Though in this mood he was supported to fine deeds, he was denied the knowledge of his success in them. His heart was wrung with pity for the sufferers for whom he cared so tenderly, day after day; but the depth of his pity made his impotence to help an agony. He saw too plainly that the most that he could do was nothing. In the darker recesses of his mind hovered a horror of giving way and relapsing to the barbarism about him. His nerve had begun to tremble under the strain. What he felt was the recurrence of an intense religious mood which had passed over his mind at the solemn beginning of manhood. He was finding, now, after years of indifference, the cogency of the old division into good and evil. As in boyhood, during that religious phase, he had at times a strange, unreasonable sense of the sinfulness of certain thoughts and actions, which to others, not awakened, and to himself, in blinder moods, seemed harmless. He began to resolve all things into terms of the spiritual war. All this external horror was a temptation of the devil, to be battled with lest the soul perish in him. Little things, little momentary thoughts, momentary promptings of the sense, perhaps only a desire for rest, became charged, in his new reckoning of values, with terrible significances. Often, after three hours of labour in the village, after feeding and cleaning those drowsy dying children, in the hot sun, till he was exhausted and sick at heart, a fear of giving way to the devil urged him to apply to them some of the known alleviations, arsenic, mercury, or the like. He would arise, and dose them all carefully, knowing that it was useless, that it would merely prolong a living death; but knowing also that to do so, at all costs, was the duty of one who had taken the military oath of birth into a Christian race. He learned that the higher notes of a whistle pleased those even far advanced in sleep. He found time each day to whistle to them in those few livelier minutes before meals, when the drowsy became almost alert. He judged that anything which stimulated them must necessarily be good for them. He tried patiently and tenderly many mild sensual excitations on them, giving them scent or snuff to inhale, letting them suck pieces of his precious sugar, burning blue lights at night before them, giving them slight electric shocks from his battery. He felt that by these means he kept alive the faculties of the brain for some few days longer. From Tiri, the wrinkled old crone, the only uninfected person there, he tried hard to learn the dialect; but age had frozen her brain, he could learn nothing from her except "Katirkama." He never rightly knew what Katirkama was. It was something very amusing, since it made her laugh heartily whenever it was mentioned. It had something to do with drumming on a native drum. Katirkama. He beat the drum, and the old body became one nod of laughter, bowing to the beat with chuckles. "Katirkama," she cried, giggling. "Katirkama." After Katirkama she would follow him about, holding his hand, squeaking, till he gave her some sugar.
When the work in the village was finished, he used to walk back to Lionel, whom he would find drowsed, just as he had left him. On good days he had some little experiment to make. He would repeat some trick or accidental gesture winch had caught the dying attention of a native. If he were lucky, the trick brought back some lively shadow of Lionel. Even if it passed away at once, it was cheering to see that shadow. More usually the trick failed. Having seen the occasional effect of them, he became studious of tricks which might help to keep the intelligence alert. The sight of Lionel gave him so crushing a sense of what was happening in the affected brain, that he found it easy to imagine fancies which, as he judged, would be arresting to it. The burning of magnesium wire and the turning of a policeman's rattle were his most successful efforts. One day, while carefully dropping some dilute carbolic acid into a chegua nest on Lionel's foot, he found that the burning sensation gave pleasure. It seemed to reach the brain like a numbed tickling. Lionel laughed a little uneasy, nervous laugh. It was the only laughter heard at "Portobe" for many days.
Though his work occupied him for ten hours daily, it did not occupy the whole of him. Much of it, such as the preparation of food and the daily disinfection of the huts, was mechanical. His mind was left free to console itself by speculation as best it could. His first impressions of the solitude were ghastly and overpowering. Waking and asleep he felt the horror of the prospect of losing Lionel. It was not that he dreaded the prospect of being alone. His fear was religious. He feared that the barbarism of the solitude would overpower his little drilled force of civilised sentiment. He was warring against barbarism. Lionel was his powerful ally. Looking out from his hut on the hill he could see barbarism all round him, in a vast and very silent menacing landscape, secret in forest, sullen in its red, shrinking river, brooding in the great plain, dotted with bones and stones. Even the littleness of an English landscape would have been hard to bear, but this immensity of savagery awed him. He doubted whether he would be able to bear the presence of that sight without his ally by him.
He knew that if he let it begin to get upon his nerves he would be ruined. He took himself in hand on the second day of Lionel's fever. His situation made him remember a conversation heard years before at his rooms in Westminster. O'Neill and a young Australian journalist, of the crude and vigorous kind nurtured by the Bulletin, had passed the evening in talk with him. The Australian had told them of the loneliness of Australia, and of shepherds and settlers who went mad in the loneliness on the clearings at the back of beyond. O'Neill had said that at present Australian literature was the product of home-sick Englishmen; but that a true Australian literature would begin among those lonely ones. "One of those fellows just going mad will begin a literature. And that literature will be the distinctive Australian literature. In the cities you will only get noisy imitations of what is commonest in the literature of the mother country." They had stayed talking till four in the morning. He had never seen the Australian since that time. He remembered now his stories of shepherds who bolted themselves into their huts in the effort to get away from the loneliness which had broken their nerve. He must take care, he said, not to let that state of mind take hold upon him.
