ON THE STATION PLATFORM
They dined together in a glass-fronted restaurant opening out on to the
terrace, and Sanda was sweet, but absent-minded. Max could guess where
her thoughts were, and almost hated Stanton. How could the man let some
wretched engagement, with a few French officers, keep him from this poor
little girl who adored him? How could Stanton let her go alone to meet
her unnatural father (it was thus that Max thought of Colonel DeLisle)
when as her one-time guardian he might have taken her to Sidi-bel-Abbés
himself, and persuaded his old friend, DeLisle, to be lenient. All that
Max had heard against the explorer came back to him, and he was ready to
believe Stanton the cruel and selfish egoist that gossip sketched him.
Poor Sanda!
Miss DeLisle had meant to finish her long journey as she had begun it,
second-class; but Max persuaded the girl to let him take for her a
first-class ticket, with _coupé lit_, in a compartment for women, as far
as the station where at dawn they must change for Sidi-bel-Abbés. She
was surprised at the smallness of the price, but did not suspect that
she owed her new friend anything more substantial than gratitude for all
the trouble he had taken for her comfort.
Max himself went second-class, packed in with seven men who would have
thought opening the window a symptom of insanity.
One of the seven was the man with whom Sanda DeLisle had chatted on
board the _General Morel_ at dinner. He was the hero of the compartment,
for he was going to Sidi-bel-Abbés to fight a boxing match with the
champion of the Legion, a soldier named Pelle. Four of the travellers
(three men of Algiers and a youth of Sidi-bel-Abbés) were accompanying
the French boxer, having met him at the ship.
Dozing and waking, Max heard excited talk of _la boxe_ and the coming
event. He was vaguely interested, for he had been the champion boxer of
his regiment--a hundred years ago!--but he was too weary in body and
mind to care much about a match at Sidi-bel-Abbés. When he was not
trying to sleep, he was mentally composing a letter to his colonel, with
discreet explanations, and a justification of his forthcoming immediate
resignation from the army: or else a written explanation of his farewell
to Billie, following up the telegram; or thinking out business
directions to Edwin Reeves. Suddenly, however, as he was dully wondering
how best to send the heiress to New York without going back himself, a
name spoken almost in his ear had the blinding effect of a searchlight
upon his brain.
"La petite Josephine Delatour," said the young man who lived at
Bel-Abbés. He was evidently answering some question which Max had not
caught.
"The handsomest, would you call her?" disputed a commercial traveller,
who also knew the town. "Ah, _that_, no! she is too strange, too
bizarre."
"But her strangeness is her charm, _mon ami_! She has eyes of topaz,
like those of a young panther. If she were not bizarre, would she--a
little nobody at all--be strong enough to draw the smart young officers
after her? There are girls in Bel-Abbés, daughters of rich merchants,
who are jealous of the secretary at the Hotel Splendide. Before she
came, it was only the officers of high rank who messed there. Now it is
also the lieutenants. It is not the food, but Mademoiselle Josephine who
attracts!"
"Once upon a time she thought me and my comrades good enough for a
flirtation," said the commercial traveller. "But she looks higher in
these days, especially since her namesake in the Spahis joined his
regiment at Bel-Abbés. She told me they had found out that they were
cousins."
"The lieutenant doesn't go about boasting of the relationship," laughed
the youth from Bel-Abbés. "He comes to my father's café, which is the
best in the town, as you well know. If any one speaks to him of _la
petite_, he laughs: and it is a laugh she would not like."
Max's ears tingled. He felt as if he were eavesdropping. He wished to
hear more, though at the same time it seemed that he had no right to
listen. Luckily or unluckily, the boxer broke in and changed the
subject.
Early in the morning, passengers for Sidi-bel-Abbés had to descend from
the train going on to Oran, and take a slow one, on a branch line. It
was a very slow one, indeed, and it was also late, so that it would be
nearly midday and the hour for _dejeuner_ when they reached their
destination. Max saw himself inquiring for Mademoiselle Delatour just at
the moment when the admirers of her topaz eyes were assembling for
their meal. He did not like the prospect; but said nothing of his own
worries to Sanda, whom he joined on changing trains. Now the meeting
with her father was so near, she had to hold her courage with both
hands. She had realized for the first time that she would not know where
to look for Colonel DeLisle. He might be in barracks. She could hardly
go to him there. He would perhaps be angry, should a girl arrive,
announcing herself as his daughter, at the house where he had rooms. The
third alternative was the Hotel Splendide, where he took his meals. He
might already be there when she reached Sidi-bel-Abbés. What a place for
a first meeting! Max agreed, sympathetically. It seemed that everything
at Sidi-bel-Abbés must happen at the Hotel Splendide!
