VII
Sweet virgin rose, farewell. Heaven has thy beauty,
That's only fit for Heaven. I'll live a little,
And then, most blessed soul, I'll climb up to thee.
Farewell. The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief.
The next morning he found upon his plate a letter in a strange hand. The writing was firmly formed, but ugly. The letters had a way of lying down upon each other towards the end of each word. It was not a literary hand. It was from Lionel Heseltine.
"400A, PUMP COURT, TEMPLE.
"DEAR MR. NALDRETT (it ran),
"If you would like to see my relics, will you come round next Thursday to my rooms between 4 and 5? You will see my name on the doorpost outside. I am up at the top. Your best way would be Underground to the Temple, and then up Middle Temple Lane. If the Lane door is shut you will have to go up into the Strand and then round. I hope you will be able to come.
"Yours sincerely,
"LIONEL HESELTINE."
He replied that he would gladly join him there on Thursday. He wished that Thursday were not still six days away. He was drawn to all these people who had known Ottalie. They were parts of her life. He realised now how much people must be in a woman's life. A man has work, and the busy interests created by it. A woman has friends and the emotions roused by them. This world of Ottalie's friends was new to him. He tried to look upon them as she would have looked upon them. These had known her intimately since her childhood. They had been in her mind continually. She had lived with them. He had often felt vaguely jealous of them, when he had heard her talk of them with Agatha; or if not jealous, sad, that he should not have access to that side of her.
He was drawn to them all, but Lionel attracted him the most strongly. Some of his liking for Lionel was mere instinctive recognition of an inherent fineness and simplicity in the man's character. But there was more than that. He had often felt that in life, as in nature, there is a constant effort to remedy the unnatural. The inscrutable agency behind life offers always wisely some restoration or readjustment of a balance disturbed. He felt that a tide had quickened in his life, at the last ebbing of the old. In the old life all had been to please Ottalie. Life was more serious now. He could not go back all at once to a life interrupted as his had been. Life was not what he had thought it. In the old days it had sufficed to brood upon beautiful images, till his mind had reflected them clearly enough for his hand to write down their evocative symbols. He was not too young to perceive the austerer beauty in the room of life beyond the room in which youth takes his pleasure. But so far his life had been so little serious that he had lacked the opportunity of perceiving it. Now the old world of the beauty of external image, well-defined and richly coloured, was shattered for him. He saw how ugly a thing it was, even as a plaything or decoration, beside the high and tragical things of life and death. It was his misfortune to have lived a life without deep emotions. Now that sorrows came upon him together, smiting him mercilessly, it was his misfortune to be without a friend capable of realising what the issue warring in him meant. O'Neill had sent him a note from Ubrique in Andaluz, asking him to order a supply of litharge for his experiments, which were "wonderful." Pollock had sent him a note from Lyme, repaying, "with many, many thanks," the loan of fifty guineas. His "little girl was very well, and Kitty was wonderful." Besides these two he had no other intimate friends. Leslie, a much finer person than either of them, might have understood and helped his mood; but Leslie had been away in Ireland since the first fortnight. Being, therefore, much alone in his misery, Roger had come to look upon himself in London as the one sentient, tortured thing in a callous ant-swarm. He was shrinking from the sharp points of contact with the world on to still sharper internal points of dissatisfaction with himself. It was, therefore, natural that he should be strongly attracted by a man who carried a mortal disease, with a grave and cheerful spirit, serenely smiling, able, even in this last misfortune, to feel that life had been ordered well, in accordance with high law. The more he thought of Lionel, the more he came to envy that life of mingled action and thought which had tempered such a spirit. In moments of self-despising he saw, or thought that he saw, this difference between their lives. He himself was like an old king surprised by death in the treasure-house. He had piled up many jewels of many-gleaming thought; he was robed in purple; his brain was heavy from the crown's weight. And all of it was a heavy uselessness. He could take away none of it. The treasure was all dust, rust, and rags. He was a weak and fumbling human soul shut away from his bright beloved, not only by death, but by his own swaddled insufficiency. Lionel, on the other hand, was a crusader, dying outside the Holy