UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR.
It was just sunset.
The far-off summits of the Djurjura were tinted with the intense glare
of the distant pines and cypresses cut sharply against the rose-warmed
radiance of the sky. On the slopes of the hills white cupolas and
terraced gardens, where the Algerine haouach still showed the taste and
luxury of Algerine corsairs, rose up among their wild olive shadows
on the groves of the lentiscus. In the deep gorges that were channeled
between the riven rocks the luxuriance of African vegetation ran riot;
the feathery crests of tossing reeds, the long, floating leaves of
plants, filling the dry water-courses of vanished streams; the broad
foliage of the wild fig, and the glowing, dainty blossoms of the
oleander, wherever a trace of brook, or pool, or rivulet let it put
forth its beautiful coronal, growing one in another in the narrow
valleys, and the curving passes, wherever broken earth or rock gave
shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day.
Farther inland the bare, sear stretches of brown plain were studded
with dwarf palm, the vast shadowless plateaux were desolate as the great
desert itself far beyond; and the sun, as it burned on them a moment
in the glory of its last glow, found them naked and grand by the sheer
force of immensity and desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken
into refts and chasms, as though to make fairer by their own barren
solitude the laughing luxuriance of the sea-face of the Sahel.
A moment, and the luster of the light flung its own magic brilliancy
over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full on the heights of El
Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, delicate form of the Italian
pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, threw out their graceful
heads against the amber sun-glow and the deep azure of the heavens. Then
swiftly, suddenly, the sun sank; twilight passed like a gray, gliding
shade, an instant, over earth and sea; and night--the balmy, sultry,
star-studded night of Africa,--fell over the thirsty leafage longing for
its dews, the closed flowers that slumbered at its touch, the seared
and blackened plains to which its coolness could bring no herbage, the
massive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in its rest.
Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha Road was a circle
of Arab tents; the circle was irregularly kept, and the Krumas were
scattered at will; here a low one of canvas, there one of goatskin; here
a white towering canopy of teleze, there a low striped little nest of
shelter, and loftier than all, the stately beit el shar of the Sheik,
with his standard stuck into the earth in front of it, with its heavy
folds hanging listlessly in the sultry, breathless air.
The encampment stretched far over the level, arid earth, and there was
more than one tent where the shadowing folds of the banner marked the
abode of some noble Djied. Disorder reigned supreme, in all the desert
freedom; horses and mules, goats and camels, tethered, strayed among
the conical houses of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the
tossed-down hay; and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood fires, whose
lurid light was flung on the eagle features and the white haiks of the
wanderers who watched the boiling of their mess, or fed the embers
with dry sticks. Round other fires, having finished the eating of their
couscousson, the Bedouins lay full-length; enjoying the solemn silence
which they love so little to break, and smoking their long pipes;
while through the shadows about them glided the lofty figures of their
brethren, with the folds of their sweeping burnous floating in the
gloom. It was a picture, Rembrandt in color, Oriental in composition;
with the darkness surrounding it stretching out into endless distance
that led to the mystic silence of the great desert; and above the
intense blue of the gorgeous night, with the stars burning through
white, transparent mists of slowly drifting clouds.
In the central tent, tall and crimson-striped, with its mighty standard
reared in front, and its opening free to the night, sat the Khalifa, the
head of the tribe, with a circle of Arabs about him. He was thrown on
his cushions, rich enough for a seraglio, while the rest squatted on the
morocco carpet that covered the bare ground, and that was strewn with
round brass Moorish trays and little cups emptied of their coffee. The
sides of the tent were hung with guns and swords, lavishly adorned; and
in the middle stood a tall Turkish candle-branch in fretted work, whose
light struggled with the white flood of the moon, and the ruddy, fitful
glare from a wood fire without.
Beneath its light, which fell full on him, flung down upon another pile
of cushions facing the open front of the tent, was a guest whom the
Khalifa delighted to honor. Only a Corporal of Chasseurs, and once a
foe, yet one with whom the Arab found the brotherhood of brave men, and
on whom he lavished, in all he could, the hospitalities and honors of
the desert.
The story of their friendship ran thus:
The tribe was now allied with France, or, at least, had accepted French
sovereignty, and pledged itself to neutrality in the hostilities still
rife; but a few years before, far in the interior and leagued with the
Kabailes, it had been one of the fiercest and most dangerous among the
enemies of France. At that time the Khalifa and the Chasseur met in many
a skirmish; hot, desperate struggles, where men fought horse to horse,
hand to hand; midnight frays, when, in the heart of lonely ravines, Arab
ambuscades fell on squadrons of French cavalry; terrible chases through
the heat of torrid suns, when the glittering ranks of the charging
troops swept down after the Bedouins' flight; fiery combats, when
the desert sand and the smoke of musketry circled in clouds above the
close-locked struggle, and the Leopard of France and the Lion of Sahara
wrestled in a death-grip.
