Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

THE BIRD CAGE

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.

II

One evening she came to meet him late for the rendezvous, and creeping through the darkness like a shadow.

It was just before the new moon, and the stars had the sky all to themselves, a sky of black pansy-purple, luminous, leaping with life and light and fire.

Up here, where they met, the murmur of the city came to them from below; the faint music of a band, louder or lower as the wind took it or left it, the murmur of the streets, shrill boy voices calling the last edition of the Echo d'Oran.

She had brought bad news.

Her father had discovered everything. It had all come about through the little birds. Someone must have seen her receiving them, and then, they were not a present that one could keep hidden for long.

She kept them in her room, but their little soft voices chatting together must have reached the old man. Sounds like that were just the sounds to reach a person like Abraham Misas. He would have heard through walls of triple brass and by instinct. Then when she was out he would have poked his head into her room and seen the cage and its contents. He would then have cast about to find the giver.

Or it may have been that someone just came into the shop and said to him, "I have seen your daughter with a soldier, one of the légionnaires."

However that might be, the fact remained. Abraham Misas had a brother, a metal worker in Algiers, and on the day after the morrow he was going to Algiers and taking Manuella with him. She was to live with the brother and help him in his shop.

Abraham had said not one word to his daughter of the reason for the change, he had made no reproach. That was the sort of man he was, secretive, silent, always working underground to obtain his ends and always obtaining them.

To a callous outsider this decision of the old man, taking all the facts into consideration, was a piece of profound common sense. For even had Raboustel been an eligible party he was tied to the Legion for nearly five years more.

Had Raboustel been worth a million of money he could not have escaped the Legion's clutches. No man once seized by that iron grip can ever escape, be he prince or millionaire or pauper, till the expiration of his term of service sets him free.

So to an outsider the decision of the old Jew would have seemed reasonable enough. To the two lovers it was equivalent to a sentence of death.

Raboustel, confused by the blow and able to see nothing clearly, on parting with the girl that night made her promise to meet him at the same place on the morrow and at the same time.

"I will think it over," said he, "but one thing you may be sure, you will not go. We will find some means of stopping it."

"We can always die," said Manuella.

He went tearing back to barracks and found Jacques, who had just returned. He told him the whole story outside the canteen, and Jacques gave him very cold comfort.

"What can you do?" said he. "The old man takes her off to Algiers, that is to say to the moon as far as you are concerned. You can't follow them, for to do so would be to desert, and you would be caught at the first station out from Sidi. Even if you could follow them, what then? You would find yourself in Algiers with no money. You cannot carry on War or Love without money. That is a fact. You cannot run away with her. Where could you run to? Nom du bon Dieu, listen to me. It is I, Jacques, that am talking, and I know what I am talking about. A man, if he is very quick-witted, if he has plenty of money, if he can talk two languages, and if he is an expert at disguise, may succeed in escaping as far as Oran. If he is under special convoy by order of good luck he may reach Marseilles, and if he escapes the military police at Marseilles, who have eyes back and front and at the ends of their fingers, he may get out of France. Now, mark you, it's not a question of escaping from Sidi-bel-Abbès or Algeria, it is a question of escaping from France.

"You, without money, without languages, without the art of disguise and with a girl in tow—what can you do? See you, if you get even to Marseilles it would not help, for there is a telegraph cable under the sea, and telegrams go quicker than mail boats, and once the girl is missed you'd have all the Jews in Algeria shouting that a Christian had run off with Rebecca, and all the Jews in Marseilles would meet you at the landing-stage. That is another point. You are not of the same faith. You are a Christian."

"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Raboustel, "what has Faith to do with love?"

"You would soon know if you went after a Mohammedan girl and her people caught you," replied Jacques. "No, you are outflanked everywhere, you can do nothing."

"One can always die," said Raboustel, echoing Manuella.

"This is a fool's talk," replied the other; "any fool can die. Come, I will stand you a bottle. There's more sense in a bottle than in many a man's skull. Come, I'll pay."

But Raboustel was not in the humour for drink, and said so and departed on his way.

He went to bed, but he did not sleep that night. He lay awake, listening to the snoring of the others, and their muttered conversation sometimes as they talked aloud in their sleep.

Légionnaires sleep soundly, but they sometimes have dreams that even the soundest sleep cannot smother. Dreams of France, of England, of the wastes of Russia, of days departed and faces never to be seen again.

Raboustel, lying on his back, watched the night pass and the stars moving across the blue-black luminous sky disclosed by the window space opposite to him.

Then something brilliant came slowly sailing into view, it was the crescent of the new moon.

The new moon is the most lovely of new-born things, especially when seen in the night sky of Algeria. Raboustel watched it pass, scarcely heeding it. He was thinking out a plan.

Next day at six o'clock he departed as usual with the others to the town.

Jacques, who had kept his eye on him all day, walked with him as far as the town and then left him. Jacques, who had a good deal of wisdom of his own, did not refer to the subject of the girl. He judged that if Raboustel had made up his mind to run away with her, nothing would stop him from making the attempt, and he considered that if Raboustel had given up the idea it would be an unfriendly thing to make him talk of it. Jacques was a good deal of a gentleman, though he had knifed several men in his time.