"If you could only be with me and help, as you have helped me all
along!" she sighed. "Though of course you can't. If Sir Knight had
come---- But I couldn't easily explain _you_ to my father. At least, not
just at present."
Max saw this, even more clearly than she saw it. It would indeed be
difficult for a strange new daughter to explain in a few brief words a
still more strange young man to such a person as Colonel DeLisle. If he
were to be introduced or even mentioned at all, Max felt that it would
have to be later, and must depend on the word of the redoubtable
colonel. He suggested to Sanda as discreetly as he could that he would
keep out of her way at the hotel, unless she summoned him. But, he
added, he would have to be there for a short time at all events, because
his business was taking him precisely to the Hotel Splendide.
"The person you're looking for is staying there?" asked Sanda.
"She's the secretary of the hotel." Max hesitated an instant, then,
realizing from the words he had overheard how conspicuous a character
Josephine Delatour evidently was, he thought best to tell Sanda
something more of his story than he had told her yet. He sketched the
version, vindicating his foster-mother, which he had given to Billie
Brookton and the Reeveses--a version which all the world at home would,
he believed, soon hear.
"So that is it?" said Sanda. "You're giving up everything to this girl.
Do you think she will take it?"
"I wish I were as sure of what I shall do next as I am sure of that,"
laughed Max. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind as to
Josephine's attitude, it had vanished while listening to the talk of her
in the train.
"I know what you ought to do next," Sanda said. "You ought to be what
you have been--a soldier."
"I shall always be, at heart, I think," Max confessed. "But soldier life
is over for me, so far as I can see ahead."
"I wonder----" she began eagerly, then stopped abruptly.
"You wonder--what?"
"I daren't say it."
"Please dare."
"I mustn't. It would be wrong. I might be horribly sorry afterward. And
yet----"
She silenced herself with a little gasp. He urged her no more, but
stared almost unseeingly out of the window at the roofed farmhouses, and
the yellow hills, like reclaimed desert, with bright patches of
cultivation, and a far, floating background of the blue Thesala
mountains.
* * * * *
Sidi-bel-Abbés at last! and the train slowing down along the platform of
an insignificant station, which might have been in the South of France,
save for a few burnoused Arabs. There was a green glimpse of olives and
palms, and taller plane trees, under a serene sky; and in the distance
the high fortified walls of yellow and dark gray stone, which ringed in
the northernmost stronghold of the Foreign Legion.
"Sidi-bel-Abbés!" a deep voice shouted musically from one end of the
platform to the other, as the train came in; and the name thrilled
through Max Doran's veins as it had not ceased to thrill since
yesterday. More strongly than ever he had the impression that some great
things would happen to him here, or begin to happen, and carry him on
elsewhere, beyond those yellow hills. Deep down in him excitement
stirred in the dark, like a dazed traveller up before the dawn, groping
for the door through which he must pass to begin his journey. All the
more quietly, however, because of what he secretly felt, Max took
Sanda's bag and his own, and gave her a hand for the high step from the
train to platform. There they became units in a crowd strange to see at
a little provincial station; a crowd to be met at few other places in
the world.
The French boxer was not the only guest of importance this train brought
to Sidi-bel-Abbés. At the far end of the platform, where the first-class
carriages had stopped, a group of officers in full dress were collected
round a man who wore civilian clothes awkwardly, as an old soldier
wears them. There was the sensationally splendid costume of the Spahis;
scarlet cloak and full trousers; the beautiful pale blue of the
Chasseurs d'Afrique, and a plainer uniform which Max guessed to be that
of the Foreign Legion. The boxer had his committee _de réception_ also;
a dozen or more dark, fat, loud-talking proprietors of cafés, or
tradefolk keen on "_le sport_." These, and the lounging Arabs, might
have interested strangers to Sidi-bel-Abbés, if there had been nothing
better worth attention. But owing to the lateness of the train, it had
come in almost simultaneously with another made up of windowless wagons
for men, horses or freight, which had not yet discharged its load. Out
from the wide doorway of the long car labelled "_32 hommes, 6 chevaux_,"
was streaming an extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the
high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond,
round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in
Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been
collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were
nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a
brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the
sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab,
and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, yet with one
likeness which bound them together like a convict's chain: weariness and
stains of long, hard travelling, which thrust the few well-dressed men
down to the level of the shabbiest. Some were almost middle aged; some
were youths hardly yet at the regulation enlistment age of eighteen; a
few one might take for broken-down gentlemen; more who looked like
workmen out of a job, and one or two unmistakably old soldiers,
eager-eyed as lost dogs who had found their way home: a strange
gathering of individuals to find stumbling out of a freight train at a
country station of a French colony; but this was Sidi-bel-Abbés,
headquarters of _La Legion Etrangére_: and as the tired, dirty men
tumbled out on to the platform, everybody stared openly as a corporal
with a high képi, a buttoned-back blue overcoat, and loose, red trousers
tucked into military boots, formed the crew into lines of four.
