The serious fact for Mansoor at that moment lay, not in the fact that he was a murderer, but the fact that he was five hundred francs. He was bundles of Algerian cigarettes, bottles of blue Algerian wine, jolly evenings at the canteen, lots of soap to wash uniforms with, kisses from black-eyed girls, glasses of coloured liqueurs at Kito's—and he was being chased by Jacques!—heaven help him!
The half-moon blazing in the sky lit the chase, and the cold of the Algerian night checked the breath of Jacques.
It seemed also to affect Mansoor, for all of a sudden he slackened his pace from a jog-trot to a quick walk.
His pursuer did the same, nothing loth.
At this pace, the marching pace of the Legion, he could keep on all night and half the next day.
In the Legion on a route march he would be carrying rifle, three hundred rounds of ammunition, knapsack and tent-pole, a weight of fifty kilogrammes or so. To-night he was free of all this, his own man.
As he kept up the pursuit the thought suddenly occurred to him that the barracks would have long closed by this, and not answering to the roll call his name would be posted as a deserter. This thought amused him for a moment, then it troubled him. He had deserted from the regiment before; that always leaves a stain on a man's name, no matter how good his subsequent conduct may be. The punishment for a second attempt is very heavy and the Legion is deaf to excuses and very merciless. Stung by this, he determined to finish the business at once, if possible, close with his prey and chance it. He broke into a run, but, lo and behold, as though gifted with eyes in the back of his head, or a supernatural sense of hearing, Mansoor did likewise.
Five minutes later, both men, as if by tacit consent, had fallen back into the old pace.
There are occasions when men hold quite long conversations with one another without a word of speech, and whilst they are grasping for one another's throats. Mansoor was saying to Jacques, "If you increase your pace I will increase mine; there is nothing to be gained by you in overhauling me like that; quite the reverse, for, seeing that I have a long lead, you would be the most exhausted of the two if you managed to outstrip me. Besides, in a racing test you might not be able to do so."
Jacques was saying, "That is true—curse you!—well, then, let's heel and toe it, I have the advantage of the practice marches of the Legion on my side, and I can stick to you till we both drop. I know, you have method in your game, for the further you lead me the more chance you have of falling in with some tribe of wandering Arabs who would back you against me. Well, I must take the chance."
These two men had once known each other; at a distance, it is true, still they had known one another and exchanged greetings. Jacques had a reputation of his own in Sidi-bel-Abbès, and so had Mansoor. They knew one another's reputations. This knowledge helped in the mute conversation between the pursued and the pursuer.
At dawn they had put some thirty kilometres between them and Sidi-bel-Abbès; the outline of the Tessala Mountains hardened against the fading darkness and then the sun rose, a ball of guinea-gold coloured, eye-dazzling fire, in a blue, still, silent sky.
The solitude here was unbroken by any sign of life; grass patch, scrub bush, ash-grey-green cactus, all seemed petrified in their natural colours, unreal in the real and living sunlight. Forsaken, and given over to eternal silence.
Jacques, used as he was to extreme and violent exercise, was beginning to fail. On route marches, it is true, he had often done forty kilometres heavily laden. They were not yet forty kilometres from their starting-point, and he was carrying nothing, but it must be remembered that the Legion on the march pauses often for a rest and that five minutes' rest makes all the difference.
Jacques had not had a moment's rest. The same held true for Mansoor. Both men were exhausted, but they were exhibiting the effects of their exhaustion in different ways. Jacques, marching well and firmly, had the appearance of a man still capable of covering many miles. His legs were still all right, but his head was giving out. The higher nervous centres could not hold to their work much longer, and that is one of the most fatal forms of exhaustion. For half a minute at a time he would forget Mansoor. At any moment he might fall together like a house of cards and lie on the ground, not dead, but sleeping peacefully, a prey to the man he was pursuing.
On the other hand, Mansoor was failing in the legs; occasionally he swayed and stumbled, but his mind was clear and it dominated his body, as a jockey dominates an exhausted horse.
They had entered a little gully where years ago quarrying work had gone on, for stone to metal the great south road, and Jacques' mind had just returned from one of its momentary lapses, when he saw the man he was pursuing wheel round and advance towards him.
Mansoor was holding something in his right hand. It was an automatic pistol.
It was the sight of the pistol that brought Jacques' mind vividly awake. A pistol! And he had been absolutely certain that his enemy was unarmed. The fact remained, and before the fact Jacques turned tail. But he did not run.
On his left a cave-opening in the rock caught his eye, and urged by the dread of a bullet in his back he dived into the cave.
Mansoor, pistol in hand, came along, swaying as he came, wild-eyed and dreadful, with the grey pallor of exhaustion showing through his dusky skin.
Right opposite the cave mouth, and thirty feet or so away, he flung himself down on the ground, rested his left arm on a piece of rock and the barrel of the pistol on the angle of his elbow, taking aim straight into the cave.
