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.