Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

THE LITTLE PRINCE

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."

II

Jacques looked at Karasloff in surprise. He had noticed lately that Karasloff was growing thinner.

"Killing you!" said Jacques. "What ails you?"

The Slav smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

"I think it is this way with men," said he, "they do not bear transplanting. The real soil in which the mind grows is the social condition to which it is accustomed. Minds die when torn up by the roots from everything to which they have been used to. Then there are some men whose bodies are affected by their minds, and to whom mental decay means bodily decay—that is how it is."

All this was Greek to Jacques.

"You will get all right," said he; "a turn with the Arabs will put new life in you, and they say we are likely to be sent down south after them any day."

But the expedition against the Arabs did not come off, and Karasloff did not get all right; on the contrary the mysterious malady that had seized him developed with alarming rapidity, it was acute phthisis; he was taken into hospital, and one day Jacques, receiving an urgent message, went there to find him dying.

Karasloff had sent for him to speak to him about Ivan. They had a long talk, and after it Jacques returned to barracks looking troubled and perplexed.

Karasloff died the next day and was buried on the day following in the cemetery of the légionnaires with military honours.

It was decided between Jacques and El Kobir to say nothing to Ivan about the death of his father.

"Life has trouble enough," said the old man. "He would gain nothing by knowing—only grief; we will tell him that his father has gone on a journey. I will keep him in my house and he will be to me as my own child, and you can come to see him of an evening as usual."

Jacques, nothing loth, agreed, and things went on just as before with the exception of Karasloff's absence from the evening meetings at the shop of El Kobir.

The effect of the child on Jacques had been profound. This scamp, who had started in life as an Apache and who had gone through the fire of the Legion, so that one might have fancied his soul scorched for ever, developed under the influence of the child quite unsuspected qualities and possibilities.

The miraculous and sometimes appalling influence of mind upon mind, and personality upon personality, was never more in evidence than in the case of Ivan and Jacques.

You might have preached to Jacques; you might have beaten him, tortured him, shown him visions or showered wisdom upon him without producing any permanent effect upon his cynical bandit mind, not an evil mind, but a mind set in narrow ways, with narrow and oblique outlooks upon life.

Ivan touched the humanity in the man because Ivan was absolutely human. I think children are the only real human beings, other people are either men or women. However that may be, in the presence of Ivan Jacques became something like Ivan, a very simple individual, not above playing with wooden soldiers or converting himself into a horse for the child to ride upon.

He would take him out sometimes on a Sunday—Sunday is a whole holiday in the Legion—for walks on the ramparts, and the fact becoming known among his companions, he told the whole story right out about Karasloff, and as a result the regiment took an interest in the child.

Ivan made his appearance in the barrack-yard sometimes hand in hand with his friend. It was wonderland to him. The drums and bugles, the légionnaires saluting their officers, the sentinels with fixed bayonets, the glare, the dust, the military atmosphere, all these things were for him splendid beyond words, fascinating beyond a grown-up person's idea of fascination. To be a légionnaire, what gifts could fortune hold out to mortal greater than that?

Then these august beings joked with him and sometimes patted him on the head, pulled out their bayonets from their scabbards and pretended to stab him, taught him how to salute and nicknamed him the Corporal.

Then, one day, surrounded with jesting légionnaires, he and Beaujon, the regimental tailor, had an interview, and Beaujon measured him as if for fun, took the girth of his chest and the length of his legs and arms, and then—a week later—Jacques appeared one evening at the shop of El Kobir with a bundle. It was a little uniform for Ivan to be worn on festive occasions, a complete corporal's uniform, képi and all.

Jacques for some time past had been out of sorts, with the manner of a man who has something weighing upon his mind.

To-night he seemed more gloomy than ever, and when Ivan, after showing himself in his new uniform, went off to have it changed, Jacques turned to El Kobir.

"All the same," said he, "the child must go. The sight of him in that turn-out has settled the business for me. Only yesterday, when Corporal Kempfer asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he said, 'A légionnaire.'"

Jacques laughed bitterly, as though reviewing mentally the légion of lost men to which he belonged, the regiment so glorious in the eyes of the child. Ah! if Ivan could have seen his regiment of heroes with the eyes of Jacques! and yet, who can say which were the clearer eyes, the eyes of the child or the eyes of the man?

El Kobir put down his cigarette on the little ash-tray by his elbow, and turned from the rug he was engaged in doctoring.

"Why must the child go?" said he.

Jacques grumbled in his throat for a moment, then he burst out, "I don't know what ails me or why I should make fantasie over the business. Do I want to get rid of the child? I've got fond of that child. He's got sense in his head, more sense than a battalion of numskull légionnaires. Now, when I don't want to do a thing, nobody can make me do it. I don't speak of regimental orders, but in ordinary things I say that when I don't want to do a thing nobody can make me do it. I don't want to get rid of the child; why then do I say he must go? I cannot tell you that.

"Now, listen! when Karasloff was dying, he said to me, 'I leave you Ivan to send back to my people. He will take his own place among them when I am dead. They do not know where he is. I took him away because he was the only thing I cared for, you must return him to my people when I am dead.' Karasloff has been dead five months," finished Jacques.

El Kobir was silent for a moment, then he spoke:

"But how are you to know where to send him?"

"Oh, mon Dieu, how? Karasloff gave me the address of his people just before he died, and I promised to write to them."

"That was five months ago," said El Kobir.