In these, through four or five seasons of warfare, the Sheik and the
Chasseur had encountered each other, till each had grown to look for
the other's face as soon as the standards of the Bedouins flashed in
the sunshine opposite the guidons of the Imperial forces; till each
had watched and noted the other's unmatched prowess, and borne away
the wounds of the other's home-strokes, with the admiration of a bold
soldier for a bold rival's dauntlessness and skill; till each had
learned to long for an hour, hitherto always prevented by waves of
battle that had swept them too soon asunder, when they should meet in a
duello once for all, and try their strength together till one bore off
victory and one succumbed to death.
At last it came to pass that, after a lengthened term of this chivalrous
antagonism, the tribe were sorely pressed by the French troops, and
could no longer mass its fearless front to face them, but had to flee
southward to the desert, and encumbered by its flocks and its women, was
hardly driven and greatly decimated. Now among those women was one
whom the Sheik held above all earthly things except his honor in war; a
beautiful antelope-eyed creature, lithe and graceful as a palm, and the
daughter of a pure Arab race, on whom he could not endure for any other
sight than his to look, and whom he guarded in his tent as the chief
pearl of all his treasures; herds, flocks, arms, even his horses, all
save the honor of his tribe, he would have surrendered rather than
surrender Djelma. It was a passion with him; a passion that not even the
iron of his temper and the dignity of his austere calm could abate or
conceal; and the rumor of it and of the beauty of its object reached
the French camp, till an impatient curiosity was roused about her, and a
raid that should bear her off became the favorite speculation round
the picket fires at night, and in the scorching noons, when the men lay
stripped to their waist--panting like tired dogs under the hot withering
breath that stole to them, sweeping over the yellow seas of sands.
Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great Djied as
something beyond all that her sex had ever given them, and to snare her
in some unwary moment was the chief thought of Zephyr and Spahi when
they went out on a scouting or foraging party. But it was easier said
than done; the eyes of no Frank ever fell on her, and when he was most
closely driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and sheep, but,
with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, fell more and
more backward and southward; drawing the French on and on, farther and
farther across the plains, in the sickliest times of hottest drought.
Re-enforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as they were
thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was a man the less to
their numbers forever, and the lightning-like pursuit began to tell
terribly on them; their herds had fallen into their pursuers' hands, and
famine menaced them. Nevertheless, they were fierce in attack as tigers,
rapid in swoop as vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the
cavalry lost more in this fruitless, worthless work than they would have
done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz.
Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very rare, dysentery
came with the scorch and the toil of this endless charge; the chief in
command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, swore heavily as he saw many of
his best men dropping off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two
hundred napoleons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik's head
or the living beauty of Djelma.
One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few barren,
withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little thread of
brackish water oozed through the yellow earth.
It was high noon; the African sun was at its fiercest; far as the eye
could reach there was only one boundless, burning, unendurable glitter
of parching sand and cloudless sky--brazen beneath, brazen above--till
the desert and the heavens touched, and blent in one tawny, fiery
glow in the measureless distance. The men lay under canvas, dead-beat,
half-naked, without the power to do anything except to fight like
thirst-maddened dogs for a draught at the shallow stream that they and
their breathless horses soon drained dry.
Even Raoul de Chateauroy, though his frame was like an Arab's, and knit
into Arab endurance, was stretched like a great bloodhound, chained
by the sultry oppression. He was ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to
the core, and sharp and swift as steel in his rigor, but he was a fine
soldier, and never spared himself any of the hardships that his regiment
had to endure under him.
Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken; a trumpet-call rang
through the stillness; against the amber transparency of the horizon
line the outlines of half a dozen horsemen were seen looming nearer
and nearer with every moment; they were some Spahis who had been out
sweeping the country for food. The mighty frame of Chateauroy, almost
as unclothed as an athlete's, started from its slumberous, panting
rest; his eyes lightened hungrily; he muttered a fiery oath; “Mort de
Dieu!--they have the woman!”
They had the woman. She had been netted near a water-spring, to which
she had wandered too loosely guarded, and too far from the Bedouin
encampment. The delight of the haughty Sidi's eyes was borne off to the
tents of his foe, and the Colonel's face flushed darkly with an eager,
lustful warmth, as he looked upon his captive. Rumor had not outboasted
the Arab girl's beauty; it was lustrous as ever was that when, far
yonder to the eastward, under the curled palms of Nile, the sorceress of
the Caesars swept through her rose-strewn palace chambers. Only Djelma
was as innocent as the gazelle, whose grace she resembled, and loved her
lord with a great love.