Jacques, seeing this, flung himself flat on the cave floor and waited for the first shot.
But Mansoor did not fire. He seemed content to lie recovering from his exhaustion and holding his enemy at bay.
Jacques had retreated as far as possible into the darkness of the cave, the opening was some nine feet or so from his face, and as he lay on his stomach, his chin resting on his arm, the fact that he was cornered and at the mercy of the other appeared before him in all its bleak simplicity.
Mansoor, when he had rested sufficiently and gauged the possibilities of the situation, would come straight to the cave mouth and then all would be over with Jacques.
But the man with the pistol showed no signs of such an intention yet, he seemed content to wait and watch, keeping a strict blockade till his energy and resolution found themselves again.
Jacques wondered what it would be like when he was dead and lying there always in the cave. Mansoor would not bother to bury him. He thought of what his companions in the Legion would say and think. They would fancy that he had deserted and had succeeded in making his escape. Then appeared before him the blue sea at Oran and Oran itself, with the barracks away up on the heights just as he had seen it on the first day of his arrival in Algeria, more than seven years ago. Then the sea, from a thought, became a vision and shimmered up to him and over him. Mansoor vanished, the cave, the sunlight at its door and the fact that he was held for Death.
Jacques had fallen asleep.
Had you fired a cannon in the ravine he would not have heard it. It was the sleep that follows on high excitement or profound exhaustion.
He was awakened by the bugles of the Legion sounding the réveillé, so it seemed to him for a moment, then the bugles of the Legion became the crying of birds.
Birds were flocking about the ravine, great birds whose shadows swept the ground in front of the cave. With the return of consciousness to Jacques came the return of full mental energy. He remembered everything, and recognized to his astonishment that it was evening, towards sundown, and that Mansoor was still in exactly the same position, his face half sheltered by his arm, taking aim.
Yet it was morning when Jacques had fallen asleep. All the burning day the murderer must have lain like this, watching—or had sleep taken him too?
Suddenly one of the great birds whose shadows had been flitting across the ground swept down and lighted on the head of Mansoor. It stood there for a second, fiery-eyed and swaying, like a funeral plume, then, shooting its head forward and downward, it peeped up into the face of the watching one and plucked out an eye.
The birds of the desert always attack the eyes of a man first. The vultures will haul at a fallen man's head till they get the face sideways. Jacques, who knew all about the birds of the desert and their ways, gave a shout; next moment he was kneeling beside the dead man.
Mansoor had been dead for hours, death had struck him most likely the moment he had changed the upright for the recumbent position, giving him only just time to lie down and take aim. His heart had given out owing to his exertions and the excitement of the chase, or a blood vessel had broken in his brain.
Jacques took the pistol from the dead hand, not without a struggle. Then he saw why the pursued man had not fired on him. The magazine was empty.
Mansoor must have been unable to obtain ammunition after the murder. He had used bluff. It is almost as good sometimes.
The birds had now drawn off. They could be seen perched here and there on the rocks and waddling on the ground. Jacques shook his fist at them. Then, taking a clasp knife out of his pocket, a knife as keen as a razor, he did that unto the body of Mansoor which would ensure the reward of five hundred francs.
As he stood up the sun was setting, and the half-moon, like a ghost in the east, was strengthening in outline. From that eastern sky, warm blue and infinite in depth, a gentle wind was blowing, shaking the leaves of the few stunted plants that grew in the ravine.
Jacques, having finished his business, came out of the ravine and stood shading his eyes with his hands.
The land far and wide lay glowing in the sunset light, all hardness had vanished from it, and the desolation was almost masked by the colours that spread the distance.
The légionnaire was looking now to the east. He had determined to make for the great south road and strike along it back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. He was stiff and so exhausted from want of food that he could take little pleasure in his triumph and the prospect of the reward.
His one idea was rest and food and drink. As he tramped along, making due east, he found by good chance one of those tiny oases which occur here and there in this part of the Algerian desert. Here, by a well scarcely bigger than a slop basin, grew a prickly pear bush with ripe fruit on it. He drank from the well and cut some of the pears, taking care to avoid the prickles, then, having smoked a pipe, he started again by the light of the moon, which was now burning white and clear.
By the well he had heard the far-off crying and quarrelling of the birds from the ravine; he could hear it still as he walked, the sound growing ever fainter, till it ceased altogether before he struck the road just at the milestone that marked the forty-first kilometre from Sidi-bel-Abbès.
Here he was lucky enough to fall in with a cart going in the direction of the town, and obtained a lift to the rest-house, which lay five miles ahead and where for a couple of francs, which he had taken from the pocket of Mansoor, he obtained a bed for the night and some food.