City, perhaps not in sight of it, but so fired with the idea of it that death was a little thing to him. All his life had been death for an idea. All his life had made dying easier. Roger's tortured mind was not soothed by thinking how their respective souls would look after death. Some men laid up treasures in heaven, others laid up treasures on earth. The writer, doubting one and despising the other, laid up treasures in limbo. He began to understand O'Neill's remark that it was "the most difficult thing in the world for an artist both to do good work and to save his own soul." Little, long-contemned scraps of mediæval theology, acquired in the emotional mood during which he had been pre-Raphaelite, appealed to him again, suddenly, as not merely attractive but wise. Often, at times of deep emotion, in the fear of death, the mind finds more significance in things learned in childhood than in the attainments of maturity. This emotion, the one real passionate emotion of his life, had humbled him. Life had suddenly shewn itself in its primitive solemnity. The old life was all ashes and whirling dust. He understood something, now, of the conflict going on in life. But he understood it quakingly, as a prophet hears the voice in the night. He saw his own soul shrivelling like a leaf in the presence of a great reality. He had to establish that soul's foundations before he could sit down again to work. The artist creates the image of his own soul. When he sees the insufficiency of that soul, he can either remedy it or take to criticism.
Thinking over the talk of the night before, he wondered at the train of events which had altered the course of his thinking. Lionel, a few weeks before, would have been to him a charming, interesting, but misguided man, wandering in one of those sandy, sonorously named Desarts where William Blake puts Newton, Locke, and those other fine intellects, with whom he was not in sympathy. Now he saw that Lionel was ahead of him on the road. Thinking of Lionel, and wishing that he, too, had done something for his fellows, he traced the course of a tide of affairs which had been setting into his mind. It had begun with that blowing paper in the garden, as a beginning tide brings rubbish with it. Now it was in full flood with him, lifting him over shallows where he had long lain grounded. He began to doubt whether literature was so fine a thing as he had thought. Science, so cleanly and fearless, was doing the poet's work, while the poet, taking his cue from Blake, maligned her with the malignity of ignorance. What if poetry were a mere antique survival, a pretty toy, which attracted the fine mind, and held it in dalliance? There were signs everywhere that the day of belles-lettres was over. Good intellects were no longer encouraged to write, "pricked on by your popes and kings." More than that, good intellects were less and less attracted to literature. The revelation of the age was scientific, not artistic. He tried to formulate to himself what art and science were expressing, so that he might judge between them. Art seemed to him to be taking stock of past achievement, science to be on the brink of new revelations.
He knew so little of science that his thought of it was little more than a consideration of sleeping sickness. He reviewed his knowledge of sleeping sickness. He thought of it no longer as an abstract intellectual question, but as man's enemy, an almost human thing, a pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in the noonday, stifling the brains of men. It fascinated him. He thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far away in the wilds, in the midst of the disease, perhaps feeling it coming on, as Lionel must have felt it. They were giving up their lives cheerily and unconcernedly in the hope of saving the lives of others. That was a finer way of living than sitting in a chair, writing of what Dick said to Tom when Joe fell in the water. He went over in his mind the questions which science had to solve before the disease could be stamped out. He wondered if there were in the literary brain some quickness or clearness which the scientific brain wanted. He wondered if he might solve the questions. Great discoveries are made by discoverers, not always by seekers. What was mysterious about the sleeping sickness?
A little thought reduced his limited knowledge to order. The disease is spreading eastwards from the West Coast of Africa between 16° north and 16° south latitude, keeping pretty sharply within the thirty-two degrees, north and south. It is caused by an organism called a trypanosome, which enters the blood through the probosces of biting flies. It kills, when the organism enters the cerebro-spinal fluid. So much was sure. He could not say with certainty why the disease is spreading eastwards, nor why the trypanosome causes it, nor how the fly obtains the trypanosome, nor what happens to the trypanosome in the fly's body. His ignorance thus resolved itself into four heads.