Of her suffering her captor took no more heed than if she were a young
bird dying of shot-wounds; but, with one triumphant, admiring glance at
her, he wrote a message in Arabic, to send to the Khalifa, ere her loss
was discovered--a message more cruel than iron. He hesitated a second,
where he lay at the opening of his tent, whom he should send with it.
His men were almost all half-dead with the sun-blaze. His glance
chanced to light in the distance on a soldier to whom he bore no
love--causelessly, but bitterly all the same. He had him summoned, and
eyed him with a curious amusement--Chateauroy treated his squadrons
with much the same sans-facon familiarity and brutality that a chief of
filibusters uses in his.
“So! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of water to a
drummer, they say?”
The Chasseur gave the salute with a calm deference. A faint flush passed
over the sun-bronze of his forehead. He had thought the Sidney-like
sacrifice had been unobserved.
“The drummer was but a child, mon Commandant.”
“Be so good as to give us no more of those melodramatic acts!” said M.
le Marquis contemptuously. “You are too fond of trafficking in those
showy fooleries. You bribe your comrades for their favoritism too
openly. Ventre bleu! I forbid it--do you hear?”
“I hear, mon Colonel.”
The assent was perfectly tranquil and respectful. He was too good a
soldier not to render perfect obedience, and keep perfect silence, under
any goad of provocation to break both.
“Obey then!” said Chateauroy savagely. “Well, since you love heat so
well, you shall take a flag of truce and my scroll to the Sidi Ilderim.
But tell me, first, what do you think of this capture?”
“It is not my place to give opinions, M. le Colonel.”
“Pardieu! It is your place when I bid you. Speak, or I will have the
stick cut the words out of you!”
“I may speak frankly?”
“Ten thousand curses--yes!”
“Then, I think that those who make war on women are no longer fit to
fight with men.”
For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateauroy started from
the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion started from its
lair. His veins swelled like black cords; under the mighty muscle of his
bare chest his heart beat visibly in the fury of his wrath.
“By God! I have a mind to have you shot like a dog!”
The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but with a serene
deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief.
“You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel. It may be as well to do
it, or the army may think you capricious.”
Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through his clinched
teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonic laugh, which his men
dreaded more than his wrath.
“No; I will send you instead to the Khalifa. He often saves me the
trouble of killing my own curs. Take a flag of truce and this paper, and
never draw rein till you reach him, if your beast drop dead at the end.”
The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy
grace that camp life never cured him of, and went. He knew that the
man who should take the news of his treasure's loss to the Emir Ilderim
would, a thousand to one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could
frame, despite the cover of the white banner.
Chateauroy looked after him, as he and his horse passed from the French
camp in the full burning tide of noon.
“If the Arabs kill him,” he thought, “I will forgive Ilderim five
seasons of rebellion.”
The Chasseur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein across the
scorching plateau. He rode to what he knew was like enough to be death,
and death by many a torment, as though he rode to a midnight love-tryst.
His horse was of Arab breed--young, fleet, and able to endure
extraordinary pressure, both of spur and of heat. He swept on, far and
fast, through the sickly, lurid glitter of the day, over the loose sand,
that flew in puffs around him as the hoofs struck it flying right and
left. At last, ere he reached the Bedouin tents, that were still but
slender black points against the horizon, he saw the Sheik and a party
of horsemen returning from a foraging quest, and in ignorance as yet of
the abduction of Djelma. He galloped straight to them, and halted across
their line of march, with the folds of the little white flag fluttering
in the sun. The Bedouins drew bridle, and Ilderim advanced alone. He
was a magnificent man, of middle age, with the noblest type of the
eagle-eyed, aquiline desert beauty. He was a superb specimen of his
race, without the lean, withered, rapacious, vulture look which often
mars it. His white haik floated round limbs fit for a Colossus: and
under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of his bold
forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the piercing luminance
of his eyes had a grand and kingly majesty.
A glance of recognition from him on the lascar, who had so often crossed
swords with him; and he waved back the scroll with dignified courtesy.
“Read it me.”
It was read. Bitterly, blackly shameful, the few brutal words were. They
netted him as an eagle is netted in a shepherd's trap.
The moment that he gave a sign of advancing against his ravishers, the
captive's life would pay the penalty; if he merely remained in arms,
without direct attack, she would be made the Marquis' mistress, and
abandoned later to the army. The only terms on which he could have her
restored were instant submission to the Imperial rule, and
personal homage of himself and all his Djouad to the Marquis as
the representatives of France--homage in which they should confess
themselves dogs and the sons of dogs.
So ran the message of peace.