At four o'clock the next afternoon, Jacques, in the highest of spirits, dusty and tired, yet stepping out vigorously, saw the roofs and mosque minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès breaking up before him against the sky.
He was going to enter that town as a conqueror. He gloated over the idea. What a good joke! His name by this had without doubt been posted as the name of a deserter, the Legion would be speculating on his escape, they would see him returning, jeer over the fact—and then!
Besides, what a smack it would be at the Arab police. The police and the légionnaires are not friends. The police have the power to arrest an escaped légionnaire, and more than that, they receive a reward for his capture. You can fancy, then, how sharp they were on the look-out for prey of this sort, and the ill-feeling that results.
Jacques, trudging along, had quite forgotten the police, also the fact that he had no doubt been posted as a deserter by this. All of a sudden the sound of horse-hoofs on the road behind him made him turn his head. Two horsemen were approaching at full speed. They had been scouting amongst the broken ground on the eastern side of the road, and the dusty figure of the légionnaire tramping along had attracted their attention.
They overhauled him, recognized him at once as the man for whom a reward was out, and whilst one of them held him under the muzzle of a pistol, the other clapped a handcuff on his right wrist. The handcuff was attached to a couple of fathoms of thin steel chain, and next moment they were mounted and trotting for Sidi-bel-Abbès, Jacques running behind them in the dust of the road.
A nice triumphal entry for a corporal of the Legion.
They passed the gates, and then down the main boulevard they came, the infernal police, like boys returning from fishing, only too proud to exhibit their catch.
They were bringing him through the town on purpose. He knew it, but he did not care. He was promising himself a fine revenge, and the onlookers in the street were treated to a new sight, an escaped légionnaire being brought in bursting with laughter and shouting ribald remarks to his captors.
At the barracks the police dismounted, and leaving their horses in charge of one of the légionnaires on duty, they marched their still laughing prisoner off to the guard-room, Five minutes later they were standing before Colonel Tirard, waiting for their reward, Jacques between them.
The Colonel was in a temper. Jacques was one of the best men in the regiment, and one of the best marchers. He had been well treated. Desertion on the part of a man like that was a big crime in his eyes.
"So, you scamp," said he, "they've brought you back. A nice thing truly, for you, a man in authority over others. Well, I will teach you—what's in that bundle tied to your belt?"
"A present for you, mon Colonel," replied Jacques.
He took the bundle, which consisted of something wrapped up in the dead man's shirt, placed it on the table, opened it, and exposed the grinning head of Mansoor.
"There are things that explain themselves," said Jacques that night, as he told the story of his interview with Colonel Tirard to his companions.
He spent the money in diverse ways, but he bought no cigarettes. Jahāl supplied him with cigarettes gratis during the next three months. He had said nothing about Jahāl's part in the business of hiding Mansoor, and he managed to impress Jahāl with the importance of his silence and its commercial value. That was Jacques all over.
I
Jacques was a bird fancier.
The slums of London and Paris seem to breed bird fanciers, men who supply the trade, and just amateurs, market porters, artisans and so forth, who go bird-catching outside the city limits of a Sunday, or who content themselves with buying the feathered article in the rough state and training it for profit.
Jacques in his Paris days used to do this occasionally by way of an honest occupation, and now, in Algeria, a corporal in the second regiment of the Foreign Legion, he managed to turn an honest penny sometimes at the bird-fancying business. A Spanish Jew with an unpronounceable name was his partner, Arab boys did the trapping, and Jacques found many a customer for the little red, soft-throated African birds amongst the officers of the Legion and their friends.
It was in this way I met him first.
One Sunday I came across him on the ramparts of Sidi-bel-Abbès.
He had come there to meet someone in connection with the bird business, and as the someone had not yet turned up, we sat and talked. He told me this story, or, at least, he gave me the substance of the story I am going to tell you.
The Legion recruits its units mostly from the failures and broken-down men of the world; consequently, and leaving aside young criminals who are driven into it by the law, it numbers few very young men in its ranks.
Raboustel formed an exception to this rule.
He was quite young, not more than eighteen or so, a fine fellow in every way, but unfit for the life he had chosen. He was a rebel, at least against discipline and restraint.
He had joined the Legion expecting, no doubt, an adventurous life hunting down Arabs or fighting pitched battles with the tribes; he did not enjoy the reality, eternal drill, with road-making, route-marching, and odd jobs as the only alternatives.
However, he possessed considerable force of character and power of restraint over himself, and after the first month or so settled down—or seemed to.
He had no special chum, but he was popular in his way and friendly with Jacques. He told the latter his history—how he had been brought up to do as he liked by a mother who doted on him, how his mother had died, and his father, a vine-grower near Avignon, had tried to make him work; how he had rebelled, not against work, but against the monotony of regular labour, how a man in the cavalry had told him of the glorious times to be had in the Legion, and how he had enlisted.