As to the spreading of the disease eastwards, Lionel, who had lived in the country, might know a reason for it. He would at least have heard what the natives and the older settlers thought. Residents' reasons generally range from stories of snake-headed women in the swamp, to tales of a queer case of gin, or of "European germs changed by the climate." The simple explanation was that in mid-Africa human communications are more frequent from the west to the east than from the east to the west. The Congo is the highway.
He knew that the trypanosome is carried by the wild game. In long generations of suffering the African big game has won for itself the power of resisting the trypanosomes. Although the trypanosomes abound in their blood, the wild animals do not develop "nagana" or "surra," the diseases which the tsetse bite sets up in most domestic animals. Something has been bred into their beings which checks the trypanosome's power. The animals are immune, or salted. But although they are immune, the wild animals are hosts to the trypanosome. In the course of time, when they migrate before the advance of sportsmen, or in search of pasture into tsetse country as yet uninfected with trypanosome, the tsetses attacking them suck the infected blood and receive the organisms into their bodies. Later on, as they bite, they transfer the organisms to human beings, who develop the disease. Plainly, a single migratory animal host, or a single infected slave, suffering from the initial feverish stages, might travel for three or four months, infecting a dozen tsetses daily, along his line of march. One man or beast might make the route dangerous for all who followed. Roger remembered how the chigoe or jigger-flea had travelled east along the Congo, to establish itself as an abiding pest wherever there was sand to shelter it.
As to the action of the trypanosome upon the human being, that was a question for trained scientists. It probably amounted to little more than a battle with the white corpuscles.
He passed the next few days at the Museum, studying the disease.
Mrs. Holder, who did for Lionel, let him in to Lionel's rooms on Thursday. "Mr. Heseltine was expecting him, and would be in in a minute. Would he take a seat?" He did so. The rooms were the top chambers of a house in Pump Court. They were nice light airy chambers, sparely furnished. The floor was covered with straw-matting. The chairs were deck-chairs. There were a few books on a bookshelf. Most of them were bound files of the Lancet and British Medical Journal. A few were medical books, picked up cheap at second-hand shops, as the price labels on the backs testified. The rest were mostly military history: The Jena Campaign; Hoenig's Twenty-four Hours of Moltke's Strategy; Meckel's Tactics and Sommernacht's Traum; Chancellorsville; Colonel Henderson's Life of Stonewall Jackson; Essays on the Science of War and Spicheren; Wolseley's Life of Marlborough; Colonel Maude's Leipzig; Stoffel's contribution to the Vie de Jules Cesar; a battered copy of Mahan's War of 1812; and three or four small military text-books on Reconnaissance, Minor Tactics, Infantry Formations, etc. A book of military memoirs lay open, face downwards, in a deck-chair. It was a hot July day, but the fire was not yet out in the grate. On the mantelpiece were some small ebony curios inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Above the mantel were a few pipes, spears, and knobkerries, a warrior's Colobus-monkey head-dress and shield, from Masailand, a chased brass bracket-dish (probably made in England) containing cigarette-butts, and a small, but very beautiful Madonna and Child, evidently by Correggio. It was dirty, cracked, and badly hung, but it was still a noble work. Lionel, coming in abruptly, found Roger staring at it.
"I hope you've not been waiting," he said. "I've been to see my monkey. Are you fond of pictures? That's said to be a rather good one. It's by a man called Correggio. Do you know his work at all? It's rather dingy. Do you like lemon or milk in your tea? Lemon? You like lemon, do you? Right. And will you wait a minute while I give myself a last dose?"
"Can I help you?" Roger asked. "It's hypodermic, isn't it?"