The Chasseur read on to the end calmly. Then he lifted his gaze, and
looked at the Emir--he expected fifty swords to be buried in his heart.
As he gazed, he thought no more of his own doom; he thought only of the
revelation before him, of what passion and what agony could be--things
unknown in the world where the chief portion of his life had passed. He
was a war-hardened campaigner, trained in the ruthless school of African
hostilities; who had seen every shape of mental and physical suffering,
when men were left to perish of gun-wounds, as the rush of the charge
swept on; when writhing horses died by the score of famine and of
thirst; when the firebrand was hurled among sleeping encampments, and
defenseless women were torn from their rest by the unsparing hands
of pitiless soldiers. But the torture which shook for a second the
steel-knit frame of this Arab passed all that he had dreamed as
possible; it was mute, and held in bonds of iron, for the sake of the
desert pride of a great ruler's majesty; but it spoke more than any
eloquence ever spoke yet on earth.
With a wild, shrill yell, the Bedouins whirled their naked sabers above
their heads, and rushed down on the bearer of this shame to their chief
and their tribe. The Chasseur did not seek to defend himself. He sat
motionless. He thought the vengeance just.
The Sheik raised his sword, and signed them back, as he pointed to the
white folds of the flag. Then his voice rolled out like thunder over the
stillness of the plains:
“But that you trust yourself to my honor I would rend you limb from
limb. Go back to the tiger who rules you, and tell him that--as Allah
liveth--I will fall on him, and smite him as he hath never been smitten.
Dead or living, I will have back my own. If he take her life, I will
have ten thousand lives to answer it; if he deal her dishonor, I will
light such a holy war through the length and breadth of the land that
his nation shall be driven backward like choked dogs into the sea, and
perish from the face of the earth for evermore. And this I swear by the
Law and the Prophet!”
The menace rolled out, imperious as a monarch's, thrilling through the
desert hush. The Chasseur bent his head, as the words closed. His own
teeth were tightly clinched, and his face was dark.
“Emir, listen to one word,” he said briefly. “Shame has been done to
me as to you. Had I been told what words I bore, they had never been
brought by my hand. You know me. You have had the marks of my steel, as
I have had the marks of yours. Trust me in this, Sidi. I pledge you
my honor that, before the sun sets, she shall be given back to you
unharmed, or I will return here myself, and your tribe shall slay me
in what fashion they will. So alone can she be saved uninjured. Answer,
will you have faith in me?”
The desert chief looked at him long; sitting motionless as a statue on
his stallion, with the fierce gleam of his eyes fixed on the eyes of
the man who so long had been his foe in contests whose chivalry equaled
their daring. The Chasseur never wavered once under the set, piercing,
ruthless gaze.
Then the Emir pointed to the sun, that was not at its zenith:
“You are a great warrior: such men do not lie. Go, and if she be borne
to me before the sun is half-way sunk toward the west, all the branches
of the tribes of Ilderim shall be as your brethren, and bend as steel
to your bidding. If not--as God is mighty--not one man in all your host
shall live to tell the tale!”
The Chasseur bowed his head to his horse's mane; then, without a word,
wheeled round, and sped back across the plain.
When he reached his own cavalry camp, he went straightway to his chief.
What passed between them none ever knew. The interview was brief; it
was possibly as stormy. Pregnant and decisive it assuredly was; and
the squadrons of Africa marveled that the man who dared beard Raoul de
Chateauroy in his lair came forth with his life. Whatever the spell he
used, the result was a marvel.
At the very moment that the sun touched the lower half of the western
heavens, the Sheik Ilderim, where he sat in his saddle, with all his
tribe stretching behind him, full-armed, to sweep down like falcons on
the spoilers, if the hour passed with the pledge unredeemed, saw the
form of the Chasseur reappear between his sight and the glare of the
skies; nor did he ride alone. That night the Pearl of the Desert lay
once more in the mighty, sinuous arms of the great Emir.
But, with the dawn, his vengeance fell in terrible fashion, on the
sleeping camp of the Franks; and from that hour dated the passionate,
savage, unconcealed hate of Raoul de Chateauroy for the most
daring soldier of all his fiery Horse, known in his troop as
“Bel-a-faire-peur.”
It was in the tent of Ilderim now that he reclined, looking outward at
the night where flames were leaping ruddily under a large caldron, and
far beyond was the dark immensity of the star-studded sky; the light of
the moon strayed in and fell on the chestnut waves of his beard, out of
which the long amber stem of an Arab pipe glittered like a golden line,
and on the skin--fair, despite a warm hue of bronze--and the long,
slumberous softness of the hazel eyes, were in so marked a contrast of
race with the eagle outlines of the Bedouins around.
