SCHNEIDER
I
Stories about the Foreign Legion have, nearly all, the same centre idea and motive—escape or attempted escape.
It is the one thing the légionnaires think of. They grumble about their food; they grumble about their chief officers and their subordinate officers; they grumble about the hot days and cold nights of Algeria; they grumble about the scarcity of cigarettes, the price of wine, the scarcity of soap, the hardness of their work, the smallness of their pay, but they never grumble about their loss of liberty.
They dream about it.
It is the one idea around which all other ideas revolve, and it is kept alive and active less perhaps by the general hardness of life in the Legion than by the fact that escape is, though seemingly feasible, next to impossible.
No man can buy his discharge from the Legion. No man, once he has signed the fatal paper, can escape from the consequences of his act by influence. You may be the son of a prince—it does not matter, or of a Rockefeller—it does not matter, you have to dree your weird for five years and carry your rifle and knapsack under the blazing sun to the last day of your term of enlistment.
After all, you have signed a contract, and signed it with your eyes open, and should you fight against fate and try to break your contract, you find that the system you are struggling with has provided against that.
Twenty thousand men or so, distributed in Algeria, Indo-China and Morocco, and most of them willing to escape on the slightest chance, require a pretty definite and complete system of restraint.
Corporal Jacques had very clear views on this matter. Bitter personal experience had convinced him of the futility of all attempts at evasion. Where he had failed he could not see the chance of anyone else succeeding. Nor did he wish anyone else to succeed. Such a success would have cast extra discredit on his own attempt, an attempt that was fast fading from the memory of the regiment, but not from the memory of Corporal Jacques.
One bright morning, Jacques, who had returned to the barrack yard with his squad after three hours' practice on the ranges, turned from lighting a cigarette to watch the arrival of a column of recruits just arrived from France by way of Oran.
There were forty men in the column, men of all heights and ages, all nationalities, a sinister-looking crowd, dusty, tattered, limping, many of them most evidently underfed and nearly all of them wearing that look of dejection common to lost dogs and lost men.
Most of these new recruits had joined the Legion to escape starvation; a few were of the active criminal type and had evidently been given the choice of the Legion or the Penitentiary. Jacques' keen eyes sorted them out and classified them at once, but there was one man he could not classify, a man of middle height, dark, clean-shaven, youthful and of military bearing.
This person's clothes though dusty were well-cut, and his boots of brown tan leather were a marvel.
He carried himself easily, with an air of indifference and detachment, as though he were a spectator and not a member of this little company of tragic actors, and when the recruits were dismissed to find their quarters, he lit a cigarette before going to the depot to receive his uniform.
Jacques felt interested in this individual. Here was most evidently a man of superior birth, an aristocrat strayed into the trap of the Legion. Every now and then the net closes on a gorgeous bird of this description. Jacques knew the type and despised it; the young man of good birth gone wrong was, in his experience, a person to be avoided; he had had his soap stolen by a Viennese banker's son and he had been badly treated financially—it was a matter of five francs—by a gentleman with manicured nails and no money morals, who had the reputation of being a Count in his own country—though what that country was no man knew.
But the present specimen was different somehow from the others, as far as one would judge by appearances, and Jacques, falling into talk with him, showed him the way to the depot and then to the dormitory allotted to him.
No place in the world is kept more spick and span than the great barracks of the Foreign Legion. It vies with an English lighthouse or an English man-of-war in the polish of its brasses and the neatness of its poor appointments.
The dormitory to which Jacques led the new-comer had the appearance of a hospital ward. There were twenty beds, and every bed, except one or two that were vacant, had a card with a légionnaire's name and number.
"Here you are," said Jacques. "You can choose your bed from those three near the door; shuffle into your uniform and you can sell your old togs; you won't want them for another five years, and the fashions will have altered by then."
He showed the new-comer, who was carrying all his kit and accoutrements in a huge bundle, how to stow away his things, gave him a few hints as to what to avoid if he wished for a peaceable life, and took his departure.
The new-comer's name was Schneider, at least that was the name he had joined under, a German name, yet he spoke French like a Frenchman.
Jacques saw him next on the drill ground, and noticed that he wore his uniform as though born in it. They had thrown him out of the instructional squad, finding that he was as well up in the business of drill as the oldest légionnaire, and he was attached to Company 4, practising the double with the great column round and round the vast drill ground.
From the very first moment Schneider took his place in the Legion as a person to be respected. He had not sold his clothes. They, and the wonderful tan boots, he had given away to be sold and he had never asked for the money. He had plenty of money.
The Legion, though recruited considerably from the ranks of the broken-down, the criminal and the starving, is a regiment of dudes; after the main ambition to escape comes the ambition to outvie one's neighbour in cleanliness and neatness. This desire to be neat, to be bright and speckless, is stimulated by the laws of the Legion that bear with terrible severity upon slackers; all the same, it is a true desire, a true ambition born of the spirit of the Legion, that strange spirit of the mass which ever affects and bends the individuality of the unit.
Schneider was such a dude that he manicured his nails; having plenty of money, he was able to pay for services. The légionnaires' fatigue uniform of white cotton cloth has to be washed nearly every day; Schneider never washed his uniform, he paid another man to do that job; the polishing of the metal work of his equipment and the cleaning of his rifle never occupied his time; a brother légionnaire did all this for him—at a price.
Consequently, he could keep his hands clean and his evenings were free. He spent his evenings mostly in Sidi-bel-Abbès, in the Place Sadi Carnot listening to the band, or in one of the better-class cafés, unapproachable to the ordinary légionnaire on account of the prices charged—thirty centimes for a cigar, half a franc for a vermouth, and so forth.
Jacques sometimes saw Schneider seated before one of these cafés reading the Echo d'Oran and sipping his wine. Jacques, who had taken an interest in the man at first sight, found as time went on that his interest was steadily growing. He watched him as a cat watches a mouse.
He could not make him out at all. Here was a man most evidently of good birth, a man possessing money, and, more than that, a man who evidently kept up correspondence with his people—for Schneider received a good many letters—living the slave life of a légionnaire. Had he committed some crime? If so, why did he keep up this large correspondence? He was not of the criminal type, and, although men of the ordinary type often do commit crimes, Jacques felt instinctively that Schneider was not held in the Legion by fear of the Law.
There were other points of interest about this person. Without being in the least offensive in his manner, he managed to keep others at a distance; he talked with anyone who chose to talk to him, yet he made no friend; doing his duties well and without any sign of distaste, he, yet, always gave the impression of a mechanism without any soul in the business on hand. He never grumbled were the practice march ever so long or the sun ever so hot on the drill ground. He seemed quite content, in a fatalistic sort of way, with his lot, and Jacques might have left the matter at that and lost interest in him had not Schneider one day chosen to make him his friend.
It was six months after the latter had joined, and one morning after parade, Schneider, producing a packet of cigarettes, offered one to Jacques.
"They aren't very good, but they are better than the Algerian stuff," said Schneider.