"Glorious times, truly," said Jacques as he was telling me this, "up at daybreak, to bed at dark, drill, Swedish exercises, route-marching, firing-range—the life of a camel and a halfpenny a day."
However that might be, Raboustel took his gruel, to use the expression of Jacques, and didn't grumble over the taste of it. A bad sign. Everyone grumbles in the Legion, and naturally, for the man who has sold his body and soul for a halfpenny a day feels that he has something to grumble at. The silent men and the men who keep up an appearance of unnatural cheerfulness are the men likely to make trouble.
For the first couple of months, then, Raboustel, loathing the life that had seized upon him, but saying nothing or next to nothing about his feelings on the matter, seemed on the highway to one of the hundred forms of revolt common to légionnaires.
Any day Jacques would not have been surprised to hear that Raboustel had mutilated himself, or made an attempt to escape, or committed some act equally mad and equally sure to lead to punishment or death.
But time went on and nothing happened, and then, strange to say, Raboustel, so far from trying to run away or attempting some mad act, all at once became cheerful—really and unfeignedly cheerful—and began to grumble at the small pin-pricks of an Algerian soldier's life just like a healthy légionnaire. He had fallen in love.
One evening, passing through Kassim Street, in the native quarter of the town, he had stopped to admire the brass-work exposed for sale in a little shop near the corner where Kassim Street is cut by the Street of the Crescent. The owner of the shop, a Spanish Jew, Abraham Misas by name, was not there. His daughter was looking after the place in his absence.
She was lying crouched on a rug in the dark interior of the shop, and seeing what she supposed to be a customer looking at the wares, she came forward.
A girl of sixteen or so, slight, dark, and beautiful as a dream.
When she saw that the customer was a légionnaire she was about to turn away in disdain. Légionnaires never buy things, and consequently are looked upon as scarcely human beings by the trading population of Sidi-bel-Abbès.
However, before she had time to turn Raboustel spoke to her; there was something in his voice that pleased her, and in a couple of minutes they were chatting away one to the other quite amicably across the brassware, so that a passer-by might have fancied them old acquaintances. They interested one another immensely and at once, and their talk about nothing in particular, the weather, the doings of the town and the Legion, had for each of them the charm of a new and surprising adventure. She spoke French with a Spanish accent. She asked him how long he had been with the Legion, and how he liked the life, and in a moment he found himself telling her all about himself, where he had come from and how he had joined the regiment for the sake of a more active and interesting life than the life of a vine-grower.
He had arrived at this when suddenly the girl broke off the conversation, and an old man, looking something like Svengali grown grey, passed Raboustel and entered the shop.
Raboustel, with a glance at the girl, turned and went on his way. He was very quick in the up-take, knew at once that the old man was the proprietor of the place and almost exactly what his feelings would be to find his daughter chatting to one of those penniless, good-for-nothing scamps of the Legion.
He returned to barracks that night a changed man. He was not in love, but the fact that someone had taken an interest in his affairs warmed his heart, and then there was something in the knowledge that the person who had taken interest in his poor affairs was a woman. Added to this, the picture of the girl remained with him so vividly that it was the first thing he saw on opening his eyes next morning. Love ought really to be represented as a photographer. He does all his business by distributing pictures to his clients, fatal pictures that they can't dispose of, or tear up, or destroy.
On parade Raboustel was looking at the girl's picture whilst receiving orders, and it came between him and the target on the range that afternoon. It filled him in the evening with such a burning desire to look at the original that he walked down Kassim Street, only to be rewarded by the sight of her father. The old man was sitting in the half-gloom of the shop, smoking cigarettes and waiting for customers, and you may be sure that Raboustel as he passed did nothing to attract his attention.
The next day the same thing happened, but on the third evening, as luck would have it, the old man was away on some business and Manuella, that was her name, was in the shop.
She came forward smiling and they talked together as before. Love grows quickly in Algeria, especially when he is pressed for time, and before they parted that night there was an understanding between these two, and Raboustel returned to barracks in such a high state of spirits that his companions fancied he had been drinking.
Now nothing much more disastrous can happen to a légionnaire than to fall in love. It is not a common complaint amongst légionnaires; they have little time or inclination for the business, and if they had who would look at them or listen to them? A halfpenny a day, a position a little above that of a convict—nice prospects to lay at the feet of any girl.
Nothing more hopeless than this passion of Raboustel could be well imagined, yet he never thought of that, and she never thought of it either. They were in love one with the other, that was the only thing they thought of. But the Legion was not to be denied or flouted. It had its revenge on this man who dared to think of other things than the bitterness of life, who dared to catch the white bird Love and hold it clasped to the tunic of a légionnaire.
It hit him first in the pocket. Out of a halfpenny a day you cannot save much to buy presents with, and the first instinct of a man in love is to offer a present to the woman he loves.
