“I’ll go to-morrow,” I answered.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I couldn’t get to sleep that night, but lay and tossed, lit my candle and read, and so on, for ever and ever—­for an eternity.  I was confoundedly excited; there were a hundred things to be thought about; clamouring to be thought about; out-clamouring the re-current chimes of some near clock.  I began to read the article by Radet in the Revue Rouge—­the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque.  It upset me a good deal—­that article.  It gave away the whole Greenland show so completely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the Hour seemed impossible.  I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind—­just as I had had to grind the State Founder’s, but Radet’s axe didn’t show.  I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country.  A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it.  A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the silence and the vastness.

And how well it was done—­how the man could write; how skilfully he made his points.  There was no slosh about it, no sentiment.  The touch was light, in places even gay.  He saw so well the romance of that dun band that had cast remorse behind; that had no return, no future, that spread desolation desolately.  This was merely a review article—­a thing that in England would have been unreadable; the narrative of a nomad of some genius.  I could never have written like that—­I should have spoilt it somehow.  It set me tingling with desire, with the desire that transcends the sexual; the desire for the fine phrase, for the right word—­for all the other intangibles.  And I had been wasting all this time; had been writing my inanities.  I must go away; must get back, right back to the old road, must work.  There was so little time.  It was unpleasant, too, to have been mixed up in this affair, to have been trepanned into doing my best to help it on its foul way.  God knows I had little of the humanitarian in me.  If people must murder in the by-ways of an immense world they must do murder and pay the price.  But that I should have been mixed up in such was not what I had wanted.  I must have dine with it all; with all this sort of thing, must get back to my old self, must get back.  I seemed to hear the slow words of the Duc de Mersch.

“We have increased exports by so much; the imports by so much.  We have protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in our minds.  And through it all we have never forgotten the mission entrusted to us by Europe—­to remove the evil of darkness from the earth—­to root out barbarism with its nameless horrors, whose existence has been a blot on our consciences.  Men of good-will and self-sacrifice are doing it now—­are laying down their priceless lives to root out ... to root our....”