From the hour of the restoration of his treasure the Sheik had been true
to his oath; his tribe in all its branches had held the French lascar in
closest brotherhood; wherever they were he was honored and welcomed; was
he in war, their swords were drawn for him; was he in need, their houses
of hair were spread for him; had he want of flight, the swiftest and
most precious of their horses was at his service; had he thirst,
they would have died themselves, wringing out the last drop from the
water-skin for him. Through him their alliance, or more justly to speak,
their neutrality, was secured to France, and the Bedouin Chief loved him
with a great, silent, noble love that was fast rooted in the granite
of his nature. Between them there was a brotherhood that beat down the
antagonism of race, and was stronger than the instinctive hate of the
oppressed for all who came under the abhorred standard of the usurpers.
He liked the Arabs, and they liked him; a grave courtesy, a preference
for the fewest words and least demonstration possible, a marked opinion
that silence was golden, and that speech was at best only silver-washed
metal, an instinctive dread of all discovery of emotion, and a limitless
power of resisting and suppressing suffering, were qualities the nomads
of the desert and the lion of the Chasseurs d'Afrique had in common; as
they had in unison a wild passion for war, a dauntless zest in danger,
and a love for the hottest heat of fiercest battle.
Silence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, screened by a
heavy curtain of goat's hair, the beautiful young Djelma played with
her only son, a child of three or four summers; the Sheik lay mute, the
Djouad and Marabouts around never spoke in his presence unless their
lord bade them, and the Chasseur was stretched motionless, his elbow
resting on a cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking outward at
the restless, changing movement of the firelit, starlit camp.
After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay, elastic good
humor of his French comrades, the silence and the calm of the Emir's
“house of hair” were welcome to him. He never spoke much himself; of
a truth, his gentle, immutable laconism was the only charge that his
comrades ever brought against him. That a man could be so brief in
words, while yet so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all nature to
the vivacious Frenchmen; that unchanging stillness and serenity in one
who was such a reckless, resistless croc-mitaine, swift as fire in the
field, was an enigma that the Cavalry and the Demi-cavalry of Algeria
never solved. His corps would have gone after him to the devil, as
Claude de Chanrellon had averred; but they would sometimes wax a little
impatient that he would never grow communicative or thread many phrases
together, even over the best wine which ever warmed the hearts of its
drinkers or loosened all rein from their lips.
“I wish I had come straight to you, Sidi, when I first set foot in
Africa,” he said at last, while the fragrant smoke uncurled from under
the droop of his long, pendent mustaches.
“Truly it had been well,” answered the Khalifa, who would have given the
best stallions in his stud to have had this Frank with him in warfare,
and in peace. “There is no life like our life.”
“Faith! I think not!” murmured the Chasseur, rather to himself than the
Bedouin. “The desert keeps you and your horse, and you can let all the
rest of the world 'slide.'”
“But we are murderers and pillagers, say your nations,” resumed the
Emir, with the shadow of a sardonic smile flickering an instant over the
sternness and composure of his features. “To rifle a caravan is a crime,
though to steal a continent is glory.”
Bel-a-faire-peur laughed slightly.
“Do not tempt me to rebel against my adopted flag.”
The Sheik looked at him in silence; the French soldiers had spent
twelve years in the ceaseless exertions of an amused inquisitiveness
to discover the antecedents of their volunteer; the Arabs, with their
loftier instincts of courtesy, had never hinted to him a question of
whence or why he had come upon African soil.
“I never thought at all in those days; else, had I thought twice, I
should not have gone to your enemies,” he answered, as he lazily watched
the Bedouins without squat on their heels round the huge brass bowls
of couscoussou, which they kneaded into round lumps and pitched between
their open, bearded lips in their customary form of supper. “Not but
what our Roumis are brave fellows enough; better comrades no man could
want.”
The Khalifa took the long pipe from his mouth and spoke; his slow,
sonorous accents falling melodiously on the silence in the lingua sapir
of the Franco-Arab tongue.
“Your comrades are gallant men; they are great warriors, and fearless
foes; against such my voice is never lifted, however my sword may
cross with them. But the locust-swarms that devour the land are the
money-eaters, the petty despots, the bribe-takers, the men who wring
gold out of infamy, who traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official
seals, who curse Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with
the hell-spawn of civilization. It is the 'Bureaucracy,' as your tongue
phrases it, that is the spoiler and the oppressor of the soil. But--we
endure only for a while. A little, and the shame of the invader's tread
will be washed out in blood. Allah is great; we can wait.”
And with Moslem patience that the fiery gloom of his burning eyes
belied, the Djied stretched himself once more into immovable and silent
rest.