Jacques at that time was carrying on a small traffic in birds, it was a business he took up and dropped with the seasons, and as it happened to be then the full swing of the season he was fairly occupied in his leisure hours buying and trapping birds.
One day near the barracks he met Raboustel, noted that he was dejected and out of sorts and asked the reason.
"It is nothing," said Raboustel.
"I know that nothing," replied the other. "I have suffered from it myself. Come, out with it, is it the food that's making you sick?"
"I have nothing to say against the food."
"Ah, then it's just the barracks, I know that feeling."
"I have nothing to say against the barracks."
"You haven't!" cried Jacques, with a burst of laughter. "Then you must be singularly easy to please. Ah, I know, you are homesick."
Raboustel laughed.
"I have not thought of home for a week. No, you are wrong, Corporal, it is neither the food, nor the barracks, nor the thought of home that is troubling me, it is something else."
He told his position in a few words. He had come to care for a girl and he had no money with which to buy her a present, nothing to offer her.
Jacques listened. At the word "girl" he had been on the point of laughing, then he saw in a flash that this was a serious business for Raboustel.
The position of a man in the Legion is such that honest aspirations and ambitions are absurd, unless they be purely military, and even then they are rarely fulfilled, and as for love!
Jacques whistled when the other told him all.
"You will have trouble there," said he. "You will have the old man on top of you; does he know about it?"
"Not he," said Raboustel.
"Well, he is sure to get to know, and then your trouble will begin. You see, you are a légionnaire."
"Well, what of that?"
"What of that! Nom de Dieu! You wouldn't be asking 'what of that' if you had a daughter in love with a légionnaire. You would be getting out a gun and shooting him. Well, the thing is not to be helped. It is a matter accomplished. When a man makes a fool of himself there is only one thing to be said for the situation, it is a matter accomplished. When do you see her?"
"In the evenings sometimes."
"Where?"
"Well," said Raboustel, "I saw her the first few times in the shop of her father, lately she has come to speak to me at the corner of the Grand Boulevard where it cuts the Street of the Crescent. She meets me there and we talk. Sometimes we walk a bit in the Boulevard and she looks into the shop windows, not wanting me to buy her things, you understand, but still, there you are. I couldn't if I wanted to—that's what's troubling me. I want to."
"And you can't. Well, we must see what can be done," replied Jacques. "I was in your position once, when I first joined. I hadn't been a week in the Legion when I lost my head over a girl, she was a daughter of a fruit-seller who used to peddle oranges on the Place Sadi Carnot. Abarbanell was his name, he was the colour of an old service boot, and she was the prettiest girl in Sidi—so I thought. I had a few francs left over from the money I had brought into the service, and I bought her some beads, amber beads made of glass. I went to give them to her and I found her arm in arm with a Spahi. She laughed at the beads, so did the Spahi; well, he did not laugh when I was trying to make him swallow them. He on the pavement and I on the top of him. They took him off to the hospital and I got ten days' cells, and when I came out, Abarbanell had been shot out of Algeria for selling drink without a permit and his daughter shot after him for robbing the men he made drunk. Well, let's see, maybe I can help you to get something to give this girl of yours. Times are not good; no, indeed. They could not be pretty much worse. Still, there are ways. I'll think it over."
He did, and two days later he called Raboustel into the cook-shop of the Legion, where there was no one except the cook, a solemn-faced German, engaged in cutting up the meat for the evening soupe.
"Here is what I have got you," said Jacques.
He went to the corner of the place and produced something wrapped up in a cloth. It was a tiny cage, and in the cage were two little birds.
"It's the best I can do," said Jacques, "and they are worth five francs in the market. It's a cock and a hen, and here's a bag of bird seed, the stuff they're used to, that and a drop of water is all they want—she'll know."
Raboustel was delighted. He could not express his thanks. Five francs was an impossible sum for him just then, and if he had possessed it he could not have spent it on a prettier present than the birds.
Manuella was not the girl to appreciate cheap jewellery.
That evening he was to meet her on the ramparts, and at sunset there he was true to time, and he had scarcely been waiting five minutes when she appeared, dressed as he had never seen her before, with a lace mantilla covering her shapely head.
It was a lonely spot that they had chosen, giving a view over the country towards the west.
When he took the covering off the cage and showed her the present he had brought for her she clasped her hands together.
Then she took the little cage between her two palms and kissed the bars of it, just as she had kissed her lover on the lips a moment before.
It was a pretty picture, there in the last rays of the sunset, a scrub stone pine, growing from a piece of rock in the rampart, shivering above her in the wind of the desert, the hot, dry wind puffing up from the sou'-sou'-west, the wind that brings with it the flavour of the heart of Africa from those great spaces across which are written desolation—death.
She held the little cage in her hands all the time they were together. It was their first time of being absolutely alone one with another. Several times when he tried to take her in his arms he found the little cage between himself and her. He could not injure the birds, so he released her.