Jacques, lighting up, assented, and the two men strolled back to the barracks, talking of indifferent matters, till, just as they were parting at the door of the depot, Jacques said:
"You aren't German, are you?"
Schneider laughed.
"No," said he. "I am not German. I am an Austrian—but I will tell you about that some day."
Next evening, they met in the town and Schneider stood Jacques a bottle of wine. It was the beginning of a friendship that was to last some months, a warm friendship, at least on the part of Jacques, who found himself actually caring less for Schneider's money or his wine than his companionship. Schneider, now that the ice was thawed, exhibited an interest in the Legion and its history in strong contrast with his general air of disinterest in everything. More especially did he ask questions about men who had tried to make their escape, their methods and their chances.
"Mon Dieu," would reply Jacques, "there's not a chance, not one in a thousand has ever done it." He went into the subject from the circumference to the centre and in the manner of an expert. He showed how the boats were guarded at Oran, how the railway line was watched and the roads patrolled.
"And how about escaping by way of the interior?" asked Schneider.
Jacques laughed and gave examples of men who had tried that business and their horrible fate.
"It's a fool's game," said he, "however you take it; but why do you talk of it so much. Do you want to escape?"
"Not I," said Schneider. "I am as happy here as anywhere else. I am interested in the subject, that is all."
But despite his interest in the subject, he did not refer to it again, and it seemed to Jacques for a moment as they returned to barracks that under the calm and listless demeanour of his friend there lay an uneasy spirit; the spirit of the slave that has sold himself into slavery and who has awakened to the galling of his chains.
Then he dismissed the subject from his mind. Schneider seemed contented, and if he did want to escape, he would without doubt have told the fact to his one friend in the Legion—Jacques.
One day, some two months later, Schneider took Jacques aside.
"You have asked me once or twice," said he, "about my nationality and the place where I came from. I told you I was an Austrian and that was the truth. I am, in fact, a Viennese. My family is one of the oldest in Austria and I left my home and forsook my position on account of an unfortunate love affair. You are my friend, and so I tell you this, trusting that you will keep my secret."
Jacques, greatly flattered by the confidence of the other, swore eternal secrecy, and Schneider went on:
"The girl I loved," said he, "was my equal socially, young, charming, wealthy; she had discarded the attention of half Vienna, had chosen me just as I had chosen her by that instantaneous power of selection which Love alone bestows."
"Oui, oui," said Jacques, scarcely understanding all this and quite at a loss before the melodramatic language of the other, who, in fact, seemed reciting some passage out of a cheap novel rather than some experience from his own life.
"Everything went well," continued Schneider, "till one fatal day we quarrelled."
"Ah, mon Dieu," said Jacques. "You quarrelled; and what did you quarrel about?"
"That I cannot tell you," replied Schneider, "It is a matter I do not care to refer to; it is sufficient that we quarrelled. I could not endure life any longer, I left my country and, seeking an active life, I came here."
"You certainly have got what you came to look for," said Jacques; "and what has become of her; does she know where you are?"
"My friend," said Schneider, "not only does she know where I am, but she is at the present moment in Sidi-bel-Abbès."
"In Sidi-bel-Abbès?"
"Yes. She is staying at the Hôtel d'Oran; she has written to me and wishes to see me."
"And you are going?"
"No, I am not going," said Schneider. "Never again shall I see her."
"Ah, mon Dieu," said Jacques, "think twice about that. Never is a long day. Come, see her and make it up; you have only four years and a bit to serve before getting your discharge, and then you can marry her."
"I will not see her," replied Schneider, "it is useless to speak of it; but I want you, as a friend, to do something for me. I wish to write to her. I have written to her, in fact, and here is the letter. Will you take it to her? You know at the military post here they sometimes open letters, at least so it is said. I want you to give it into her own hands."
"I will do it," said Jacques. He took the letter and put it in his pocket—there was no address upon it. "And for whom shall I ask at the Hôtel d'Oran?"
"Madame Seraskier."
"Madame Seraskier?"
"Yes, that is her mother; she is staying there with her mother, so you must ask for the elder lady. Madame Seraskier knows all about this business, so you need not hesitate to hand the letter to Mademoiselle Seraskier in her presence."
"I will do it," said Jacques.
He got an hour's leave that afternoon and started off for Sidi-bel-Abbès.
Sidi-bel-Abbès is slashed across like a hot cross bun by two boulevards, one running north and south, the other east and west. The Hôtel d'Oran is situated near the junction of these boulevards, and when Jacques arrived there, he found after numerous inquiries that Madame Seraskier was at home. I say numerous inquiries, for in the hotels of Sidi-bel-Abbès nobody seems to know anything about anything, the Arab khayf seems to have stolen into the mental atmosphere of the business world, nobody seems capable of exertion or surprise, and if you were to ask the lady clerk of the Hôtel d'Oran as she sits in her glass-fronted office, "Madame, has a dromedary gone upstairs?" I am perfectly sure she would reply, without even raising those jet-black eyebrows of hers, "Monsieur, I do not know—but I will ask." Jacques was shown up to the first floor and into a private sitting-room, where an old lady and a young lady were seated, one reading a novel and the other writing a letter.
He told of his mission with military brevity, and stood whilst the young woman opened and read through the letter.
His mission was over with its delivery, yet he waited, scarcely knowing why, half expecting that some verbal message would be given to him, half held perhaps by his interest in the girl, who was very good-looking yet spoiled in his eyes by a business-like and decided manner evident in every movement.
"Thank you," said Mademoiselle Seraskier, as she finished reading and handed the letter to the elder woman. "It is most good of you to have brought this. There is no reply."
"No reply," said Jacques. He was thinking if this were so everything was indeed up with this unfortunate love affair, and his interest in his good friend Schneider made him bold.
"You will excuse me, mademoiselle," said he; "I am only a common soldier and Monsieur Schneider is a gentleman, as is easily to be seen, still he is my friend, and the welfare of my friend touches me. He has been in the Legion some months now and he stands the life all right; but it is in another six months or a year that the harness will begin to rub. I know, for I have seen it in many a man like him. The Legion tells, and the more a gentleman a man is, the sooner it breaks him. Then he goes cafard and shoots someone, or else he tries to escape and gets hauled back. All this happens unless he has some interest outside the Legion to hold him back and keep him quiet."
Jacques paused. He was a very blunt-speaking person and his shyness before the ladies was dissipated by the sound of his own voice; besides, he had a purpose.
"Monsieur Schneider has told me the whole affair," he resumed. "He has quarrelled with you and will not make it up. Well, do not mind him, give him another six months of drill and route marching and he will sing another tune.—If you care for him, mademoiselle, as a woman ought to care for a man, don't regard his tantrums and keep on writing to him even if he tears up your letters."
The effect of this speech was astonishing. Mademoiselle Seraskier, after looking at Jacques for a moment with eyes dancing with merriment, suddenly turned and ran from the room; she seemed choking with laughter, and the incensed Jacques was turning to go, when the old lady held him.
