Multitude and Solitude

by John Masefield

He knelt down by the cot in a whirl of jarring suggestions. What was he to do? Anxiety had lifted him out of himself on to another plane, a plane of torturing emotion. He felt a painful clearness of intellect and an utter deadness of controlling will. His ideas swarmed in his head, yet he had no power to select from them. He saw so many things which he might be doing; building a raft to take them to Malakoto, making, or trying to make, a serum, to nullify the infection; there were many things. But how could he leave Lionel in this state, and how was he to get Lionel out of this state? He told himself that large doses of arsenic might be of use; the next moment he realised that they would be useless. He had tried to make Lionel take arsenic on the voyage upstream, as a prophylactic. Lionel had replied that arsenic was no good to him. "Trypanosomes," he had said, "become inured to particular drugs. Mine got inured to arsenic the last time I was out here. If my trypanosomes recur you'll have to try something else." What else was he to try?

He had read that marked temporary improvement shows itself after a variety of treatments, after any treatment, in fact, which tends to improve the health of particular organs. He tried the simplest and least dangerous of those which he remembered. It could do no harm, in any case. If it did good, he would feel braced to try something more searching.

The mere act of administering the dose strengthened him. Action is always a cordial to a mind at war with itself. At times of conflagration the fiddle has saved more than Nero from disquieting thought, tending to suicide. When at last he had forced his will to the selection of a course, he felt more sure of himself. He set about the preparation of food for the patient, and, when that was made and given, he sterilised his hands for the beginning of the delicate task of culture-making. He had plenty of tubes of media of different kinds. He selected those most likely to give quick results. They were media of bouillon and agar. One of them, a special medium of rabbit's flesh and Witte's peptone, had been prepared by Lionel months before, in far-distant London. Roger remembered how they had talked together, in their enthusiasm, during the making of that medium. He had had little thought then of the circumstances under which it would come to be used. He had never before felt home-sick for London. He was home-sick now. He longed to be back in London with Lionel, in the bare, airy room in Pump Court, where the noise of the Strand seemed like the noise of distant trains which never passed. He longed to be back there, out of this loneliness, with Lionel well again. The memory of their little bickerings came back to him. Travel is said to knock off the angles of a man. If the man has fire in him, the process may burn the fingers of those near him. Little moments of irritation, after sleepless nights, after fever, after over-exertion, had flamed up between them. No Europeans can travel together for many hundreds of miles in the tropics without these irritable moments. They derive from physical weakness of some kind, rather than from any weakness of character, though the links which bind the two are, of course, close and subtle. He told himself this; but he was not to be comforted. The memory of those occasional, momentary jarrings gave him keen pain. If Lionel got over this illness, he would make it up to him. He thought of many means by which he might make their journey together more an adventure of the finer character. "Lionel," he said, aloud, looking down on the sick man, "I want you to forgive me."

There was no sign of comprehension from Lionel. He lay there muttering nervously. His skin was hot to the touch with that dry febrile heat which gives to him who feels it such a shocking sense of the body's usurpation by malign power. His temperature was beginning to show the marked and dreadful evening rise. Roger could guess from that that there would be no improvement until the morning fall. After feeling the fluttering, rapid pulse, and the weakness of the movements of the hands, he had grave doubts whether the body would be able to stand the strain of that sudden fall.

He dragged up a box and sat staring at Lionel, torn by many thoughts. One thought was that these moments would be less terrible if we could live always in this awakened sense of the responsibility and wonder of life. Life was not a succession of actions, planned or not planned, successful or thwarted, nor was it a "congressus materiai" held together for a time by food and exercise. It was something tested by and evolved from those things, which were, in a sense, its instruments, the bricks with which the house is built. He began to realise how hard it is to follow life in a world in which the things of life have such bright colours and moving qualities. He had not realised it before, even when he had been humbled by the news of Ottalie's death.

In his torment he "thought long" of Ottalie. He called back to his memory all those beautiful days, up the glens, among the hills. Words which she had spoken came back to him, each phrase a precious stone, carefully set in his imagination of what the prompting thought had been in her mind. Ottalie had lived. He could imagine Ottalie sitting in judgment upon all the days of her life ranked in coloured succession before her, and finding none which had been lived without reference, however unconscious, to some fine conception of what exists unchangingly, though only half expressed by us.