He began to school himself that night. He forced himself up the hill, into the Zimbabwe, at the eerie moment when the dusk turns vaguely darker, and the stars are still pale. All the dimness of ruin and jungle brooded malignantly, informed by menace. Faint noises of creeping things rustled in the alley between the walls. Dew was fast forming. Drops wetted him with cold splashes as he broke through creepers. Below him stretched the continent. No light of man burned in that expanse. There was a blackness of forest, and a ghostliness of grass, all still. Out of the night behind him came a stealthiness of approach, more a sense than a sense perception. Coming in the night so secretly, it was hard to locate. It had that protective ventriloquism of sounds produced in the dark. There is an animal sense in us, not nearly etiolated yet, which makes us quick to respond to a light noise in the night. It makes us alert upon all sides; but with a tremulous alertness, for we have outgrown the instinctive knowledge of what comes by night. Roger faced round swiftly, with a knocking heart. The noise, whatever it was, ceased. After an instant of pause a spray, till then pinned, swept loose, as though the talon pinning it had lifted. It swept away with a faint swishing noise, followed by a pattering of drops. After that there came a silence while the listener and the hidden watcher stared into the blackness for what should follow. The noise of the spattering gave Roger a sense of the direction of the danger, if it were danger. He drew out his revolver. Another spray spilled a drop or two. Then, for an instant, near the ground, not far away, two greenish specks burned like glow-worms, like crawling fireflies, like two tiny electric lights suddenly turned on. They were shut off instantly. They died into the night, making it blacker. After they had faded there came a hushed rustling which might have been near or far off. When that, too, had died, there was a silence.
It was so still that the dripping of the dew made the night like a death vault. Terrible, inscrutable stars burned aloft. Roger pressed his back against the wall. Up and up towered the wall, an immense labour, a cynical pile, stamped with lust's cruelties. It almost had life, so seen. In front was the unknown; behind, that uncanny thing. Roger waited, tense, till the darkness was alive with all fear. Everything was in the night there, gibbering faces, death, the sudden cold nosing of death's pig-snout on the heart. He swung his revolver up, over his left elbow, and fired.
The report crashed among the ruin, sending the night rovers fast and far. Chur-ra-rak! screamed the scattering fowl. Roger paid little heed to them. He was bending down in his tracks hugging his forehead. The hammer of the kicking revolver had driven itself into his brow with a welt which made him sick. He groped his way down the hill again, thinking himself lucky that the iron had not smashed his eye. He thought no more of terror for that night.
But the next night it came with the dark. The old savage devil of the dark was there; the darkness of loneliness, the loneliness of silence, the immanent terror of places not yet won, still ruled by the old unclean gods, not yet exorcised by virtue. Looking at it, after night had fallen, from the door of "Portobe," it seemed full of the promise of death. The little rustling noises were there; the suggestion of stealthy death; the brooding of it all. A braver man would have been awed by it. It was not all cowardice which daunted Roger. It was that animal something not yet etiolated, which on a dark night in a lonely place at a noise of stirring makes a man's heart thump like a buck's heart. To stare into the blackness with eyes still dazzled from the camp-fire gave a sense of contrast not easy to overcome. The comfort of the fire was something, something civilised, conquered, human. And the beloved figure lying ill was one of his own kind, leagued with him against the inhuman. The vastness of the inhuman overpowered his will. He dared not face it. Sudden terror told him of something behind him. He hurried into the hut and heaped boxes against the tarpaulin door.
The moment of fear passed, leaving him ashamed. He was giving way to nerves. That would not do. He must brace himself to face the darkness. He forced himself down the hill to the village, and into the village. Kneeling down he peered into the hut where old Tiri rocked herself by a fire of reeds, like the withered beauty in Villon. She did not see him. She was crooning a ditty. From time to time, with a nervous jerk of the arm, she flung on a handful of reed, which crackled and flared, so that she chuckled. He was comforted by the sight of her. Any resolute endurance of life is comforting to the perplexed. He walked back up the hill without the tremors he had felt in going down. Something in the walk, the coolness and quiet of it, made him forget his fears. He experienced an animal feeling of being, for the moment, at one with the night. "Surely," he thought, "if man can conceive a spiritual state, calm and august like the night, he can attain it." It might even be that by brooding solitary, like the night itself, one would arrive at the truth sooner than by the restless methods left behind. Standing by the door of his hut again, the darkness exalted him, not, in the common way, by giving him a sense of the splendour of nature, but by heightening for an instant his knowledge of the superior splendour of men.
He stood looking out for a little while before some rally of delirium called him within to his friend. Later, when he had finished his work for the night, he thought gloomily of what his fate would be if the death of Lionel left him alone there, so many miles from his fellows. What was he to do? How was he to cross four hundred miles of tropical country to the nearest settlement of whites? No civilised man had been there since the Phoenicians fought their last rearguard fight round the wagons of the last gold train. Four hundred miles meant a month's hard marching, even if all went well. He could not count on doing it in less than a month. And how was he to live during that month, how guide himself? Even in mere distance it was a hard walk. It was much such a walk as, say, from the Land's End to Aberdeen, but with all the natural difficulties multiplied by ten, and all the artificial helps removed. It was going to be forced on him. He would have to attempt that walk or die alone, where he was, after watching his friend die. He glanced anxiously at Lionel to see if there were any chance of Lionel's being dragged and helped over that distance. He saw no chance. He would have to watch Lionel dying. He would have to try to stave off Lionel's death by all the means known to him, knowing all the time that all the means were useless. Then he would bury Lionel, after watching him die. After that he would have to watch the villagers dying; and then, when quite alone, set forth.