II
One evening she came to meet him late for the rendezvous, and creeping through the darkness like a shadow.
It was just before the new moon, and the stars had the sky all to themselves, a sky of black pansy-purple, luminous, leaping with life and light and fire.
Up here, where they met, the murmur of the city came to them from below; the faint music of a band, louder or lower as the wind took it or left it, the murmur of the streets, shrill boy voices calling the last edition of the Echo d'Oran.
She had brought bad news.
Her father had discovered everything. It had all come about through the little birds. Someone must have seen her receiving them, and then, they were not a present that one could keep hidden for long.
She kept them in her room, but their little soft voices chatting together must have reached the old man. Sounds like that were just the sounds to reach a person like Abraham Misas. He would have heard through walls of triple brass and by instinct. Then when she was out he would have poked his head into her room and seen the cage and its contents. He would then have cast about to find the giver.
Or it may have been that someone just came into the shop and said to him, "I have seen your daughter with a soldier, one of the légionnaires."
However that might be, the fact remained. Abraham Misas had a brother, a metal worker in Algiers, and on the day after the morrow he was going to Algiers and taking Manuella with him. She was to live with the brother and help him in his shop.
Abraham had said not one word to his daughter of the reason for the change, he had made no reproach. That was the sort of man he was, secretive, silent, always working underground to obtain his ends and always obtaining them.
To a callous outsider this decision of the old man, taking all the facts into consideration, was a piece of profound common sense. For even had Raboustel been an eligible party he was tied to the Legion for nearly five years more.
Had Raboustel been worth a million of money he could not have escaped the Legion's clutches. No man once seized by that iron grip can ever escape, be he prince or millionaire or pauper, till the expiration of his term of service sets him free.
So to an outsider the decision of the old Jew would have seemed reasonable enough. To the two lovers it was equivalent to a sentence of death.
Raboustel, confused by the blow and able to see nothing clearly, on parting with the girl that night made her promise to meet him at the same place on the morrow and at the same time.
"I will think it over," said he, "but one thing you may be sure, you will not go. We will find some means of stopping it."
"We can always die," said Manuella.
He went tearing back to barracks and found Jacques, who had just returned. He told him the whole story outside the canteen, and Jacques gave him very cold comfort.
"What can you do?" said he. "The old man takes her off to Algiers, that is to say to the moon as far as you are concerned. You can't follow them, for to do so would be to desert, and you would be caught at the first station out from Sidi. Even if you could follow them, what then? You would find yourself in Algiers with no money. You cannot carry on War or Love without money. That is a fact. You cannot run away with her. Where could you run to? Nom du bon Dieu, listen to me. It is I, Jacques, that am talking, and I know what I am talking about. A man, if he is very quick-witted, if he has plenty of money, if he can talk two languages, and if he is an expert at disguise, may succeed in escaping as far as Oran. If he is under special convoy by order of good luck he may reach Marseilles, and if he escapes the military police at Marseilles, who have eyes back and front and at the ends of their fingers, he may get out of France. Now, mark you, it's not a question of escaping from Sidi-bel-Abbès or Algeria, it is a question of escaping from France.
"You, without money, without languages, without the art of disguise and with a girl in tow—what can you do? See you, if you get even to Marseilles it would not help, for there is a telegraph cable under the sea, and telegrams go quicker than mail boats, and once the girl is missed you'd have all the Jews in Algeria shouting that a Christian had run off with Rebecca, and all the Jews in Marseilles would meet you at the landing-stage. That is another point. You are not of the same faith. You are a Christian."
"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Raboustel, "what has Faith to do with love?"
"You would soon know if you went after a Mohammedan girl and her people caught you," replied Jacques. "No, you are outflanked everywhere, you can do nothing."
"One can always die," said Raboustel, echoing Manuella.
"This is a fool's talk," replied the other; "any fool can die. Come, I will stand you a bottle. There's more sense in a bottle than in many a man's skull. Come, I'll pay."
But Raboustel was not in the humour for drink, and said so and departed on his way.
He went to bed, but he did not sleep that night. He lay awake, listening to the snoring of the others, and their muttered conversation sometimes as they talked aloud in their sleep.
Légionnaires sleep soundly, but they sometimes have dreams that even the soundest sleep cannot smother. Dreams of France, of England, of the wastes of Russia, of days departed and faces never to be seen again.
Raboustel, lying on his back, watched the night pass and the stars moving across the blue-black luminous sky disclosed by the window space opposite to him.
Then something brilliant came slowly sailing into view, it was the crescent of the new moon.
The new moon is the most lovely of new-born things, especially when seen in the night sky of Algeria. Raboustel watched it pass, scarcely heeding it. He was thinking out a plan.
Next day at six o'clock he departed as usual with the others to the town.
