctors face worse things in London every day. So do nurses. A doctor was telling me only the other day how a succession of nurses went down to a typhus epidemic and died one after the other. There's nothing like that in the Protectorate with sleeping sickness."

"But being the only white man, away in the wilds, with the natives dying all round you!"

"Yes. That is pretty bad. I was in the middle of a pretty bad outbreak in a little place called Ikupu. It was rather an interesting epidemic, because it happened in a place where there weren't any of the tsetse which is supposed to do the harm. They may have been there; but I couldn't find any. It must have been another kind which did the damage at Ikupu. As a matter of fact, I did find trypanosomes in another kind there, which was rather a feather in my cap. Well, I was alone there. My assistant died of blackwater fever. And there I was with a sleeping village. There were about twenty cases. Most of the rest of the natives ran away, and no doubt spread the infection. Those twenty cases were pretty nearly all the society of Ikupu. Some were hardly ill at all. They just had a little fever, perhaps, or a skin complaint on the chest, and tender, swollen glands. Others were just as bad as they could be. They were in all stages of the disease. Some were just beginning to mope outside their huts. Others were sitting still there, not even caring to ask for food, just moping away to death, with their mouths open. Generally, one gets used to seeing that sort of thing; but I got nerves that time. You see, they were rather a special tribe at Ikupu. They called themselves Obmali, or some such name. Their lingo was rather rummy. Talking with the chief I got the impression that they were the relics of a tribe which had been wiped out further west. They believed that sleeping sickness was caused by a snake-woman in a swampy part of the forest. Looking after all those twenty people, and taking tests from them, gave me fever a good deal. That is one thing you have to get used to—fever. You get used to doing your work with a temperature of one hundred and two degrees. It's queer about fever. Any start, or shock, or extra work, may bring it on you. I had it, as I said, a good deal. Well, I got into the way of thinking that there was a snake-woman. A woman with a puff-adder head, all mottled. I used to barricade my hut at night against her."

Dr. Heseltine drew his chair up. "What are you two discussing? Talking about sleeping sickness?" he asked. "How does the new treatment suit you, Lionel? No headache, I hope? It's apt to make you headachy. There's a subject for a play for you, Mr. Naldrett. 'Man and the Trypanosome.' You could bring the germs on to the stage, and kill them off with a hypodermic syringe."

"Yes," said Roger. "It has all the requirements of a modern play: strength, silence, and masculinity. There's even a happy ending to it."

Lionel began to talk to Dr. Heseltine. Roger crossed the room to talk to Leslie. He heard Lionel saying something about "waiting to give the monkey a chance." He did not get another talk with Lionel that night. After they joined the ladies, Ethel Fawcett sang. She had a good, but not very strong voice. She sang some Schumann which had been very dear to Ottalie. Her voice was a little like Ottalie's in the high notes. It haunted Roger all the way home, and into his lonely room. Sitting down before the fireplace he had a sudden vision of drenching wet grass, and a tangle of yellowing honeysuckle, heaped over a brook which gurgled. For an instant he had the complete illusion of the smell of meadowsweet, and Ottalie coming singing from the house, so sharply that he gasped.