Even the officers at the end of the platform gazed at the soiled
scarecrows who had to be made into soldiers: for this being
Sidi-bel-Abbés, there was no difficulty in guessing that the
twenty-eight or thirty men of six or seven nations were recruits of the
Legion of Foreigners. The draggled throng was quietly indicated to the
visitor in civilian clothes, who nodded appreciatively and then turned
away. But the boxer's brigade explained the unfortunate wretches so
loudly and unflatteringly to their guest that haggard faces flushed and
quivering lips stiffened; while at the gateway of exit, a motionless row
of non-commissioned officers, watching for deserters, regarded "_les
bleus_" critically, yet indifferently.
Max, whose quick imagination made him almost painfully sensitive for
others, felt hot and sorry for the men herded together by misfortune. He
had read sensational stories of the Foreign Legion, and found himself
hypnotized into looking for brutal jowls of escaped murderers, or faces
of pallid aristocrats in torn evening clothes, splashed with blood.
Among these men of mystery or sorrow there were, however, few startling
types which caught the eye. But one man--young, tall, straight as an
arrow--running the gauntlet of jokes and stares with fierce, repressed
defiance, turned suddenly to look at Max and Sanda.
Where to place him in life, Max could not tell. He might be prince or
peasant by birth, since prince and peasant are akin at heart, and ever
remote from the middle-classes as from Martians. He wore a soft, gray
felt hat, smeared with coal-dust from the engine. The collar of his
dusty black overcoat was turned up; it actually looked like an evening
coat. His trousers were black too, and Max had an impression of patent
leather shoes glittering through dust. But these details were only
accessories to the picture, and interesting because of the wearer's
face. It was dark as that of a Spaniard from Andalusia, with the high,
proud features of an Indian. It had been clean-shaven a few days ago;
and from two haggard hollows a pair of wild black eyes flashed one
glance at Max--the only man who had not seemed to stare. Face and look
were unforgettable. It seemed to Max that some appeal had been flung to
him. He could hardly keep himself from striding after the tall figure,
to ask: "What is it you want me to do?" And Sanda also had been
impressed. He heard her murmur under her breath, "Poor man! What
wonderful eyes!"
Nobody moved from the platform until the corporal had called the roll of
names--German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arab--and had marched
his batch of recruits briskly through the guarded gate. Max would have
hurried Sanda out directly behind them, before the crowd could secure
all the queer, old-fashioned cabs which were waiting, but at that moment
the smart group of officers moved forward. Having shown their guest one
of the sights of Sidi-bel-Abbés, they evidently expected to take
precedence of the townspeople, who gave no sign of disputing their
right. Max, following the example of others and resisting an impulse to
salute, stood back with his companion to let the uniforms pass. Sanda,
pink with excitement, was as usual all unconscious of self, and vividly
interested both in recruits and officers. The latter, especially the
young ones, were equally interested in the pretty, well-dressed girl, a
stranger in Sidi-bel-Abbés and the one woman on the platform.
Max saw the polite but admiring glances, and would have liked to draw
her further away. He bent down to whisper a suggestion, but Sanda did
not hear. Her face, her whole personality, had undergone one of those
swift changes characteristic of her.
With a fluttering cry, she started forward, then stepped nervously back,
and, stumbling against Max's foot, would have fallen if he had not
caught her.
All his attention was for her, yet, with his eyes on the girl, he
suddenly became conscious that something had happened among the
officers. One man had stopped abruptly just in front of Sanda, while
others were going through the gate, hurrying on as if tactfully desirous
to get themselves out of the way. A voice murmured "Mon Dieu!" and
having steadied Sanda, Max saw standing close to them a small, rather
dapper man with a lined brown face, a very square, smooth-shaven jaw,
long gray eyes, short gray hair, and the neat slimness of a West Point
cadet. He had on his sleeve the five gold stripes signifying a colonel's
rank, and was decorated with several medals.
Instantly Max understood the situation. The one thing that ought _not_
to have happened, had happened.