"Do not mind my daughter," said she. "She is young, and young people are sometimes foolish. Meanwhile, take my thanks for your kindness, and as a small memento of our meeting please accept this."
She took a pink and blue five-hundred-franc note from a travelling desk open on the table and approached Jacques with it.
"Madame," said Jacques, "I do not take money for assisting my friends." He saluted, turned on his heel and departed.
It was magnificent. Five hundred francs to a légionnaire is the equivalent of five thousand francs to an ordinary civilian, and he had flung it back in the faces of these people—really in the face of this girl who had laughed at his friend. He came down the stairs swelling out his chest and with the feeling of a man who has cast everything away but honour. Then in the street outside and all of a sudden his splendour of mind faded and shrivelled up.
In a practical world where cigarettes were three sous a packet, he had flung away five hundred francs. Twenty-five napoleons.
"Madame, I do not take money for assisting my friends." What a fine sentiment for a man without five centimes in his pocket!
He stopped and actually retraced his steps for a pace or two, then he resumed his way to the barracks, furious with himself, with Schneider, Madame Seraskier, Mademoiselle Seraskier and the universe in general. He saw Schneider that evening and told him that he had delivered the letter, and Schneider not making any inquiries, he said nothing more. He felt illogically angry with Schneider, so much so that he borrowed five francs from him. It was the first time he had ever borrowed from him. With the five francs, Jacques went off to the canteen, where he stood treat all round, drank two bottles of Algerian wine and went to bed happy.
II
Next night at the time when all good légionnaires should be in barracks, Schneider failed to answer the roll call.
In such a case the Legion officials, disregarding the half-dozen different causes that may make a man break his leave, look upon him as a deserter.
By morning, Schneider's description had been telegraphed to Oran, eighty miles away, and the railway officials and road patrols notified, also the Arab police.
Schneider did not turn up next day. He had deserted or else he was dead.
Jacques believed that he must have done away with himself. Schneider, being his friend, would have told him had he intended to make his escape; then there was a matter of the letter to the girl, a farewell letter. Yes, there could be no doubt—he had committed suicide and was hidden away in some ditch somewhere.
He mourned for his friend all day, and in the evening, strolling into the town, he spent five centimes on the Echo d'Oran, thinking there might be some news of his vanished friend. Later on, he strolled into the shop of a friend of his, Moccata by name, a Jew clothier, rag and rubbish dealer and fence.
I do not accuse Jacques of using Moccata in the latter capacity, I simply state the fact that this gentleman was a fence; he was also a most picturesque individual, with the grey beard of a prophet.
Despite his many and shady activities, he always had time for a chat with Jacques if the latter called. He had a kindness for Jacques, who had once done him a service, and Jacques in return had a great respect for Moccata's astuteness and knowledge of the highways and byways of Sidi-bel-Abbès.
He had come to ask him his opinion of the Schneider business.
"The man has made his escape," said Moccata, "without any manner of doubt—you are quite wrong. If he had committed suicide, the body would have been found. Bless you, there's no hiding anything away in Sidi-bel-Abbès, what with the police always hunting for runaways and criminals and the Arab boys poking about in every lane and ditch for bits of old metal and rubbish— Ah, ha!"
He struck himself on the knee as though he had remembered something all of a sudden. Then he rose up and went into a corner of the shop, searched amongst the rubbish there and produced a bundle.
He unrolled it, exposing a blue full-dress légionnaire's coat, red trousers and sash.
"I was coming home last night," said Moccata, "with a sack containing some old clothes, when I stumbled against a bundle. It was in the lane opening from Mustapha Street; the things were rolled up and tied together with the sash. I popped them in the sack. It was stupid of me to touch them. You know the law is heavy on anyone helping a légionnaire to escape, and to be in possession of a légionnaire's uniform might cast suspicion on one, but to tell the truth, my friend, I could not let the things lie; all my life I have been dealing in old clothes; it is not the profit I make from them, but the feeling I have for them that prevents me from leaving even an old hat lying in the street if I can pick it up. My father dealt in old clothes before me and his father before him, it runs in the family. So there you are. I picked the things up. I could not let them lie, and now I do not know what to do with them."
"You had better hide them," said Jacques. Then he went off.
There was no doubt in his mind now. Schneider was not dead, he had escaped. The only thing to account for a uniform cast away like that was an escaped légionnaire, and no other légionnaire had escaped or attempted escape.
Schneider had been playing a part all along. Jacques, as he walked back to the barracks, revolved matters in his mind. He remembered how, several months ago, Schneider had suddenly made friends with him; he remembered those conversations about escape, and he saw how artfully this scamp had pumped him on the matter; then came the question of the girl.
The girl and the old lady had come to Sidi-bel-Abbès to help in the business, and he blushed to think of the part he, Jacques, had played; he remembered that speech of his, honest and spoken from the heart, and the way in which the girl had received it, rushing from the room to hide her merriment, and remembering this, Jacques swore a great oath to be revenged. Schneider had played him false, that was bad; he had placed him in a ridiculous position, that was worse.
Then as he drew near the barrack gate, an idea struck him. He went straight to the officers' quarters, and the colonel happening to be in, Jacques had a five minutes' interview with him.
At ten minutes past ten he left the colonel, carrying with him a written order that made him virtual master of all the outlets of Algeria; he went to his room, fetched his blue overcoat, and going to the garage, secured a motor-car. A few minutes later he was being driven to Oran, where he arrived shortly before one o'clock in the morning.
He went to the Police Bureau and found that the boat for Marseilles was due to start at nine o'clock, and at eight o'clock he had taken his stand on the quay, close to the gangway of the steamer.
It was the ill-fated General Chanzy, and the last of the cargo was going on board to the tune of the winch pawls and the shouting of the red-fezzed negro stevedores. The quay presented a brilliant spectacle beneath the intense blue of the morning sky; a company of Spahis bound for Senegal were lining up by the troopship that was to take them, the crying of the Arab children at play answered the crying of the gulls fishing in the harbour, and here came the first of the passengers for the Marseilles boat, a stout, bearded Frenchman, who might have been Tartarin of Tarascon himself, in tweeds, wearing a sun helmet and followed by two negro porters carrying his luggage. After him came a French family, two American ladies in blue veils and a tall Englishman with side whiskers, a rare bird to find nowadays, and recalling to mind the "typical" Englishman who used to figure in the old Palais Royal farces. Then came some Germans, and lastly what Jacques was waiting for.
Madame Seraskier, Mademoiselle Seraskier and their maid. The women were all veiled and the maid was carrying a dressing-bag. There was no sign of Schneider. Jacques was not looking for him.
He drew close to the gangway, and as Madame Seraskier placed her hand upon the rail, he advanced, raised his képi and said:
"I see, madame, that you have changed your maid."
