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.