"Would you mind? You shove the snout of the thing into my arm, and push the spirit. It won't take a minute." He shewed Roger into a Spartan bedroom, furnished with a camp-bed and a Sandow's exerciser.
"Now," he said, producing a bottle and a syringe, "first I'll roll up my sleeve, and then I'll shew you how to sterilise the needle. I suppose you've never done this kind of thing before? Now, jab it in just here where all the punctures are."
"You said it was your last dose," said Roger. "Does that mean that you are cured?"
"Cured for the time. I may get a relapse. Still, that isn't likely."
"How do you know that you are cured? Do you feel better?"
"I don't get insomnia," said Lionel. "No. They inject bits of me into a monkey, and then wait to see if the monkey develops the organism. The monkey's very fit indeed, so they reckon that I'm cured. Thanks. That'll do. Now I hear tea coming. Go on in, will you? I'll be out in a minute. I must get out my slides."
After, tea they looked at relics, to wit, tsetse-flies, butterflies, biting flies, fragments of the same, sections of them, slides of trypanosomes, slides of filaria, slides of Laverania. "I've got these photographs, too," said Lionel. "They aren't very good; but they give you an idea of the place. This lot are all rather dark. I suppose they were over-exposed. They shew you the sort of places the tsetse likes. The hut in this one is a native hut. I lived in it while I was out there the last time. I was studying the tsetse's ways."
"They're always near water, aren't they?" Roger asked.
"Yes, generally near water. They keep to a narrow strip of cover by the side of a lake or stream. They don't like to go very far from water unless they are pursuing a victim. In fact, you're perfectly safe if you avoid fly-country. If you go into fly-country, of course they come for you. They'll hunt you for some way when you leave it. They like a shady water with a little sandy shady beach at the side. They like sand or loose soil better than mud. Mud breeds sedge, which they don't care about. They like a sort of scrubby jungle. One or two trees attract them especially. Here's a tree where about a dozen natives got it together merely from taking their siesta there."
"Does clearing the jungle do any good?"
"Oh, yes. It clears the flies out of that particular spot. But it scatters them abroad. It doesn't destroy them. It doesn't destroy the pupæ, which are buried under the roots in the ground. Burning is better, perhaps. Burning may do for the pupæ, but then it doesn't affect the grown flies."
"Tell me," said Roger, "is blood necessary to the tsetse?"
"I wish I knew."
"I've been thinking about the spread of the disease. Is it caused by game, by slave-raiders, or by ivory-hunters? How is it spread?"
"We don't know. It seems to have followed the opening up of the Congo basin to trade. The game are reservoirs, of course."
"Have the natives any cure?"
"None. They have a disinfectant for their cattle. They boil up some bitter bark with one dead tsetse and make the cattle drink the brew. Then they fumigate the cattle with bitter smoke. They go through this business when they are about to trek cattle through fly-country. They travel at night, because the flies don't bite after dark. But the fumigation business is really useless."
"The tsetse is useless, I suppose?"
"All flies are useless."
"I like the ladybird and the chalk-blue butterfly."
"I see you're a sentimentalist. You might keep those. But all the rest I would wipe out utterly. I wish that we could wipe out the tsetse as easily as one can wipe out the germ-carrying mosquitoes."
"Has it been tried?"
"No. Well. It may have been. But in the mosquito there is a well-marked grub stage, and in the tsetse there isn't. It is so difficult to get at the chrysalids satisfactorily."
"What do the tsetses live upon? Do you mind all my questions?"
"No. Go ahead. But it must be rather boring to you. They live on anything they can get, like the commissioners who study them."
"But why do they live near water?"