The stout Frenchman, who had taken his place on the boat deck of the General Chanzy, and who was in the act of lighting a cigar, was treated to a spectacle. He saw the légionnaire corporal raise his hat to an old lady, the old lady fall in a faint, and the old lady's maid drop the dressing-bag she was carrying, pick up her skirts and run, pursued by the légionnaire. He saw her captured and handcuffed, and then he saw the old lady and her daughter led off by the police.
Then the boat started, carrying him off, to wonder for ever what could have been the meaning of it all and how it all ended.
It ended in a court-martial at Oran, where Schneider was condemned to a year of the penal battalion, not for having run away, but for having lost his uniform, and Jacques, who knew where that uniform was, said nothing. Wicked of him, perhaps, but with that I have nothing to do. I am simply telling this story to cast a sidelight on the character of Jacques.
As for the character of Schneider, the regimental surgeon, a hard-bitten French colonial officer with a terrible eye for the truth of things, summed it up for me:
"Schneider joined the Legion, as we discovered at the court-martial, for no reason. He was suffering from the European disease that afflicts, mostly, well-to-do men, and which is confined almost entirely to the continent of Europe, the disease that makes a man go off and commit suicide or join the Legion—for no reason. He is tired of life. These men are nearly always of high intelligence, but they have no belief in a God, and as in the case of Schneider, they often keep no faith with a friend. They are very crafty. We have had several of them in the service and I speak from knowledge.
"When Schneider, after a couple of months of Algeria, began to dislike the business, he determined to make an end of it; but knowing that it was next to impossible to escape by ordinary ways, he enlisted his old mother and his sister in his service. No heart, you see.
"I believe what is wrong with men like him is a brain that tires of ordinary stimuli and seeks for new sensations; well, he is receiving plenty of them in the criminal battalion, building roads down there in the south. It is a remedy that will cure him, if it does not kill him."
THE LITTLE PRINCE
I
He was a man of twenty-eight or so, and he had not entered the Legion in the ordinary manner, by way of a draft from Oran. He had enlisted at Sidi-bel-Abbès.
Jacques had begun by disliking him, on account of his fine airs and finicking ways. Faced with the ordinary, depressing, everyday duties of a légionnaire's life, Karasloff—for that was the name the newcomer had enlisted under—after a first momentary revolt had accepted everything with the air of a fatalist. He evidently possessed some money, as he was able to pay for small services such as the washing of his fatigue uniform and the cleaning of his equipment, but he rarely stood treat in the canteen and he was not over-generous with his cigarettes. Every evening he left the barracks with the rest and went off to Sidi-bel-Abbès, but he was scarcely ever seen on the Place Sadi Carnot, where the légionnaires congregated to hear the band; Sidi-bel-Abbès swallowed him, and no man knew where he went or what he did with his time, and no man particularly cared.
Now Karasloff was most evidently a gentleman, a man of refinement, and most certainly a man with a past, and in any other regiment in the world there would have been much speculation and gossip as to where he came from, who he was and what he had done; but the Legion cares about nothing but itself, it heeds neither the past nor the future, and the past of Karasloff was of no interest to it.
Jacques had begun by disliking this man, then he had taken an interest in him, and had finished by becoming his friend.
There was something strangely childlike and simple in the character of Karasloff that developed on closer acquaintanceship; it puzzled Jacques; what puzzled him more was the mystery of how Karasloff spent his time when off duty.
One day, some two months or so after they had struck up their friendship, Jacques, coming back from the drill ground with the other, put the question point-blank. "Look here," said he, "I'm not the man to poke his nose into another man's business, but I want to know something, all the same. What do you do with yourself of an evening? Why don't you come to the Place to hear the band, or go to one of the cafés, like the rest of us? You make off and vanish—well, what do you do with yourself?"
Karasloff smiled.
"I do not go to hear the band," said he, "maybe because music stirs up memories, and as to the cafés, I have never been a frequenter of cafés. What do I do with myself? Well, I will not tell you; but if you come with me this evening I will show you."
"I'll come," said Jacques.
He was vastly interested in this business, there was something mysterious in the evasive reply and the manner of Karasloff. What was this mysterious occupation or amusement that held his friend every evening from six till ten? He remembered one légionnaire who used to disappear from barracks like this, and who, it turned out afterwards, was assisting in the management of a café; could Karasloff be so employed? Jacques' fertile brain busied itself all that day turning over suggestions and ideas on the subject without finding anything plausible, and at six o'clock, still in the dark, he started off with his secretive companion for Sidi-bel-Abbès.
"I have been trying to guess what you will show me," said he, "and what business it is that you are engaged in."
"I will give you three guesses," said Karasloff, laughing, "and five francs if you hit the mark."
"Good," said Jacques. "Well, then, you are running a café."
"No."
"A gambling shop."
"No."
"Ah, I have it—an opium den."
"No."
"Deuce. I give in—maybe you have turned Mussulman and spend your time at the mosque."
"No. I am still a good Christian—I hope."
"Well, it is beyond me and it seems that I am not to win that five francs—well, we will see."
"Yes," said Karasloff, laughing, "we will see."
They reached the gates and passed through to the great boulevard cutting the town north and south.
Leading the way, Karasloff turned from the boulevard down a street narrow and roofed with the blue evening sky, less a street than a bazaar, where the stalls exposed all sorts of merchandise for sale, pottery, oriental stuffs, carpets, pipe-stems and oriental tobacco, Arab gums faked and made in Paris, Rahat Lakhoum, scent.
Before one of these shops that exposed oriental stuffs and carpets for sale Karasloff paused, then, glancing up and down the street to make sure that there were no other légionnaires about, he entered, followed by Jacques.
El Kobir was the name of the merchant who owned the premises; he was seated amongst his wares engaged in mending a rug; around him lay bales of rugs just arrived and filling the air with a vague perfume, the very fume of the East, calling up the bazaars of Samarkand and the looms of Persia.
El Kobir was wealthy; he sold his goods to the travellers who came to Sidi-bel-Abbès and to well-to-do inhabitants of the town, but his export trade was his stand-by. He had a shop in Vienna managed by his brother, and correspondents in London and Paris. With the very same hand with which now he was repairing a defect in the rose-coloured rug on his knees he could, without feeling the loss, have written you a very large cheque on the Crédit Lyonnais; white-bearded and fragile-looking, he had, yet, made the pilgrimage to Mecca for the second time only a year ago.
El Kobir bowed to Karasloff without rising, wished him good evening, and, turning his head, called out something in Arabic as though he were addressing some person in the back premises.
Karasloff introduced Jacques, they sat down, and whilst they were talking a curtain moved aside and a little boy of eight years or so appeared, glanced at Jacques, and then ran up to Karasloff, who put his arm round him.
"This is Ivan," said Karasloff. "He is my son. Ivan, this is my very good friend, Corporal Jacques—give him your hand."
Ivan held out his little hand, which Jacques took in his hard and horny fist. He was a pretty child, delicate-looking, and dark-eyed, dressed in the European style with the exception of a fez, which he wore as if born to it. Having shaken hands with Jacques, he took shelter again with his father, and the talk interrupted by his entrance went on.
