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.