The Chasseur answered nothing; his sympathies were heartfelt with the
Arabs, his allegiance and his esprit de corps were with the service
in which he was enrolled. He could not defend French usurpation; but
neither could he condemn the Flag that had now become his Flag, and
in which he had grown to feel much of national honor, to take much of
national pride.
“They will never really win again, I am afraid,” he thought, as his eyes
followed the wraith-like flash of the white burnous, as the Bedouins
glided to and fro in the chiar-oscuro of the encampment; now in the
flicker of the flames, now in the silvered luster of the moon. “It is
the conflict of the races, as the cant runs, and their day is done.
It is a bolder, freer, simpler type than anything we get in the world
yonder. Shall we ever drift back to it in the future, I wonder?”
The speculation did not stay with him long; Semitic, Latin, or Teuton
race was very much the same to him, and intellectual subtleties had not
much attraction at any time for the most brilliant soldier in the French
cavalry; he preferred the ring of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun's
play along the line of steel as his regiment formed in line on the eve
of a life-and-death struggle, the wild, breathless sweep of a midnight
gallop over the brown, swelling plateau under the light of the stars,
or,--in some brief interval of indolence and razzia-won wealth,--the
gleam of fair eyes and the flush of sparkling sherbet when some
passionate, darkling glance beamed on him from some Arab mistress whose
scarlet lips murmured to him through the drowsy hush of an Algerine
night the sense, if not the song of Pelagia,
“Life is so short at best!
Take while thou canst thy rest,
Sleeping by me!”
His thoughts drifted back over many varied scenes and changing memories
of his service in Algiers, as he lay there at the entrance of the
Sheik's tent, with the night of looming shadow and reddened firelight
and picturesque movement before him. Hours of reckless, headlong
delight, when men grew drunk with bloodshed as with wine; hours of
horrible, unsuccored suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his
throat and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh,
while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal; hours
of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was given to slay and
yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent
rocks, the doomed were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in
the warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the
sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to
aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative left, as the
challenging eyes of “Zephir” or “Chasse-Marais” flashed death across the
barriere, in a combat where only one might live, though the root of the
quarrel had been nothing more than a toss too much of brandy, a puff of
tobacco smoke construed into insult, or a fille de joie's maliciously
cast fire-brand of taunt or laugh. Hours of severe discipline, of
relentless routine, of bitter deprivation, of campaigns hard as steel
in the endurance they needed, in the miseries they entailed; of military
subjection, stern and unbending, a yoke of iron that a personal and
pitiless tyranny weighted with persecution that was scarce else than
hatred; of an implicit obedience that required every instinct of
liberty, every habit of early life, every impulse of pride and manhood
and freedom to be choked down like crimes, and buried as though they had
never been. Hours again that repaid these in full, when the long line
of Horse swept out to the attack, with the sun on the points of their
weapons; when the wheeling clouds of Arab riders poured like the clouds
of the simoon on a thinned, devoted troop that rallied and fought as
hawks fight herons, and saved the day as the sky was flushed with that
day's decline; when some soft-eyed captive, with limbs of free mountain
grace, and the warm veins flushing under the clear olive of her cheeks,
was first wild as a young fettered falcon, and then, like the falcon,
quickly learned to tremble at a touch, and grow tame under a caress, and
love nothing so well as the hand that had captured her. Hours of all the
chanceful fortunes of a soldier's life, in hill-wars and desert raids,
passed in memory through his thoughts now where he was stretched;
looking dreamily through the film of his smoke at the city of tents, and
the reclining forms of camels, and the tall, white slowly moving shapes
of the lawless marauders of the sand plains.
“Is my life worth much more under the French Flag than it was under the
English?” thought the Chasseur, with a certain, careless, indifferent
irony on himself, natural to him. “There I killed time--here I kill men.
Which is the better pursuit, I wonder. The world would rather economize
the first commodity than the last, I believe. Perhaps it don't make an
overgood use of either.”
The night was someway spent when the talk of wild-pigeon-blue mares and
sorrel stallions closed between the Djied and his guest; and the French
soldier, who had been sent hither from the Bureau with another of his
comrades, took his way through the now still camp where the cattle were
sleeping, and the fires were burning out, and the banner-folds hung
motionless in the luster of the stars, to the black-and-white tent
prepared for him. A spacious one, close to the chief's, and given such
luxury in the shape of ornamented weapons, thick carpets, and soft
cushions, as the tribe's resources could bring together.
As he opened the folds and entered, his fellow-soldier, who was lying on
his back, with his heels much higher than his head, and a short pipe in
his teeth, tumbled himself up; with a rapid somersault, and stood bolt
upright, giving the salute; a short, sturdy little man, with a skin
burnt like a coffee-berry, that was in odd contrast with his light,
dancing blue eyes, and his close, matted curls of yellow hair.