Coffee was brought in by an Arab woman, and cigarettes. El Kobir talked about business and how Sidi-bel-Abbès was falling off in foreign visitors, and Jacques, set going by the coffee and the general atmosphere of mild festivity, talked of the Legion and its desperate adventures, not excluding his own.
Whatever the secret of personality may be that attracts children to grown-up people, Jacques must have possessed it, for in half an hour Ivan was sitting on his knee listening to his wild tales, enraptured and worshipping.
Karasloff looked on, pleased and rather astonished, whilst El Kobir, almost as much of a child as Ivan, listened also to Jacques telling of the great fight down by the Oasis of the Five Palms, of how the water gave out and of how he, Jacques, had fought hand to hand with the chief of the insurgent Arabs and spitted him like this—see——!
When it was time to return to barracks, Jacques and Karasloff walked off, the former promising to come again soon.
"So you see," said Karasloff, when they were in the street, "that is how I have been spending my evenings; better than in a café, eh?"
"Mon Dieu, yes," replied the other; "but tell me it all, how is your little son here in Sidi-bel-Abbès and you a légionnaire—what is the meaning of it?"
"My friend," said Karasloff, "I was once a man in a very high position. I had a wife who died and a little son who lived. Then a tragedy happened, and I came to grief. I had to leave my country and hide myself in the Legion, but I could not leave my son. He and I arrived at Sidi-bel-Abbès, we put up at the Hôtel d'Oran, and on our first evening here I walked out to see what I could do in the way of a home for Ivan. When I got to see the physiognomy of the town, I came to the conclusion that the thing was impossible. Sidi-bel-Abbès is not the town in which to leave a child boarded out with a stranger. I was in despair, but there is a Providence, without doubt there is a Providence; the very fact of the existence of Love would make one believe in a protecting Power—well, that evening I was returning to the hotel and I had the choice of two streets to come back by, and I chose the Rue Victor Hugo. Half-way down it there was a crowd. A tipsy Spahi just back from Senegal had fallen foul of an old man. The Spahi had the old fellow by the beard and was about to strike him—kill him, perhaps, when I felled the Spahi with a blow just beneath the ear. It is necessary to be brutal at times, to strike hard, and to strike swiftly. I would have had trouble over this business, had the military police come along, but luckily for me it was one of the mounted Arab police that was attracted by the crowd, and when he heard the story and found that I had been defending a true believer he made no trouble. The old man was El Kobir.
"I walked with him home to his shop, which was only a little way off, and he was so full of gratitude and seemed such a good man altogether that I put my case before him and asked him could he tell me what to do with Ivan.
"He saw my point at once and that it would never do to leave the child with any promiscuous person; he was such a gentleman that he never once asked my reason for joining the Legion, he just proposed that I should let Ivan stay with him.
"'I have no family,' said he, 'and the child, if he is a good child, will not be in the way.'
"I suggested that I should pay for the child's keep, but he would not hear of it—well, that's how it was, and I come up and see Ivan every evening; the child is happy enough. El Kobir has a good many well-to-do friends and Ivan goes and plays with their children, but he is always there to meet me in the evening."
"Well," said Jacques, "you were safe in offering that five francs. I never would have guessed what you were after; we don't have much to do with children in the Legion, and that's a fact; but it seems to me now there is a good deal of sense in children, and the man who has one, and looks after it, spends his time better than sitting round in the canteen or in the cafés. I'll come with you some other evening, if I may?"
"With pleasure," said Karasloff.
Often after that Jacques accompanied his friend to El Kobir's, and there in the twilight of the shop, whilst Karasloff smoked cigarettes and talked of his friends, the child and the légionnaire would amuse themselves, taking redoubts made of bales of rugs, practising the bayonet exercises with the measuring-stick, drilling, or telling the most extraordinary yarns, for Ivan had his own stock of stories picked up from his little Moslem friends, and had you listened to him you would have recognized in a mutilated form the doings of the old heroes of the "Nights"—the Chinese Magician, Aladdin, The Three Calenders and the D'jin imprisoned by the seal of the great "Zuleiman."
A tremendous friendship struck up between the légionnaire and the child, and now, during all his leisure time at the barracks, Jacques busied himself with an old knife and some small blocks of wood, picked up from who knows where. The légionnaires are always making things, tobacco-boxes, baskets, knife-handles, and what not, to sell for a few sous to spend on drink or tobacco.
Jacques was making a wooden corporal and six légionnaires, excellent reproductions of the original things, three inches high and each able to stand on its own feet. They were in full marching uniform, blue overcoats turned back to show the red trousers, knapsack and all.
They took two months in the making and a lot of trouble in obtaining the paint for the coats and trousers, but they were finished for the time appointed: Christmas Day.
Karasloff, who had seen the making of the things, was much moved when he found that they were for Ivan, but he said scarcely anything. Ivan did all the thanking, and the valiant wooden soldiers formed another bond, if such a thing were wanted, between himself and the légionnaire.
One day Karasloff said to Jacques, "Life in the Legion is a healthy life; though hard enough at times, the work is not without interest, one has the sunshine and the blue sky and the good wine is only three sous a bottle. All the same, this life in the Legion is killing me."
II
Jacques looked at Karasloff in surprise. He had noticed lately that Karasloff was growing thinner.
"Killing you!" said Jacques. "What ails you?"
The Slav smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
"I think it is this way with men," said he, "they do not bear transplanting. The real soil in which the mind grows is the social condition to which it is accustomed. Minds die when torn up by the roots from everything to which they have been used to. Then there are some men whose bodies are affected by their minds, and to whom mental decay means bodily decay—that is how it is."
All this was Greek to Jacques.
"You will get all right," said he; "a turn with the Arabs will put new life in you, and they say we are likely to be sent down south after them any day."
But the expedition against the Arabs did not come off, and Karasloff did not get all right; on the contrary the mysterious malady that had seized him developed with alarming rapidity, it was acute phthisis; he was taken into hospital, and one day Jacques, receiving an urgent message, went there to find him dying.
Karasloff had sent for him to speak to him about Ivan. They had a long talk, and after it Jacques returned to barracks looking troubled and perplexed.
Karasloff died the next day and was buried on the day following in the cemetery of the légionnaires with military honours.
It was decided between Jacques and El Kobir to say nothing to Ivan about the death of his father.
"Life has trouble enough," said the old man. "He would gain nothing by knowing—only grief; we will tell him that his father has gone on a journey. I will keep him in my house and he will be to me as my own child, and you can come to see him of an evening as usual."
Jacques, nothing loth, agreed, and things went on just as before with the exception of Karasloff's absence from the evening meetings at the shop of El Kobir.
The effect of the child on Jacques had been profound. This scamp, who had started in life as an Apache and who had gone through the fire of the Legion, so that one might have fancied his soul scorched for ever, developed under the influence of the child quite unsuspected qualities and possibilities.