"Oh, that? Some think that they suck the crocodiles; but the general opinion is that they go for air-breathing, fresh-water fish. The theory is this. In the dry season the fish have very little water. The rivers dry up, or very nearly dry up. I'm not talking of rivers like the Zambesi and the Congo, of course. Well. They dry up, leaving water-courses of shallow pools joined together by trickles. The fish are perfectly horrible creatures. They burrow into the mud of the shallows, and stay there till the rains. I suppose they keep their snouts out of the mud, in order to breathe. It is thought that the tsetses feed upon their snouts. It may not be true. Jolly interesting if it is, don't you think? Look here, excuse me if I smoke. Tell me. What is it which interests you so much in sleeping sickness? It seems so queer that you should be interested."
"I met with accounts of it not long ago, at a time when various causes had made me very sensitive to impressions. I don't know whether you ever feel that what is happening to you is part of a great game divinely ordained?"
Lionel shook his head. His look became a shade more medical.
"Well. It sounds foolish," said Roger. "But I was impressed by the way in which sleeping sickness was brought to my notice again and again. So I studied it, as well as one so ignorant of science could. I am interested now, because you've been there and seen it all. It is always very interesting to hear another man's life-experience. But it is more than that. The disease must be one of the most frightful things of modern times. I think it splendid of you to have gone out, as you have, to study it for the good of mankind."
"That was only self-indulgence," said Lionel. "It's queer that you should be interested. You're the only person I've met yet since I came back who is really interested. Of course, the doctors have been interested. But I believe that most Londoners have lost the faculty for serious mental interest. It has been etiolated out of them. They like your kind of thing, 'sugar and spice and all things nice.' They like catchwords. They don't study hard nor get at the roots of things. I met a Spaniard the other day, Centeno, a chemist, I don't mean a druggist. He said that we had begun to wither at the top."
"I don't agree," said Roger. "Spain is too withered to judge. Our head is as sound oak as it always was. Were you ever a soldier, Heseltine?"
"Yes, in a sort of a way. I was in the militia."
"Did you want to be a soldier? Why did you leave it?"
"It isn't a life, unless you're on a General Staff. Everybody ought to be able to be a soldier; I believe that; but it doesn't seem to me to go very far as a life's pursuit. One can only become a good soldier by passing all one's days in fighting. That doesn't lead to anything. I would like best of all to be a writer, only, of course, I can't be. I haven't got the brains. I suppose you'll say they're not essential."
"They are essential, and you've probably got as many as any writer; but writing is an art, and success in art depends on all sorts of subtle, instantaneous relations between the brain's various faculties and the hand. Are you really serious, though?"
"Yes. I'd give the world to be able to write. To write poetry. Or I'd like to be able to write a play. You see, what I believe is, that this generation is full of all sorts of energy which ought not to be applied to dying things. I would like to write a poem on the right application of energy. That is the important thing nowadays. The English have lots of energy, and so much of it is wasted. The energy wasted is just so much setting back the clock. The energy wasted at schools alone—— If I'd not been a juggins at school, I'd have been fully qualified by this time, and been able to get a lot more fun out of things, finding out what goes on. Don't you find writing awfully interesting?"
"I find it makes the world more interesting. Writing lets one into life. But when I meet a man like yourself I realise that it isn't a perfect life for a man. It isn't active enough. It doesn't seem to me to exercise enough of the essential nature. Have you ever tried to write? I expect you have written a lot of splendid things. Will you shew me what you have written?"
"Oh," said Lionel, "I've only written a few sonnets and things. Out there alone at night when the lions are roaring, you can't help it. They used to roar all round me. I was only in a native hut. It gives one a solemn feeling. I used to make up verses every night."
"Have you got any? Won't you read them to me?"
"You can look at them if you like," said Lionel, blushing under his tan. Like most Englishmen, he was a little ashamed of having any intelligence at all. He pulled out a little penny account-book from the drawer under the bookshelf. "They're pretty bad, I expect."
Roger looked at them.
"They're not bad at all," he said. "You've got something to say. You haven't got much ear; but that's only a matter of training. People can always write well if they are moved or interested. Great writing happens when a carefully trained technician undergoes a deep emotion, or, still better, has survived one. Have you written prose at all?"