He roused himself. That was why women are so much finer than men; they are occupied with life itself, men with its products, or its management. Whatever his shortcomings had been, he was no longer dealing with the things of life, but with life itself.

Here he was, for the first time, squarely face to face with a test of his readiness to deal with life. He forced himself to work again, following the process with a cautious nicety of delicate care which an older artist would have despised as niggling and stippling. From time to time he stopped to look at Lionel, and to take the temperature. The temperature was swiftly rising.

After some days the fever left Lionel. It left him with well-marked symptoms of sleeping sickness. The man was gone. The body remained, weak and trembling, sufficiently conscious to answer simple questions, but neither energetic enough to speak unprompted, nor to ask for food when hungry. How long he might live in that state Roger could not guess. He might live for some weeks; he might die suddenly, shaken by the violent changing of the temperature between night and morning. It was not till the power of speech was checked that the horror of it came home to Roger. Lionel's monosyllables became daily less distinct, until at last he spoke as though his tongue had grown too large for his mouth. The sight of his friend turning brutish before his eyes made Roger weep. The strain was telling on him; his recurrent fever was shaking him. He felt that if Lionel were to die, he would go mad. He could not leave his friend. Even in the day-time, with the work to be done, he could hardly bear to leave him. At night his one solace was to stare at his friend, in an agony of morbid pity, remembering what that man had been to him before the closing in of the veil. The veil was closing more tightly every day. Roger could picture to himself the change going on inside the dead, on the surface of the brain, behind the fine eyes, so drowsy now. Such a little thing would arrest that change. Two cubic centimetres of a white soluble powder. He went over it in his mind, day after day, till the craving for some of that powder was more than he could bear. "Lionel," he would say. "Lionel, Lionel." And the drowsy head would lift itself patiently, and grunt, showing some sort of recognition. If Lionel had been a stranger (so he told himself) it might have been endurable; but every attitude and gesture of the patient was chained to his inmost life by a hundred delicate links. That he had known Ottalie was the sharpest thing to bear. In losing Lionel he was losing something which bound Ottalie to him. Another torment was the knowledge of his own insufficiency. He thought of the strongly efficient soldiers and scientists who had studied the disease. He loathed the years of emotional self-indulgence which had unfitted him for such a crisis. He longed to have for one half-hour the knowledge and skill of those scientists, their scrupulous clinical certainty, their reserve of alternative resource.

In reality he was doing very creditably. One of the most marked qualities in his character was that extreme emotional tenderness, or sensibility, which is so strong, and in the lack of the robuster fibres, so vicious, an ingredient of the artistic or generating intellect. This sensitiveness had been the cause in him of a scrupulous aloofness from the world. It had made him maintain a sort of chastity of idea, not so much from an appreciation of the value of whiteness of mind as from an inherent fastidious dislike of blackness. As he yielded more and more to the domination of this aloofness, as the worker in an emotional art is tempted to do, his positive activities grew weaker till he had come to seek and appreciate in others those qualities which, essential to manly nature, had been etiolated in himself by the super-imposition of the unreal. This desire to be virtuous vicariously, by possessing virtuous friends, had been gratified pleasantly, with advantage to himself, and with real delight to those robuster ones who felt his charm. But the removal of the friends had shown the essential want. The man was like a childless woman, groping about blindly for an emotional outlet. In his misery he found an abiding satisfaction in an intense tenderness to the suffering near him. In his knowledge of himself he had feared that his own bodily discomfort would make him a selfish, petulant, callous nurse. Before Lionel had fallen ill, he had been prone to complain of pains, often real enough to a weak, highly sensitive nature, exposed, after years of easy living, to the hardships of tropical travel. Lionel's illness had altered that. It had lifted him into a state of mental exaltation. In their intenser, spiritual forms, such states have been called translation, gustation of God, ingression to the divine shadow, communion with the higher self. They may be defined as states in which the mind ceasing to be conscious of the body as a vehicle, drives it superbly to the dictated end, with the indifference of a charioteer driving for high stakes.