The miraculous and sometimes appalling influence of mind upon mind, and personality upon personality, was never more in evidence than in the case of Ivan and Jacques.
You might have preached to Jacques; you might have beaten him, tortured him, shown him visions or showered wisdom upon him without producing any permanent effect upon his cynical bandit mind, not an evil mind, but a mind set in narrow ways, with narrow and oblique outlooks upon life.
Ivan touched the humanity in the man because Ivan was absolutely human. I think children are the only real human beings, other people are either men or women. However that may be, in the presence of Ivan Jacques became something like Ivan, a very simple individual, not above playing with wooden soldiers or converting himself into a horse for the child to ride upon.
He would take him out sometimes on a Sunday—Sunday is a whole holiday in the Legion—for walks on the ramparts, and the fact becoming known among his companions, he told the whole story right out about Karasloff, and as a result the regiment took an interest in the child.
Ivan made his appearance in the barrack-yard sometimes hand in hand with his friend. It was wonderland to him. The drums and bugles, the légionnaires saluting their officers, the sentinels with fixed bayonets, the glare, the dust, the military atmosphere, all these things were for him splendid beyond words, fascinating beyond a grown-up person's idea of fascination. To be a légionnaire, what gifts could fortune hold out to mortal greater than that?
Then these august beings joked with him and sometimes patted him on the head, pulled out their bayonets from their scabbards and pretended to stab him, taught him how to salute and nicknamed him the Corporal.
Then, one day, surrounded with jesting légionnaires, he and Beaujon, the regimental tailor, had an interview, and Beaujon measured him as if for fun, took the girth of his chest and the length of his legs and arms, and then—a week later—Jacques appeared one evening at the shop of El Kobir with a bundle. It was a little uniform for Ivan to be worn on festive occasions, a complete corporal's uniform, képi and all.
Jacques for some time past had been out of sorts, with the manner of a man who has something weighing upon his mind.
To-night he seemed more gloomy than ever, and when Ivan, after showing himself in his new uniform, went off to have it changed, Jacques turned to El Kobir.
"All the same," said he, "the child must go. The sight of him in that turn-out has settled the business for me. Only yesterday, when Corporal Kempfer asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he said, 'A légionnaire.'"
Jacques laughed bitterly, as though reviewing mentally the légion of lost men to which he belonged, the regiment so glorious in the eyes of the child. Ah! if Ivan could have seen his regiment of heroes with the eyes of Jacques! and yet, who can say which were the clearer eyes, the eyes of the child or the eyes of the man?
El Kobir put down his cigarette on the little ash-tray by his elbow, and turned from the rug he was engaged in doctoring.
"Why must the child go?" said he.
Jacques grumbled in his throat for a moment, then he burst out, "I don't know what ails me or why I should make fantasie over the business. Do I want to get rid of the child? I've got fond of that child. He's got sense in his head, more sense than a battalion of numskull légionnaires. Now, when I don't want to do a thing, nobody can make me do it. I don't speak of regimental orders, but in ordinary things I say that when I don't want to do a thing nobody can make me do it. I don't want to get rid of the child; why then do I say he must go? I cannot tell you that.
"Now, listen! when Karasloff was dying, he said to me, 'I leave you Ivan to send back to my people. He will take his own place among them when I am dead. They do not know where he is. I took him away because he was the only thing I cared for, you must return him to my people when I am dead.' Karasloff has been dead five months," finished Jacques.
El Kobir was silent for a moment, then he spoke:
"But how are you to know where to send him?"
"Oh, mon Dieu, how? Karasloff gave me the address of his people just before he died, and I promised to write to them."
"That was five months ago," said El Kobir.
"Yes, five months ago. I did not want to send the child off, and so I have played false with Karasloff for five months."
"Not so," replied El Kobir, "you only delayed in performing a promise, you did not break it."
"Oh, as for that," said Jacques, "I said to myself when he was dead that I would keep the child, promise or no promise; then, lately it came to me that a child has no say, he just has to take his marching orders, and I fell to wondering if I was marching him into a ditch; just now when he came in wearing that rig-out, it was as if the uniform hit me in the face. No, he has to go back to his own people."
Jacques knew the word "Duty" only as a military term. He could not tell in the least what power it was that compelled him to do this thing he did not want to do. The child had become a companion, an interest, almost a necessity of life, and had you told him that it was the good influence of the child upon him that was now driving the child away from him, he would not have understood you.
No. The uniform had hit him in the face, that was enough for him.
El Kobir said nothing more. Like Jacques, he did not want to part with the child, yet he was a just man. Had he been an unjust man or a hard-hearted man, he would not have wanted to keep the child. Our good qualities hit us very hard sometimes.
"And who are the child's people?" asked El Kobir, as Jacques, rose to go.
The latter took a paper from his pocket and handed it to his questioner, who scanned it and handed it back without a word.
It was almost a world-known name that he had read, and it remained before his eyes as he sat alone working on the rug.
He knew quite well that Jacques was about to write, or get his commanding officer to write to the child's people, yet he had said nothing to urge or deter him from that course.
He was an old man, and the child had grown round his heart. However, Fate is Fate. If the thing had to be, it had to be. All the same, a half welcome idea clung to his mind that Jacques might prove weak enough to let the matter stand as it was for the present. A year or two, what did it matter. And suppose the child were taken off to that splendid palace and that glorious future awaiting him, might that prove the happiest fate for him?
El Kobir had a profound knowledge of the evil of wealth and the weariness of greatness, and he looked on Western civilization with the cynical eyes of an Eastern.
Railway trains, telegraph lines, steamships, the magic that makes a voice reach London from Paris, all these things did not impress him at all; viewed against the background of the stately East they seemed like the vulgar jewellery of a nouveau riche. He knew quite well that the glitter surrounding a great man in Europe was only glitter, and that as far as happiness was concerned, an Arab boy playing in the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès had, perhaps, a better chance of securing happiness than a princeling in a palace of the West.
Still, the child was a European—and Fate was Fate.
Days passed and nothing happened. Jacques came of an evening as usual, but not a word did he say on the all important topic, nor did the old man speak of it.
He watched Jacques narrowly, but that personage showed nothing of his mind or his intentions. He seemed a bit grimmer than usual, except when Ivan was present, but one could argue nothing much from that. The grimness might be simply the expression of dissatisfaction with himself for having done nothing to further the orders of the dead Karasloff.
However, a week later the bomb-shell fell. Quite early in the afternoon Jacques made his appearance at El Kobir's.
"They have come for the child," said he.
The old man, who was looking over some accounts, glanced up.
"Ah, they have come for the child. Where are they?"
"At the Hôtel d'Oran. They wanted to come here and fetch him. I told them not. I told them I would fetch him myself. You see we don't want a fuss—you had better say nothing to the child. I will just take him for a walk and leave him with them at the hotel. They seem good folk these people of his. There is a woman and a man, the grandfather and grandmother it seems. There is also our Colonel at the hotel with all the papers about Karasloff.