"No. Prose is much more difficult. I never know when to stop."
"Nor do I. Prose becomes hard directly one begins to make it an art instead of a second nature."
He wanted to talk with Lionel about Portobe. He was in that mood in which the wound of a grief aches to be stricken. He wanted to know what Lionel had said to Ottalie, and what she had said to him. He had that feeling which sometimes comes to one in London. "Here you are, in London, before me. And you have been in such a place and such a place, where I myself have been, and you have talked with people known to me. How wonderful life is!" To his delight, Lionel began to talk about Ireland unprompted.
"I wish I could write prose like yours," he said. "It was your prose first made me want to write. I was stopping with the Fawcetts at Portobe. It was the year before Leslie married, just before I went to India, to do Delhi-sore. Ottalie had just got that book you wrote about the Dall. You'd sent it to her. That was a fine book. I liked your little word-pictures."
"I am sorry you liked that book. It is very crude. I remember Ottalie was down on me for it."
"Ottalie was a fine person," said Lionel. "She had such a delicate, quick mind. And then. I don't know. One can't describe a woman. A man does things and defines himself by doing them, but a woman just is. Ottalie just was; but I don't know what she was. I think she was about the finest thing I've ever seen."
"Yes," said Roger, moistening dry lips. "She was like light."
"What I noticed most about her," said Lionel, taking on now the tone of a colonial who has lived much away from the society of women, "was her fineness. She did things in a way no other woman could. When I came back from the East, and went to see her—of course I used to go to Portobe fairly often when Leslie was there—it was like being with some one from another world. She was so full of fun, too. She had a way of doing things simply. I'm not good at describing; but you know how some writers write a thing easily because they know it to the heart. Ottalie Fawcett seemed to do things simply, because she understood them to the heart, by intuition."
"Yes," said Roger. "I shall always be proud to have lived among a race which could bear such a person."
"She must be a dreadful loss," said Lionel, "to anybody who knew her well. I'm afraid you knew her well. I used to think of her when I was in Africa. She was wonderful."
"She was a wonderful spirit," Roger answered. "Tell me. I seem to know you very well, although I have hardly met you. I don't even know if your people are alive. Is your mother living?"
"No," said Lionel. "You're thinking of my old aunt who was at the At Home with me. I was stopping with her for a few days, before she left town. My people are dead."
"Are you thinking of going out again to Africa to examine sleeping sickness?"
"Yes," said Lionel. "I want to go soon. I want to go in the rains, so that I can test a native statement, that the rains aggravate the disease and tend to bring it out where it is latent. I believe it is all nonsense. Natives observe, but never deduce. Still, one ought to know."
"Would you go alone?"
"I should go out alone, I suppose. There are lots of men who would come with me to shoot lions, but trypanosomes are less popular. You don't bring back many trophies from trypanosomes, except a hanging jaw and injected eyes."
"Are the rains very unhealthy?"
"Yes. If they bring out the latent disease, they do so by lowering the constitution. But I don't believe that they do anything of the kind. Still, the natives say that they can bring out nagana in a bitten cow by pouring a bucket of water over her."
"Look here," said Roger, "I don't want you to decide definitely till you know me better. I know how risky a thing it is to choose a companion for a journey into the wilderness, or for any undertaking of this kind. But I am dissatisfied with my work. I can't tell you more. I don't think that my work is using enough of me, or letting me grow up evenly. Besides, for other reasons, I want to give up writing. I am deeply interested in your work, and I should like to join you, if you would let me, after you know me better. I have a theory which I should like to work out."
