The Desert Islander | Page 5

humiliate the excited and glowing spirit of Constantine.
Death was the final, most loathsome triumph of the body; death meant
dumbness and decay--yet even death he could have faced courageously
could he have been flattered to its very brink.

The car, a ramshackle Ford, stood in the rain on the bald gravel of the
compound, as Constantine, white with excitement, limped out through
the front door. His limp, though not consciously assumed, had
developed only since last night. His whole leg now felt dangerous, its
skin shrinking and tingling. Constantine looked into the car. In the back
seat sat Mr. White's coolie, clasping a conspicuously neat little white
canvas kit-bag with leather straps. The kit-bag held Constantine's eye
and attacked his self-respect as the tie-press had attacked and haunted
him the night before. Every one of his host's possessions was like a
perfectly well-balanced, indisputable statement in a world of fevered
conjecture. "And a camp-bed--so nicely rolled," said Constantine,
leaning into the car, fascinated and humiliated. "But only one...."
"I have only one," said Mr. White.
"And you are bringing it--for me?" said Constantine, looking at him
ardently, overjoyed at this tribute.
"I am bringing it for myself," said Mr. White with his unamused and
short-sighted smile. "I am assuming that a légionnaire is used to
sleeping rough. I'm not. I'm rather fixed in my habits and I have a
horror of the arrangements in Chinese inns."
"He is morally brave," thought Constantine, though, for the first time, it
occurred to him how satisfactory it would be to slap his host's face. "A
man less brave would have changed his plans about the camp-bed at
once and said, 'For you, my dear man, of course--why not?'"
Constantine chattered nervously as he took his seat in the car next to
his host, the driver. "I feel such admiration for a man who can drive a
motor-car. I adore the machine when it does not--like the
gramophone--trespass on matters outside its sphere. The machine's
sphere is space, you see--it controls space--and that is so
admirable--even when the machine is so very unimpressive as this one.
Mr. White, your motor-car is very unimpressive indeed. Are you sure it
will run three hundred miles?"
"It always seems to," said Mr. White. "I never do anything to it except
pour petrol, oil, and water into the proper openings. I am completely

unmechanical."
"You cannot be if you work a gramophone."
"You seem to have my gramophone on your mind. To me it doesn't
answer the purpose of a machine--it simply is Chopin, to me."
Constantine stamped his foot in almost delighted irritation, for this
made him feel a god beside this groundling. After a few minutes of
self-satisfaction, however, a terrible thought invaded him. He became
obsessed with an idea that he had left fleas in his bed in Mr. White's
attic. That smug, immaculate Chinese servant would see them when he
made the bed, and on Mr. White's return would say, "That foreign
soldier left fleas in our attic bed." How bitterly did Constantine wish
that he had examined the bed carefully before leaving the room, or
alternatively, that he could invent some elaborate lie that would prevent
Mr. White from believing this revolting accusation. Constantine's mind,
already racked with the fear of pain and death and with the agony of his
impotence to impress his companion, became overcast with the
hopelessness and remorselessness of everything. Everything despairing
seemed a fact beyond dispute; everything hopeful, a mere dream. His
growing certainty about the fleas, the persistence of the rain, combined
with the leakiness of the car's side-curtains, the skiddiness of the road,
the festering of his leg, the thought of the surgeon's saw, the perfection
of that complacent kit-bag in the back seat, with the poor cigar-box
balalaika tinkling beside it, the overstability and overrightness of his
friend in need--there was not one sweet or flattering thought to which
his poor trapped mind could turn.
The absurdly inadequate bullock-trail only just served the purpose of a
road for the Ford. The wheels slid about, wrenching themselves from
groove to groove. Constantine's comment on the difficulties of the road
was silenced by a polite request on the part of Mr. White. "I can't talk
while I'm driving, if you don't mind. I'm not a good driver, and I need
all my attention, especially on such a bad road."
"I will talk and you need not answer. That is my ideal plan of
conversation. I will tell you why I joined the Foreign Legion. You must

have been wondering about this. It will be a relief for me from my
misfortunes, to talk."
"I'd rather not, if you don't mind," said his host serenely.
"Mean old horse," thought Constantine passionately, his heart
contracting with offence. "It is so English