They rode hard for a few minutes. "Who was that?" Roger asked. "I seemed to know his voice."
"It's a man called Maynwaring," said Leslie. "I don't think you've met him, have you? He's in the Navy. He met us at a dance. He proposed to Ottalie about a year ago. Now he has married one of those pretty, silly doll-women, a regular officer's wife. They are not much liked here."
"Curious," said Roger; "he was singing about sleeping sickness. Somehow, I think I must have met him. His voice seems so familiar." He stopped suddenly, thinking that the voice was the voice of the singer in his dream. "Yes," he said to himself. "Yes. It was."
A few minutes later they were sliding down the long hill to the hotel.
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.