When he returned to barracks that night he looked about for his friend. He had not yet come back. Then Jacques, instead of going to the canteen, took his place near the sentry at the barrack gate and watched the late arrivals coming in. The men came in twos and threes, singing, skylarking, some silent and moody, the last of them flushed with running, but none of them drunk. Drunkenness is not common in the Legion, owing to the scarcity of money and the drastic nature of the punishment.

Then the barrack gates were shut and the roll was called. Raboustel did not answer to his name.

He had deserted.

Of course it might be that he would yet turn up. It sometimes happens that a légionnaire, for one cause or another, outstays his leave; but Jacques did not consider this chance at all. He made up his mind that the man had deserted, and he was right.

Next day brought confirmation.

A report came from the Arab police that a légionnaire and a girl mounted on a presumably stolen horse had been met with by a police patrol on the southern road.

The girl was mounted behind the légionnaire. The patrol, consisting of two officers, allowed them to pass; they were riding at full speed and the officers never thought for a moment that it was the case of a légionnaire deserting. Légionnaires making off are always on foot, they avoid the high roads and they don't carry girls with them.

Then, recovering from their surprise, the police officers consulted together and determined to follow, but the légionnaire had got a long start and a very good horse. They followed for two miles or so without gaining on the suspects, their horses being poor and already tired by a long day's work. They dropped the chase, returned to Sidi-bel-Abbès and telegraphed to the nearest southern police post.

No news of the supposed fugitives had been received. They must have left the road and taken to the plain.

Then Abraham Misas appeared on the scene. He turned up at the barracks, interviewed the colonel and literally wailed over his lost daughter. It was a bad quarter of an hour for Colonel Tirard, and he swore terrible oaths as to what he would do with that scamp of a Raboustel when he was brought back. He got rid of the old man at last, and day followed day, but no news came, and week followed week without a breath or word from that mysterious south into which the lovers had vanished like figures in a dream.

The affair caused a great stir in Sidi-bel-Abbès, where it is remembered yet. The escape of a soldier would not give the good people of the town a moment's thought, but the escape of a soldier taking away with him a girl of the town, a daughter of an honest citizen, made them furious.

This delighted the Legion, who hate the townsfolk for various and substantial reasons. Raboustel became a hero. He had undoubtedly made his way across the frontier into Morocco. The thing had been done once or twice before by deserters.

After a month had passed this supposition became an assured fact and Raboustel began to suffer the fate of the heroes, kings and captains who had vanished. People began to forget him.

"And you never saw him again?" I said.

"There you are wrong, Monsieur," replied Jacques. "I saw them both. It was this way. Three months or so after he had made his escape, taking the girl with him, an Arab tribe down south began to light matches. That sort of thing spreads and must be put out quickly, or you would soon have the whole of the south on fire, so, one night we got our orders to march. The whole regiment went.

"It was really not much of an affair and we soon dealt with it; what made us swear was not the fighting, for there was scarcely enough fighting to go round, but the distance. The place was very far south, in the region of the sand dunes.

"Does Monsieur know the desert? Many people when they talk of the desert think of sand and nothing but sand, whereas the desert is rock and nothing but rock, till, of course, you reach the sandy patches.

"Well, it was down there, the main fighting was over and we were sending out patrol parties to clean up and hunt for fugitives. I was with one of these parties. One day, about ten kilometres from camp, we sighted a palm tree, and knowing there was water there, we made for it, thinking also to find fugitives.

"It was a dead tree, Monsieur; it had been dead, maybe, six months, and the well source that had fed it was dried up, but we found fugitives.

"Under the withered tree, Monsieur, lay two skeletons, the bones all mixed together, and some rags of cloth; the birds had torn the clothing to get at the bodies that now were skeletons.

"There were also some buttons from a légionnaire's uniform, his belt and buckle, and a woman's comb. I said at once: 'There's Raboustel and his girl, look,' I said; 'it is a légionnaire's bones, and the little bones are those of a girl.'

"Then, Monsieur, I picked up something else that made me sure. It was a little cage. I knew it, for I had made it myself, and in the cage there were also two skeletons. The girl had taken the thing with her. Women do strange things. One might have thought that she had enough to bother about, without taking that. It was a strong cage, made of iron wire, else the vultures would have broken it to pieces. That is the story of Raboustel, Monsieur, and his girl."

He rolled a cigarette, and as he was lighting it there came along the person for whom he was waiting. An Arab boy, a bird trapper, carrying a cage in which were two little birds newly caught. He gave them to Jacques, who gave him in return some small coins.

"Do you make much at this business?" I asked.

"No, Monsieur," he replied. "A légionnaire never has the chance of making much money over anything. Just a few francs, and the man who buys them will sell them for ten—he is not in the Legion."

I gave him ten francs for the birds, and opening the cage let them free, much to his amazement; then we stood watching them as they fluttered in the air, confused, dazzled by freedom, and at last striking south away across the vineyards like two spirits freed from the prison of a sordid and soul-ruining world.