"There is no cure. There's no cure for a lot of things. Tetanus, leprosy, cancer. I wonder how it begins. You wake up feeling drowsy. And then to feel it coming on; and to have seen others ill with it. And to know at the beginning what you will have to go through and become. It must be ghastly."
"Here is tea," said Leslie. "By the way, sleeping sickness must be getting worse. It attacks Europeans sometimes. MacKenzie said that in his time it never did."
"Well," said Roger, "Europeans have given enough diseases to the Africans. It is only fair that we should take some in return."
They rode on slowly in the bright Irish twilight. When they were near the end of their journey they came to a villa, the garden of which was shut from the road by a low hedge. The garden was full of people. Some of them were still playing croquet. Chinese lanterns, already lit, made mellow colour in the dusk. A black-haired, moustachioed man with a banjo sat in a deck-chair singing. The voice was a fine bass voice, somehow familiar to Roger. It was wailing out the end of a sentimental ditty:
"O, the moon, the moon, the moon,"
in which the expression had to supply the want of intensity in the writing. Hardly had the singer whined his last note when he twanged his banjo thrice in a sprightly fashion. He piped up another ditty just as the cyclists passed.
"O, I'm so seedy,
So very seedy,
I don't know what to do.
I've consumption of the liver
And a dose of yellow fever
And sleeping sickness, too.
O, my head aches
And my heart..."
The banjo came to ground with a twang: the song stopped.
"Fawcett!" the singer shouted; "Fawcett! Come in here. Where are you going?"
"I can't stop," cried Leslie, over his shoulder. He turned to Roger. "Let's get away," he said.