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."