"Yes, five months ago. I did not want to send the child off, and so I have played false with Karasloff for five months."

"Not so," replied El Kobir, "you only delayed in performing a promise, you did not break it."

"Oh, as for that," said Jacques, "I said to myself when he was dead that I would keep the child, promise or no promise; then, lately it came to me that a child has no say, he just has to take his marching orders, and I fell to wondering if I was marching him into a ditch; just now when he came in wearing that rig-out, it was as if the uniform hit me in the face. No, he has to go back to his own people."

Jacques knew the word "Duty" only as a military term. He could not tell in the least what power it was that compelled him to do this thing he did not want to do. The child had become a companion, an interest, almost a necessity of life, and had you told him that it was the good influence of the child upon him that was now driving the child away from him, he would not have understood you.

No. The uniform had hit him in the face, that was enough for him.

El Kobir said nothing more. Like Jacques, he did not want to part with the child, yet he was a just man. Had he been an unjust man or a hard-hearted man, he would not have wanted to keep the child. Our good qualities hit us very hard sometimes.

"And who are the child's people?" asked El Kobir, as Jacques, rose to go.

The latter took a paper from his pocket and handed it to his questioner, who scanned it and handed it back without a word.

It was almost a world-known name that he had read, and it remained before his eyes as he sat alone working on the rug.

He knew quite well that Jacques was about to write, or get his commanding officer to write to the child's people, yet he had said nothing to urge or deter him from that course.

He was an old man, and the child had grown round his heart. However, Fate is Fate. If the thing had to be, it had to be. All the same, a half welcome idea clung to his mind that Jacques might prove weak enough to let the matter stand as it was for the present. A year or two, what did it matter. And suppose the child were taken off to that splendid palace and that glorious future awaiting him, might that prove the happiest fate for him?

El Kobir had a profound knowledge of the evil of wealth and the weariness of greatness, and he looked on Western civilization with the cynical eyes of an Eastern.

Railway trains, telegraph lines, steamships, the magic that makes a voice reach London from Paris, all these things did not impress him at all; viewed against the background of the stately East they seemed like the vulgar jewellery of a nouveau riche. He knew quite well that the glitter surrounding a great man in Europe was only glitter, and that as far as happiness was concerned, an Arab boy playing in the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès had, perhaps, a better chance of securing happiness than a princeling in a palace of the West.

Still, the child was a European—and Fate was Fate.

Days passed and nothing happened. Jacques came of an evening as usual, but not a word did he say on the all important topic, nor did the old man speak of it.

He watched Jacques narrowly, but that personage showed nothing of his mind or his intentions. He seemed a bit grimmer than usual, except when Ivan was present, but one could argue nothing much from that. The grimness might be simply the expression of dissatisfaction with himself for having done nothing to further the orders of the dead Karasloff.

However, a week later the bomb-shell fell. Quite early in the afternoon Jacques made his appearance at El Kobir's.

"They have come for the child," said he.

The old man, who was looking over some accounts, glanced up.

"Ah, they have come for the child. Where are they?"

"At the Hôtel d'Oran. They wanted to come here and fetch him. I told them not. I told them I would fetch him myself. You see we don't want a fuss—you had better say nothing to the child. I will just take him for a walk and leave him with them at the hotel. They seem good folk these people of his. There is a woman and a man, the grandfather and grandmother it seems. There is also our Colonel at the hotel with all the papers about Karasloff.

"The grandfather is M. le Prince, but he is all the same a kind-spoken old man—the child will be happy enough. Besides, he need not know he is going away for always. Only there must be no fuss. He does not want to take any clothes with him or luggage—they will give him all that."

El Kobir called his servant to bring Ivan.

"Ivan," said El Kobir, "your friend has come to take you for a walk."

He took the child to his side for a moment and gave him a little squeeze, then he kissed him on the forehead.

Ivan clapped his hand in that of Jacques, and the pair went off, while El Kobir returned to his accounts.

But the addition of figures made little way, and the eternal cigarette was unlit as he sat thinking, thinking, a hundred miles removed from the shop, from his business, from himself.

He was an old man and he had lost many friends. His business was indeed the only friend left to him. Jacques had never been his friend.

Just an acquaintance. They were people inhabiting different worlds, with ideas, tastes, and natures absolutely dissimilar. Ivan by his magic had drawn them together, but he had not united them.

Indeed, now that Ivan was gone, El Kobir felt a vague antagonism towards Jacques.

Jacques had divided them. This rascal of a Jacques had done a fine thing no doubt in parting with the child he was so fond of, for the child's sake—all the same, he had taken the child away.

It was after dark and the swaying lamp was lit in the shop when Jacques came back.

"Well," he said, "it's done, and they leave to-morrow for Oran. They made me stay for a while and talk——"

"And the child?" asked El Kobir.

"The child's as pleased as they are. He ran into the old woman's arms directly they met, and called her grandmama. He does not know he's going away for good—anyway, there he is quite happy. Happier than I've ever seen him."

El Kobir heaved a sigh. Then he went off into the back premises and returned with a bundle. It was the uniform of the Corporal of the légionnaires, little képi and all.

"These are yours," said he, "you had better take them back to the man who made them. Your Legion is a légionnaire the less now."

Jacques unrolled the things, looked at the blue coat and red trousers, the sash and the belt, then as we close the pages of a story, he folded them together, put them under his arm, and with the képi swinging by the chin-strap to his finger, bade good-night to the old man and went off to the barracks.