Max answered quietly: "No, I don't wonder. Perhaps you feel it does you good to speak. It's strange music!—stirs one up, somehow—makes one think of things. And I suppose you trust me? You can. But don't go any farther unless you're sure you want to."
"I do want to!" burst out the Spaniard. "I've wanted to from the first—since you helped me about the clothes. Only you're a reserved fellow yourself. I didn't care to have you think me a gusher. You guessed why I begged for the clothes?"
"I didn't let myself dwell on it too much."
"You must have guessed. Of course I mean to desert the first chance I get."
"It's a beastly risk. Did you see that awful photograph the colonel told the non-coms to pass around for us to look at, as a warning against desertion?"
"The poor wretch they found in the desert, across the Moroccan border, the man who ran away from Bel Abbés before we came? Yes, I saw the picture. Ghastly! And to think it's the women who mutilate men like that! But I shan't try to escape by way of Morocco. The danger I'll run is only from being caught and sent to the penal battalion—the awful 'Batt d'Aff.' It's a bad enough danger, for I might as well be dead as in prison—better, for I'd be out of misery. But I must run the risk. I enlisted in the Legion for its protection in getting to Africa, because I was in danger of arrest. And you know the Legion, once it's got a man, won't give him up to the police unless he's a murderer. I'm not that, though I came near it. Even while I signed for five years' service, I knew I should have to desert the minute I could hope to get away. I shall wait now till the big march begins, and get as far south as the rest of you go, in my direction—the direction I want. Then I shall cut away."
"God help you!" said Max.
"Maybe He will, though I'm a man of no religion. Is love the next best thing? Everything I've done so far, and what I have to do, is for love. Does that make you think me a fool?"
"No."
"I have to save a girl from being given to a man who isn't fit to kiss her little embroidered shoes—bless them! To save her from him—or from suicide. The letter told me she would rather die than marry him. That's why I'm not in Paris to-night. There'd been other letters before; she said in the one which reached me at the theatre—reached me in the midst of rehearsal—thank God—if there is a God—I still have till the end of September. The crisis won't come till then, on her seventeenth birthday. But what is five months and a half to a man handicapped as I am? Caught in a trap, and with hardly any money, just when I had a fortune almost in my grasp!"