IN THE DESERT
It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his
tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow
place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his
little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a
man's life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in
the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their
sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he
died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than
what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor
devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert,
where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy's
lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin;
the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like
a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat
of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron;
and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.
He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy,
he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it
would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded
had fallen to Tyson's charge.
Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women
remember what they have done for men.
The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting,
out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty
sound men.
When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among
the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come
in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest
station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of
cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and
arrange.
They were curious documents. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her
forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed
when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the
grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved
you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never
could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don't say this to justify
myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply
incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the
best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same
strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night,
whenever he could snatch a minute from his duty. He must have meant
every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious
thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the
other paper.
This was a long letter to Stanistreet, begun in the form of an irregular
diary--a rough account of the march, of the fighting, of the struggle
with dysentery, given in the fewest and plainest words possible, with
hardly a trace of the writer's natural egotism. The two last sheets were
a postscript. They had evidently been written at one short sitting, in
sentences that ran into each other, as if the writer had been in
passionate haste to deliver himself of all he had to say. The first
sentence was a brief self-accusation, what followed was the defense--a
sinner's _apologia pro vita sua_. He had behaved like a scoundrel to his
wife. To other women too, if you like, but it had been fair fighting with
them, brute against beast, an even match. While she--she was not a woman;
she was an adorable mixture--two parts child to one part angel. And he,
Tyson, had never been an angel, and it was a long time since he had been
a child. That accounted for everything. Barring his marriage, none of his
crimes had been committed in cold blood; but he had gone into _that_ with
his eyes open, knowing himself to be incapable of the feeling women call
love. (Of course, there was always the other thing.) But that love of his
wife's was something divine--a thing to believe in, not to see. Men were
not made to mate with divinities. He ought to have fallen down and
worshiped the little thing, not married her. But was it his fault!
That particular crime would never have been committed if he had been left
to himself. It was not the will of God; it was that will of the old man
Tyson. The whole thing was a cursed handicap from beginning to end. He
was strong; but the world and life and destiny were a bit stronger--it
was three to one, and two out of the three were women--see? It's always
two to one on them. You can't hit out straight from the shoulder when
you fight with women, Stanny. If you can keep 'em going, it's about all.
He had nothing to say against Destiny, mind. Destiny fights fair enough
(for a woman), and she had fought fair with him. She had picked him up
out of the dirt when the scrimmage was hottest, and pitched him into the
desert to die. It was better to die out here in the desert cleanly, than
to die in the gutter at home. If only he could die fighting!
Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable document, at any rate it
bore on the face of it a passionate veracity. But it gave the lie to
every word of his letter to his wife. Tyson had dashed it off in hot
haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to
write that letter. Taken singly, the three documents were misleading;
taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography. The
self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no
class, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan
and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling
perpetually to be.
He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards,
and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple
straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he
had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he
could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.
When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling
women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have
been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the
feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could
he say? And it was too late to mend it now.
He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it
gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In
any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It
began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her
brain could never have been very strong."
He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish
crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence
and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he
had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was
futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he
could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never
have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.
The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he
strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed
him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there
condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce
penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.
Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him
reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a
bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of
sand.
And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was
surrounded.
Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers
were still there in the box of cartridges.
He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he
died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on
his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that
the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.
He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into
the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant lust of battle.