"The grandfather is M. le Prince, but he is all the same a kind-spoken old man—the child will be happy enough. Besides, he need not know he is going away for always. Only there must be no fuss. He does not want to take any clothes with him or luggage—they will give him all that."
El Kobir called his servant to bring Ivan.
"Ivan," said El Kobir, "your friend has come to take you for a walk."
He took the child to his side for a moment and gave him a little squeeze, then he kissed him on the forehead.
Ivan clapped his hand in that of Jacques, and the pair went off, while El Kobir returned to his accounts.
But the addition of figures made little way, and the eternal cigarette was unlit as he sat thinking, thinking, a hundred miles removed from the shop, from his business, from himself.
He was an old man and he had lost many friends. His business was indeed the only friend left to him. Jacques had never been his friend.
Just an acquaintance. They were people inhabiting different worlds, with ideas, tastes, and natures absolutely dissimilar. Ivan by his magic had drawn them together, but he had not united them.
Indeed, now that Ivan was gone, El Kobir felt a vague antagonism towards Jacques.
Jacques had divided them. This rascal of a Jacques had done a fine thing no doubt in parting with the child he was so fond of, for the child's sake—all the same, he had taken the child away.
It was after dark and the swaying lamp was lit in the shop when Jacques came back.
"Well," he said, "it's done, and they leave to-morrow for Oran. They made me stay for a while and talk——"
"And the child?" asked El Kobir.
"The child's as pleased as they are. He ran into the old woman's arms directly they met, and called her grandmama. He does not know he's going away for good—anyway, there he is quite happy. Happier than I've ever seen him."
El Kobir heaved a sigh. Then he went off into the back premises and returned with a bundle. It was the uniform of the Corporal of the légionnaires, little képi and all.
"These are yours," said he, "you had better take them back to the man who made them. Your Legion is a légionnaire the less now."
Jacques unrolled the things, looked at the blue coat and red trousers, the sash and the belt, then as we close the pages of a story, he folded them together, put them under his arm, and with the képi swinging by the chin-strap to his finger, bade good-night to the old man and went off to the barracks.
MANSOOR
They were coming back from the rifle butts in the blaze of the late afternoon sun, Jacques walking beside Corporal Kandorff. The roofs and minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès showed beyond the barracks, swimming in the heat-shaken air, whilst on the tepid wind blowing in their faces came the scents of the desert and the smell of the town.
You can smell Sidi-bel-Abbès half a league off, the perfume of the yellow city is as distinctive as the perfume of a marigold, and as unforgettable. Camels, negroes, jasmine flowers, caporal tobacco and the old, old yellow earth of the ramparts all lend a trace of themselves to form a scent the very recollection of which brings up the bugles of the Legion, the domes of the city, and the cry of the muezzins from the minarets of the mosques.
Jacques was thirsty, and as he tramped along beside Kandorff he was abusive towards the universe in general. When he was short of money he was always like that, and lately he had been very short of money, reduced to borrowing a few halfpence that morning from Kandorff—fifteen centimes, and they were spent.
"Seven years in the regiment," he was saying, "and look at me. I who know every hole and corner of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Things are going from bad to worse; a year ago there was lots of pickings to be had what between the new drafts from Oran and the town there; but of late there's not a man joined the Legion with more than the rags he stands up in, and as for the town it's gone rotten. Visitors don't seem to come there now, there's no money and no tick and no trade to be done. I was the sharpest man in the regiment once at carving a bit out of the Arabs and the visitors and the traders, but where's the use in being sharp when you have nothing to cut. Tell me that. I had money once, enough to start in business when I got my discharge; much good my discharge will do me when I get it. It will mean rejoining for another five years, and that will be the end of me. I want the sight of money and I want it bad; every time I pass the Crédit Lyonnais I can scent the gold there just as you smell the cooking going on in a café. I'll break in there some day, and if I can't do anything more I'll just roll in the twenty-franc pieces, swallow them, choke myself with them. That's how I feel—you'll see."
"Then they would shoot you," said Kandorff, "and I would never get my fifteen centimes back."
Jacques laughed.
"Well, there would be some satisfaction in that," said he. "It's better to die owing fifteen centimes than owing nothing—one has someone to mourn one then. Ah, ha! here's the placard for Mansoor stuck up."
They had reached the barrack gates and he pointed to a poster just stuck upon the right gate-post. It was the offer of a reward of five hundred francs for the capture of Mansoor, late superintendent of the Arab police, and the delivery of his body alive or dead into the hands of Colonel Tirard, chief of the regiment of légionnaires stationed at Sidi-bel-Abbès. The poster was issued from the Bureau Arabe, but the goods were to be delivered at the headquarters of the Legion.
Mansoor, two days ago, had murdered a légionnaire; it was a sordid and ferocious crime, committed on account of a woman. The criminal had made his escape, Sidi-bel-Abbès had been searched, Oran sealed, and the desert posts warned, but the murderer was still at large, hence the reward. Jacques and Kandorff stood amongst the crowd that had gathered to discuss the notice.
"They'll never get him," said Kandorff.
"And why not?" asked one of the crowd.
"Why not? Well, just for the very good reason that he is an Arab and the Arab police will shelter him and wink at his escape."
"Winking at him won't help him much if he wants to cross the frontier," replied the other, "to get into Tunisia."
"He won't bother about that," said Kandorff; "he'll stick on to some wandering tribe and most likely the next time we meet him he'll be fighting us down south somewhere. That is the sort of man worse to let loose than a plague, and he will very likely raise a holy war of his own if he is not caught."
Kandorff—whose name was not Kandorff and who had spent some years in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Foreign Office—was a man who knew what he was talking about. He turned and entered the barrack yard with Jacques and the business passed from their minds. A légionnaire has no time to bother about murders, even if the murdered man is a légionnaire. Jacques and his companion had not even time to think about resting. They had their washing to do.
Jacques had annexed a piece of soap that morning and hidden it under his bed; he shared it now with Kandorff as they stood at the great washing trough, and then, the uniforms washed, pressed and packed safely away, they started off on their usual evening's walk to the town.
Arrived there they parted company, Kandorff going on some business of his own, whilst Jacques, left to himself, strolled off down one of the boulevards. The evening was delightful after the heat of the day, and the wind from the desert, warm but stimulating, played with the leaves of the trees bordering the street and blew in the face of the légionnaire as he walked, glancing in at the shop windows and pausing here and there to inspect their contents.
He reached the Crédit Lyonnais, which was closed, and stood for a moment looking at the building as though measuring the strength of it. This was the place where fellows shovelled twenty-franc pieces across the counter with copper shovels and pulled out drawers stuffed with pink and blue five-hundred-franc notes. Dreams rose before him of what the Legion could do if it only had the courage of its desires and opinions. The looting of Sidi-bel-Abbès rose up before him, a gaudy picture with himself in the foreground armed with a copper shovel and a sack. Then he resumed his way, striking from the boulevard into the native quarter, or rather the Moslem quarter of the town.