Jacques, who had kept his eye on him all day, walked with him as far as the town and then left him. Jacques, who had a good deal of wisdom of his own, did not refer to the subject of the girl. He judged that if Raboustel had made up his mind to run away with her, nothing would stop him from making the attempt, and he considered that if Raboustel had given up the idea it would be an unfriendly thing to make him talk of it. Jacques was a good deal of a gentleman, though he had knifed several men in his time.
When he returned to barracks that night he looked about for his friend. He had not yet come back. Then Jacques, instead of going to the canteen, took his place near the sentry at the barrack gate and watched the late arrivals coming in. The men came in twos and threes, singing, skylarking, some silent and moody, the last of them flushed with running, but none of them drunk. Drunkenness is not common in the Legion, owing to the scarcity of money and the drastic nature of the punishment.
Then the barrack gates were shut and the roll was called. Raboustel did not answer to his name.
He had deserted.
Of course it might be that he would yet turn up. It sometimes happens that a légionnaire, for one cause or another, outstays his leave; but Jacques did not consider this chance at all. He made up his mind that the man had deserted, and he was right.
Next day brought confirmation.
A report came from the Arab police that a légionnaire and a girl mounted on a presumably stolen horse had been met with by a police patrol on the southern road.
The girl was mounted behind the légionnaire. The patrol, consisting of two officers, allowed them to pass; they were riding at full speed and the officers never thought for a moment that it was the case of a légionnaire deserting. Légionnaires making off are always on foot, they avoid the high roads and they don't carry girls with them.
Then, recovering from their surprise, the police officers consulted together and determined to follow, but the légionnaire had got a long start and a very good horse. They followed for two miles or so without gaining on the suspects, their horses being poor and already tired by a long day's work. They dropped the chase, returned to Sidi-bel-Abbès and telegraphed to the nearest southern police post.
No news of the supposed fugitives had been received. They must have left the road and taken to the plain.
Then Abraham Misas appeared on the scene. He turned up at the barracks, interviewed the colonel and literally wailed over his lost daughter. It was a bad quarter of an hour for Colonel Tirard, and he swore terrible oaths as to what he would do with that scamp of a Raboustel when he was brought back. He got rid of the old man at last, and day followed day, but no news came, and week followed week without a breath or word from that mysterious south into which the lovers had vanished like figures in a dream.
The affair caused a great stir in Sidi-bel-Abbès, where it is remembered yet. The escape of a soldier would not give the good people of the town a moment's thought, but the escape of a soldier taking away with him a girl of the town, a daughter of an honest citizen, made them furious.
This delighted the Legion, who hate the townsfolk for various and substantial reasons. Raboustel became a hero. He had undoubtedly made his way across the frontier into Morocco. The thing had been done once or twice before by deserters.
After a month had passed this supposition became an assured fact and Raboustel began to suffer the fate of the heroes, kings and captains who had vanished. People began to forget him.
"And you never saw him again?" I said.
"There you are wrong, Monsieur," replied Jacques. "I saw them both. It was this way. Three months or so after he had made his escape, taking the girl with him, an Arab tribe down south began to light matches. That sort of thing spreads and must be put out quickly, or you would soon have the whole of the south on fire, so, one night we got our orders to march. The whole regiment went.
"It was really not much of an affair and we soon dealt with it; what made us swear was not the fighting, for there was scarcely enough fighting to go round, but the distance. The place was very far south, in the region of the sand dunes.
"Does Monsieur know the desert? Many people when they talk of the desert think of sand and nothing but sand, whereas the desert is rock and nothing but rock, till, of course, you reach the sandy patches.
"Well, it was down there, the main fighting was over and we were sending out patrol parties to clean up and hunt for fugitives. I was with one of these parties. One day, about ten kilometres from camp, we sighted a palm tree, and knowing there was water there, we made for it, thinking also to find fugitives.
"It was a dead tree, Monsieur; it had been dead, maybe, six months, and the well source that had fed it was dried up, but we found fugitives.
"Under the withered tree, Monsieur, lay two skeletons, the bones all mixed together, and some rags of cloth; the birds had torn the clothing to get at the bodies that now were skeletons.
"There were also some buttons from a légionnaire's uniform, his belt and buckle, and a woman's comb. I said at once: 'There's Raboustel and his girl, look,' I said; 'it is a légionnaire's bones, and the little bones are those of a girl.'
"Then, Monsieur, I picked up something else that made me sure. It was a little cage. I knew it, for I had made it myself, and in the cage there were also two skeletons. The girl had taken the thing with her. Women do strange things. One might have thought that she had enough to bother about, without taking that. It was a strong cage, made of iron wire, else the vultures would have broken it to pieces. That is the story of Raboustel, Monsieur, and his girl."