“Beg pardon, sir! I was half asleep!”
The Chasseur laughed a little.
“Don't talk English; somebody will hear you one day.”
“What's the odds if they do, sir?” responded the other. “It relieves
one's feelings a little. All of 'em know I'm English, but never a one
of 'em know what you are. The name you was enrolled by won't really tell
'em nothing. They guess it ain't yours. That cute little chap, Tata, he
says to me yesterday, 'you're always a-treating of your galonne like
as if he was a prince.' 'Damme!' says I, 'I'd like to see the prince as
would hold a candle to him.' 'You're right there,' says the little
'un. 'There ain't his equal for taking off a beggar's head with a back
sweep.'”
The Corporal laughed a little again, as he tossed himself down on the
carpet.
“Well, it's something to have one virtue! But have a care what those
chatter-boxes get out of you.”
“Lord, sir! Ain't I been a-taking care these ten years? It comes quite
natural now. I couldn't keep my tongue still; that wouldn't be in
anyways possible. So I've let it run on oiled wheels on a thousand rum
tracks and doublings. I've told 'em such a lot of amazing stories about
where we come from, that they've got half a million different styles to
choose out of. Some thinks as how you're a Polish nob, what got into hot
water with the Russians; some as how you're a Italian prince, what
was cleaned out like Parma and them was; some as how you're a Austrian
Archduke that have cut your country because you was in love with the
Empress, and had a duel about her that scandalized the whole empire;
some as how you're a exiled Spanish grandee a-come to learn tactics and
that like, that you may go back, and pitch O'Donnell into the middle of
next week, whenever you see a chance to cut in and try conclusions with
him. Bless you, sir! you may let me alone for bamboozling of anybody.”
The Corporal laughed again, as he began to unharness himself. There was
in him a certain mingling of insouciance and melancholy, each of which
alternately predominated; the former his by nature, the latter born of
circumstances.
“If you can outwit our friends the Zephyrs you have reached a height of
diplomacy indeed! I would not engage to do it myself. Take my word for
it, ingenuity is always dangerous--silence is always safe.”
“That may be, sir,” responded the Chasseur, in the sturdy English with
which his bright blue eyes danced a fitting nationality. “No doubt it's
uncommon good for them as can bring their minds to it--just like water
instead o' wine--but it's very trying, like the teetotalism. You might
as well tell a Newfoundland not to love a splash as me not to love a
chatter. I'd cut my tongue out sooner than say never a word that you
don't wish--but say something I must, or die for it.”
With which the speaker, known to Algerian fame by the sobriquet of
“Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,” from the hair-breadth escapes and reckless
razzias from which he had come out without a scratch, dropped on his
knees and began to take off the trappings of his fellow-soldier, with as
reverential a service as though he were a lord of the bedchamber serving
a Louis Quatorze. The other motioned him gently away.
“No, no! I have told you a thousand times we are comrades and equals
now.”
“And I've told you a thousand times, sir, that we aren't, and never will
be, and don't oughtn't to be,” replied the soldier doggedly, drawing
off the spurred and dust-covered boots. “A gentleman's a gentleman, let
alone what straits he fall into.”
“But ceases to be one as soon as he takes a service he cannot
requite, or claims a superiority he does not possess. We have been
fellow-soldiers for twelve years--”
“So we have, sir; but we are what we always was, and always will be--one
a gentleman, the other a scamp. If you think so be as I've done a good
thing, side by side with you, now and then in the fighting, give me my
own way and let me wait on you when I can. I can't do much on it when
those other fellow's eyes is on us; but here I can and I will--begging
your pardon--so there's an end of it. One may speak plain in this place
with nothing but them Arabs about; and all the army know well enough,
sir, that if it weren't for that black devil, Chateauroy, you'd have had
your officer's commission, and your troop too, long before now--”
“Oh, no! There are scores of men in the ranks merit promotion better
far than I do. And--leave the Colonel's name alone. He is our chief,
whatever else he be.”
The words were calm and careless, but they carried a weight with them
that was not to be disputed. “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort” hung his head
a little and went on unharnessing his Corporal in silence, contenting
himself with muttering in his throat that it was true for all that, and
the whole regiment knew it.
“You are happy enough in Algeria?” asked the one he served, as he
stretched himself on the skins and carpets, and drank down a sherbet
that his self-attached attendant had made with a skill learned from a
pretty cantiniere, who had given him the lesson in return for a slashing
blow with which he had struck down two “Riz-pain-sels,” who, as the best
paid men in the army, had tried to cheat her in the price of her Cognac.