He was quite at home here and well known to many of the traders. He had eaten kouss-kouss in the terrible little native cafés where the front premises are only the stage curtains that conceal an opium joint or worse; he was known to black-eyed Arab children and to the quick-eyed Arab police, and to-night, being hard up for cigarettes, he was on the look-out for someone amidst all this host of acquaintances who could supply him.
In a narrow street and before an open booth he paused. Here on a bench beneath a swinging lamp sat a yellow man, cross-legged and wearing a red fez. He was rolling cigarettes.
He had rolled cigarettes since the time when he was a little boy, son of a cigarette-maker in Blidah. He would continue rolling cigarettes till they took him to the grave. He did not know how many he had rolled since his fingers had first closed on the rice paper and the yellow opium-tinctured tobacco. He might have rolled millions, tens of millions, he did not know. He never smoked the things he rolled and one might have taken him for an automaton, but for the song that was always humming upon his lips, a song without words, monotonous, dreary and fateful.
Jacques paused before this image and greeted it. It nodded in reply to his greeting and went on with its work.
Jahāl, for that was the name of this man, did not work for his own hand. He was only a servant in the employ of the Kassim company. It supplied him with the tobacco and cigarette-papers and paid him for the finished product. He sat now without replying to the remarks of the légionnaire, for he guessed Jacques was hard up for a smoke and had come to borrow.
Jacques noted the sullenness of the other and resented it. He was just on the point of flinging an epigram at the head of the silent one and turning on his heel, when the reed curtain at the back of the shop parted, revealing the head of Mansoor the murderer.
There was no mistaking that dark haughty head with the hare lip that exposed glistening teeth in an eternal sneer.
The pause in the talk between Jacques and Jahāl had evidently inspired Mansoor with the belief that the visitor was gone, and, as evidently, he had something urgent to say to Jahāl, else he would not have put forth from his hiding hole. As it was he drew back instantly, but not before Jacques had sprung into the shop, upsetting Jahāl, sending the pile of made cigarettes flying every way and striking with his head the swinging lamp so that it smashed against the fretwork screen depending from the low ceiling and went out.
Next moment, Jacques was behind the screen, in darkness, struggling with a cloth which someone—he knew it was a woman from the clash of the bangles on the arms—had flung over him. Then he was free and bursting out of a stifling atmosphere of camel-hair cloth, scent, and native smell through a window and with his right hand on the shoulder of Mansoor.
Mansoor had sprung into a lane through a window. The moon, filling with light as the west sank to darkness, shone on the scene and showed now the flying figure of Mansoor and the following figure of Jacques, who had missed the shoulder hold, fallen face forward from the low window on to the pavement, and, nothing daunted by his fall, was in full pursuit.
Jacques had joined in many a game of life and death, but never one quite like this. There was money in this business, a lot of money, and fame. More fame than he could ever get were he to perform the utmost prodigies of valour as a soldier fighting the enemy with his regiment.
Then Mansoor was a devil incarnate and he was absolutely certain to be armed. He had not fired yet, nor would he do so as long as there was the faintest chance of escape without using the automatic pistol in his belt.
He, Jacques, was unarmed.
All these considerations, flashing and splashing like heliograph signals across the brain of Jacques, tinged the business with the charm of drunkenness. This was Life stirred up and sublimated, the sort of life one holds for a moment by virtue of Absinthe.
With the rush of a rat, Mansoor broke from the lane into a passage that was simply a crack between two houses that were built right against the inner wall of the ramparts.
The house next the rampart had an iron stair leading to the upper story and the roof. Mansoor, followed by Jacques, swarmed up these stairs, reached the roof, reached the ramparts and dropped over into the encircling ditch.
Mansoor made the drop fifteen seconds only before Jacques. It was thirty feet and they ought both to have been killed, but we may fancy that the gods like a bit of sport sometimes, for they weren't.
But the Arab recovered from the shake-up of the fall before his pursuer had done likewise, and from the start at the ditch's edge for the race for freedom Jacques was under a half-minute handicap.
Half a minute is a terribly long time when the energy of life is blazing to a point as in battle, or a pursuit like this. It gave Mansoor time to get well away.
Just here, around the walls of Sidi-bel-Abbès, you will find vineyards stretching southward and breaking up at last into market gardens. Mansoor was making his way between two vineyards down a path that ended in a cul-de-sac.
A fence, in fact, ended the path and barred his way and checked it for a moment. He left it broken behind him and struck across a market garden where long lines of bell glasses glowed in the light of the moon. In the grape season all this place would be watched by the grape growers and by this a hue and cry might have been set up and half a dozen unsolicited helpers spoiling Jacques' game, but at this time of year the place was deserted and the pursued and the pursuer had the ground to themselves.
The time taken by Mansoor in breaking through the fence gave Jacques an advantage, for the break was so thorough that he was able to get through without delay; when he was through, Mansoor, at the other end of the garden, was negotiating the fence on that side.
Beyond lay broken ground, spotted here and there with stunted bushes and cacti.
When Jacques reached this place, Mansoor was far ahead but distinctly visible, and he had altered his pace. He was no longer running as if for his life, he had settled down to a jog-trot, and Jacques, after a spurt that lessened the distance between them by a quarter, held himself in and settled down to the pace of Mansoor.
The man who holds the lead in an affair of this kind holds the advantage, for the pursuer, if he overhauls the pursued, must inevitably come up to the scratch winded.
Jacques had come to the conclusion that the murderer was unarmed, else here, in this desolate place, he would undoubtedly have attacked instead of running away. Believing this, he determined to hang on the other's heels, wear him down, and then close with him.
He knew his own powers; a born long-distance runner and trained to feats of almost fabulous endurance by his seven years' life in the Legion, he felt that he held the trump card, and if, as he felt certain now, Mansoor was unarmed, he had no fear of the issue.
Sidi-bel-Abbès is situated on the borders of the desert, but the Algerian desert must not be confused with the Sahara, in those places where it shows limitless wastes of sand.
The desert places of Algeria show little sand except in districts away down south, as, for instance, by the Oasis of the Five Palms or that great, sandy track where we saw the Legion fronting the Arabs and defeating them.
The desert of Algeria consists of waste land, rock-strewn and desolate, yellow earth, sun-baked and hardened, a few miserable scrub bushes and cacti, an occasional oasis with palm trees blowing in the desert wind.
There is no water, except that which flows underground and breaks to the surface here and there to form the oasis pools.
Through this wilderness runs the great southern military road, built by the soldiers of the Legion, and the line Mansoor was now taking lay to the west of this road. It was his object to avoid the road; in this Jacques was with him; the road meant military patrols and the prize taken out of Jacques' hands.
Five hundred francs! Never for a moment had the idea left his mind; it had driven him like a charging bull into the shop of the cigarette-maker, it led him in pursuit down the lane, over the rampart, into the ditch and through the market garden; it was leading him now on the most desperate and dangerous chase that man ever engaged in, and it would lead him to the end, whatever the end might be.