"It would be very nice," said Lionel. "I mean it would be very nice for me. But it means pretty severe work, remember. And then, how about scientific training? I'm not properly qualified myself; but I've been at this game for seven years, and I had a hard year's training under my old chief, Sir Patrick Hamlin. I began by doing First Aid and Bearer-Party in camp. Then, when I gave up soldiering, I got a job on famine relief in India. Then old Hamlin took me under his wing, and got me to help with the plague at Bombay, and so I went on, learning whatever I could. I was very lucky. I mean, I was able to learn a good deal, being always with Hamlin. You ought to know Hamlin. He's a very remarkable man. He stamped out Travancore ophthalmia. He made me very keen and taught me all that I know. Not that that's much. Now you are rather a griff, if you'll excuse my saying so. I wonder how soon you could make yourself useful?"
"Well, what is wanted?" said Roger. "Surely not much? What can you do with the disease? You can only inject atoxyl into a man, and pump trypanosomes out of him? I can learn how to mount and stain objects for the microscope. I have kept meteorological records. I could surely keep records of temperatures. I have no experience and no scientific knowledge; but I am not sure that my particular theory will need much more than prolonged, steady observation. Probably all the attainable scientific facts about the structures of the different varieties of tsetse are known, but the habits of the flies are very little known. I was thinking that a minute observation of the flies would be useful. It is a kind of work which a trained scientist might find dull. Now, who has really observed the tsetse's habits? It is not even known what their food is. And another thing. What is it which keeps them near the water, even when (for all that we know) the air-breathing fish are no longer burrowed in the mud? And why should they be so fond of certain kinds of jungle? And why should there not be some means of exterminating them? I could experiment in many ways."
"Yes. That is true. You could," said Lionel, puckering his face. "How do you stand heat? You're slight. You can probably stand more than a big beefy fellow."
"I did not find Belize very trying."
"Then it's an expensive business," said Lionel. "When I go out I shan't be attached to any commission. One has to go into all these sordid details pretty closely. Of course, you won't mind my giving you one or two tips. Here's my account book for a quite short trip to Ikupu. You will see that it is very costly and very wasteful."
Roger looked at the account-book. The cost of the Ikupu trip was certainly heavy. The relatives of two bearers who had been eaten by lions had received compensation. The widow of the dead assistant had received compensation. A month's stores had been thrown away by deserting bearers. The dirty, dog's-eared pages gave him a sense of the wasteful, deathy, confused life which goes on in new countries before wasteful, cruel, confused nature has the ideas of her "rebellious son" imposed upon her. "We went out seventy strong," said Lionel, "to go to Ikupu. We had bad luck from the very start. Only twelve of us ever got there. You see, my assistant, Marteilhe, was frightfully ill. I had fever on and off the whole time. So the bearers did what they liked. It's a heart-breaking country to travel in. It's like Texas. 'A good land for men and dogs, but hell for women and oxen.' What do you think? Does it seem to you to be worth the waste?"
"Very well worth," said Roger, handing back the book. "If I fail to do one little speck of good there, it will have been very well worth, both for my own character and for my own time."
"I don't quite see your point," said Lionel.
"Well," said Roger, moved. "I want to be quite sure of certain elements in myself, before I settle down to a literary life. That life, if it be in the least worthy, is consecrated to the creation of the age's moral consciousness. In the old time a writer was proved by the world before he could begin to create his "ideas of good and evil." Homer never existed, of course, but the old idea of a poet's being blind is very significant. Poets must have been men of action, like the other men of their race. They only became poets when they lost their sight, or ceased, through some wound or sickness, to be efficient in the musters, when, in fact, their lives were turned inwards. Nowadays that is changed, Heseltine. A man writes because he has read, or because he is idle, or greedy, or vicious, or vain, for a dozen different reasons; but very seldom because his whole life has been turned inward by the discipline of action, thought, or suffering. I am not sure of myself. Miss Fawcett's death has brought a lot into my life which I never suspected. I begin to think that a writer without character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ." He rose from his chair. He paced the room once or twice. "Jacob Boehme was right," he went on. "We are watery people. Without action we are stagnant. If you sit down to write, day after day, for months on end, you can feel the scum growing on your mind." He sat down again, staring at the Correggio. "There," he said, "that is all it is. I sometimes feel that all the thoroughly good artists, like Dürer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Dante, all of them, sit in judgment on the lesser artists when they die. I think they forgive bad art, because they know how jolly difficult art of any kind is. I don't believe that art was ever easy to anybody, except perhaps to women, whose whole lives are art. But they would never forgive faults of character or of life. They would exact a high strain of conduct, mercilessly. Good God, Heseltine, it seems to me terrible that a man should be permitted to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the State."
