Chapter 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."