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Page 67
In other words, what could you expect after so much agony, so much
thinking, and the striving of that life within her life, the hope that
would have renewed the world for her--the fruit of three days and three
nights of happiness? It was a grave case, but--oh yes, while there was
life there was hope.
So they talked. But she was far away from them, lost in her dream. And in
her dream the dead child and the unborn child were one.
By night the tumult in her brain was raging like a fire. She had bad
dreams. They were full of noises. First, the hiss of a thin voice singing
from a great distance an insistent, intolerable song; then the roar of
hell, and the hissing of a thousand snakes of flame. And now a crowd of
evil faces pressed on her; they sprang up quick out of the darkness,
and then they left her alone. She was outside in the streets. It was
twilight, a dreadful twilight; and perhaps it was only a dream, for it is
always twilight in dreams. She was all in white, in her night-gown, and
it was open at the neck too. She clutched at it to hide--what was it she
wanted to hide? She had forgotten--forgotten.
But that was nothing, only a dream, and she was awake now. It was light;
it was broad daylight. Then why was she out here, in the street, in her
night-gown? She must hide herself--anywhere--down that dark alley, quick!
No, not there--there was a bundle--a dead baby.
No, no, she knew all about it now; there was a fire, and she had got up
out of her bed to save some one--to save--"Nevill! Nevill!" She must run
or she would be late. Ah, the crowd again, and those faces--all looking
at her and wondering. They were running too, they were hunting her down,
the brutes, driving her before them with pitchforks. The shame of it, the
shame of it! Who was singing that hideous song? It was about her, What
had she done? She had done nothing--nothing. She was bearing the sins of
all women, the sins of the whole world. It was swords now--sharp burning
swords, and they hurt her back--her head--Nevill!
The dream changed. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was wandering about somewhere alone,
always alone; she was walking over sand, hot like the floor of a furnace,
on and on, a terribly long way, towards something black that lay on the
very edge of the world and was now a cloud, and now a cloak, and now a
dead man.
Two people were talking about her now, and there was no sense in what
they said.
"Is there _no_ hope?" said one.
"None," said the other, "none."
There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but
it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.
"It is just as well. She would have died in child-birth, or lost her
reason."
The crying sounded very far away.
It ceased. The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking
into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy
wind. She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from
sleep. She had done with fevers and with dreams.
The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead. "Look,"
he said, "it is like the forehead of a child."
CHAPTER XXII
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.
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