“I, sir? Never was so happy in my life, sir. I'd be discontented indeed
if I wasn't. Always some spicy bit of fighting. If there aren't a
fantasia, as they call it, in the field, there's always somebody to pot
in a small way; and, if you're lying by in barracks, there's always a
scrimmage hot as pepper to be got up with fellows that love the row just
as well as you do. It's life, that's where it is; it ain't rusting.”
“Then you prefer the French service?”
“Right and away, sir. You see this is how it is,” and the redoubtable,
yellow-haired “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort” paused in the vigorous cleansing
and brushing he was bestowing on his Corporal's uniform and stood at
ease in his shirt and trousers; with his eloquence no way impeded by the
brule-gueule that was always between his teeth. “Over there in England,
you know, sir, pipe-clay is the deuce-and-all; you're always got to have
the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or it's all up with you;
you're that tormented about little things that you get riled and kick
the traces before the great 'uns come to try you. There's a lot of lads
would be game as game could be in battle--aye, and good lads to boot,
doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to anything like
war--that are clean drove out of the service in time o' peace,
along with all them petty persecutions that worry a man's skin like
mosquito-bites. Now here they know that, and Lord! what soldiers they
do make through knowing of it! It's tight enough and stern enough in
big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all
through the campaigning; but that don't grate on a fellow; if he's worth
his salt he's sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a
fight, and that he's to go to hell at double-quick-march, and mute as a
mouse, if his officers see fit to send him. There ain't better stuff to
make soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless 'em! But they're
badgered, they're horribly badgered; and that's why the service don't
take over there, let alone the way the country grudge 'em every bit of
pay. In England you go in the ranks--well, they all just tell you you're
a blackguard, and there's the lash, and you'd better behave yourself or
you'll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you're a bad lot or
you wouldn't be there, and in course you're riled and go to the bad
according, seeing that it's what's expected of you. Here, contrariwise,
you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests
with yourself whether you won't be a fine fellow or not; and just along
of feeling that you're pricked to show the best metal you're made on,
and not to let nobody else beat you out of the race, like. Ah! it makes
a wonderful difference to a fellow--a wonderful difference--whether the
service he's come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothing
but a scamp, or as a rascal that's maybe got in him, all rascal though
he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. And that's just the difference,
sir, that France has found out, and England hasn't--God bless her, all
the same!”
With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had
won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to
refill his Corporal's pipe.
“An army's just a machine, sir, in course,” he concluded, as he rammed
in the Turkish tobacco. “But then it's a live machine, for all that;
and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel's
body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature
goes wrong--there's the mischief.”
Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung
full-length on the skins.
“I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when--when I
was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what
you say. Yet--fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible
blackguards!”
“In course they are, sir; they wouldn't be such larky company unless
they was. But what I say is that they're scamps who're told they may be
great men, if they like; not scamps who're told that, because they've
once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the
difference in life.”
“Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left,
or--left out!”
The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite
sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen
pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned
face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.
“Won't there never be no hope, sir?” he whispered, while his voice
trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.
The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh
with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as
those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.
“Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and
die! A splendid destiny.”
“No, sir,” said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of
his voice. “You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----”
He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.
The other moved with a certain impatience.
“How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a
soldier of France?--forget as I have forgotten it!”
The audacious, irrepressible “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,” whom nothing
could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a
chidden spaniel.
“I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how
his lordship's death--”
“No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death
that some day an Arbico's lunge will give me; and that is a long time
coming.”
“Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Cecil, don't talk like this!”
The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if
a bullet had struck him.
“Never say that again!”
Rake, Algerian-christened “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,” stammered a
contrite apology.
“I never have done, sir--not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me
like--you talking of wanting death in that way----”
“Oh, I don't want death!” laughed the other, with a low, indifferent
laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while. “I
am of our friends the Spahis' opinion--that life is very pleasant with a
handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one's saddle. Unhappily
harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not
better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household--specially
when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals at the core, or
we should never find such an infinite zest in the death grapple.
Good-night!”
He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the skins that
made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the pipe still in his mouth, and
its amber bowl resting on the carpet which the friendship and honor of
Sidi-Ilderim had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair
was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the
din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the hills
around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab of rock, or with
the knowledge that at every instant the alarm might be given, the drums
roll out over the night, and the enemy be down like lightning on the
bivouac. But now a name--long unspoken to him--had recalled years he
had buried far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi
d'ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among its wild
and brilliant soldiers.
Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light in the
single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and died away, the
Chasseur d'Afrique lay wakeful; looking outward through the folds of the
tent at the dark and silent camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory
drift backward to a time that had grown to be to him as a dream--a time
when another world than the world of Africa had known him as Bertie
Cecil.