"Well," said Lionel, picking up his cigarette, which had fallen to the floor, scattering sparks. "Yes." He pressed his forefinger reflectively on each crumb of fire one after the other. "Yes. But look here. I met that French poet fellow, Mongeron, the other day, the day before yesterday. He said that action was unnecessary to the man of thought, since the imagination enabled him to possess all experience imaginatively."
"Yes. I know that pleasant theory. I agree," said Roger. "But only when action has formed the character. I take writing very seriously, but I want to be sure that it is the thing which will bring out the best in me. I am doubtful of that. I am doubtful even whether art of any kind is not an anachronism in this scientific century, when so much is being learned and applied to the bettering of life. As I said the other night, my State is the human mind. If this art, about which I have spilled such a lot of ink, be really a survival, what you call in dissecting-rooms 'a fossil,' then I am not helping my State, but hindering her, by giving all my brains' vitality to an obsolete cause. One feels very clever, with these wise books in one's head; but they don't go down to bed-rock. They don't mean much in the great things of life. They don't help one over a death."
"No," said Lionel reflectively. "I think I see all your points." He made the subject practical at once, feeling a little beyond his depth in ethics. "It would be a very interesting experience for you to go out," he said. "A fine thing, too; for it is very difficult to get a good brain to take up a subject in that particular way. Still, one ought not to waste a good brain like yours in watching tsetses."
"No imaginative work is wasted," said Roger. "The experience would add a great deal to me. I should feel more sure of being able to face the judge after death."
"How about the practice of your art?"
"That will not be hurt by the deepening of my interests."
"Come on out to dinner," said Lionel. "I generally go to Simpson's. We'll go into Committee of Supply. The first thing we shall have to do is to try to get you the job of bottle-washer to somebody's clinic. What I want to do when I get out there is this, Naldrett. I want to get right away into the back of beyond, into the C.F.S., or wherever there is not much chance of the natives having mixed with Europeans. I want to find out if there is any native cure, if any native tribes are immune, as they are to malaria, and whether their cattle, if they have any, are immune, like the game. You will guess that what I want to do is to prepare anti-toxins strong enough to resist the disease at any stage, and also to act as preventives. That's the problem as it seems to me. It may sound a little crazy."
"Is the tsetse immune?" said Roger. "Does anybody know anything about flies? If the tsetse is immune, why could not an anti-toxin be prepared from the tsetse? It would be more than science. It would be equity."
They walked along the Strand together.
"Anti-toxins must wait," said Roger, as they stopped before crossing Wellington Street. "The first thing we had better do is to go for a long tramp together, to see how we get along."
"We might charter a boat, and try to get round the north of Ireland," said Lionel. "Dublin to Moville. It would be a thorough eye-opener. Then we might walk on round the coast to Killybegs. Old Hamlin will be back by the end of August. He would prescribe you a course of study. We might do some reading together."
In the Strand, outside Simpson's, a procession of dirty boys followed a dirty drunkard who was being taken to Bow Street by two policemen. Newsboys, with debased, predatory faces, peered with ophthalmic eyes into betting news. Other symptoms of disease passed.
"Plenty of disease here," said Roger.
"All preventable," said Lionel. "Only we're not allowed to prevent it. People here would rather have it by them to reform. Science won't mix with sentiment, thank God!" They entered Simpson's.