He rolled a cigarette, and as he was lighting it there came along the person for whom he was waiting. An Arab boy, a bird trapper, carrying a cage in which were two little birds newly caught. He gave them to Jacques, who gave him in return some small coins.
"Do you make much at this business?" I asked.
"No, Monsieur," he replied. "A légionnaire never has the chance of making much money over anything. Just a few francs, and the man who buys them will sell them for ten—he is not in the Legion."
I gave him ten francs for the birds, and opening the cage let them free, much to his amazement; then we stood watching them as they fluttered in the air, confused, dazzled by freedom, and at last striking south away across the vineyards like two spirits freed from the prison of a sordid and soul-ruining world.
One day in times away back before Jacques had joined the Legion, Count Aerenthal, that well-groomed diplomat, sitting in his private room at the Bal Platz in Vienna, and in conference with parties not wholly un-German, came to a grave decision, a decision to tear up the Treaty of Berlin and rob Serbia of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
That decision, ratified by the God of Rogues, had very far-reaching consequences. It was the match that set a light to a long, long train of consequences. It was the voice that found echoes in every pocket of the Balkan mountains and an answer to-day in the blaring bugles of the Foreign Legion.
ACTIVE SERVICE
Fancy the magic of those words in that vast sun-baked barrack of the Legion, those words that cut through the routine of life like a sword. Drills, Swedish exercises, road-mending, the awful blaze of the Algerian mid-summer, all collapsed, broke away, vanished like the memory of a nightmare before the vision of war.
Not a rough and tumble Arab war, either, but a great German war, made in Berlin, polished and complete in all its parts, an affair "worth something."
There were men in the Legion well versed in the intricacies of European diplomacy; there were men in the Legion better fitted to write the history of what we call Armageddon than many a European scribe renowned in his trade. But from the lowliest to the likeliest, there was not a man who thought or cared for anything but the fight ahead.
For the Legion does not care what it fights so long as it fights, where it goes so long as it goes, or how far it goes so long as it gets clear of barracks.
The Germans in the Legion were quite ready to fight Germany, the Spaniards to fight Spain, the Austrians to fight Austria; but, and this is the mysterious thing, they were all eager to fight for France.
For France who paid them a halfpenny a day and worked them like horses, yet who had, by some alchemy, made them her loyal soldiers second to none in the field.
Some days later at Oran, whilst they were waiting to embark, Jacques and a companion, having obtained leave of absence from barracks, were taking a stroll through the town.
Jacques had only been here once since that day, years ago, when, having parted with Casmir and Choc, he had been arrested and taken back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. The place was just the same, the same sun-splashed streets, Arabs, Jews, Levantines, Greeks, the same salt sea wind blowing round corners and wiping out the same Oriental smells, the same children playing in the gutter, the same beggars and plum-coloured porters topped with red fezes, the same Spahis smoking the same cigarettes.
Then, turning a corner they came on a crowd and a dog fight.
An awful Arab brute was engaged in a battle to the death with a dust-coloured mongrel, and the mongrel was Choc.
No, it could not be Choc, for it had a white patch on its rump, but save for that patch it was Choc, and Jacques seized his companion by the arm as he stood watching, breathless, without a word.
Now the dust-coloured one was down, now up, and now, marked by a shout from Jacques, it had got the old hold. Clinging to the Arab's foreleg just where it joined the body, it clung luxuriously, whilst the Mohammedan yelled and circled, demoralized, beaten and craving to run.
"Watch!" cried Jacques.
The word had scarcely left his lips, when releasing the leg hold, the dusty devil had the other by the throat.
That was Choc's old trick; a fatal one for next minute the Arab was dead.
Then the dusty one sat down by the corpse and laughed, with tongue hanging out and head wagging to the panting of the body.
Blood was flowing from him in three places, but he did not even bother to lick the wounds. He was "celebrating."
Then as the crowd dispersed he got up stiffly, snuffed the corpse, shook himself, snuffed his wounds, and went off to a shady corner to apply first dressings and laze on his side, and think the battle over.
Jacques approached him, only to be received by a growl. The same old attitude of mind towards strangers after battle that Jacques knew so well.
Jacques nodded at the dog, then, taking his companion by the arm, he walked off. He was elated. He had seen Choc's offspring, and as he walked he poured out his mind. Told all the old story we know and then finished up: "Well it's good to know the dog came through it, and had heart enough to have a son, maybe that's a grandson, I don't know, but it's Choc's right enough, son or grandson. Oh, if I know anything of Choc, he'll have filled Oran with his pups—but it's good to know he had a bit of pleasure in life and heart to take it. Let us have a drink on it."
They went into a café. "Yes, I feel just, as you may say, 'sif I'd found a child I'd lost, and it's a good omen. You mark me, we'll beat the Boches just like that, we'll get the leg hold and then the throat. I know. The old dog has come to tell me."
And maybe he had.
THE END