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?"