A Soldier of the Legion

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

In the letter, Grant said that they planned to alter the old Doran house and "bring it up to date." It was he, Grant, who had all the ideas, apparently. Josephine was letting him do as he pleased. What should she know about such matters? If she could have all the dresses and jewels and fur she wanted, Grant would be allowed to go his own way with other things. He was clever enough to understand that, and to manage Josephine.

With the letter Grant had posted a bundle of Sunday newspapers and illustrated magazines, such a bundle of old news as one sends to an invalid in hospital. Max had glanced through some of the papers before going to bed, looking with a sad, far-off sort of interest at portraits of people whose names he knew. There had been a page of "America's most beautiful actresses" in one Sunday supplement, and among them, of course, was Billie Brookton. No such page would be complete without her! It was a new photograph that Max had never seen. The smiling face, head drooped slightly in order to give Billie's celebrated upward look from under level brows, had the place of honour in the middle of the page. And a paragraph beneath announced that Billie would leave the stage on her marriage with "Millionaire Jeff Houston, of Chicago."

No doubt Houston was the man she had mentioned in her last letter. Round her neck, in the picture, Max thought he recognized his pearls, and on the pretty hand, raised to play with a rope of bigger pearls—"Millionaire Houston's" perhaps—was the ring Max had given her the night when the telegram came. The photograph, which was large and clearly reproduced, showed the curiously shaped stone on the middle finger of Billie's left hand. A large round pearl adorned the finger on which Max had once hoped she might wear the blue diamond, a pearl so conspicuous that the original of the picture appeared to display it purposely. "Millionaire Houston" would be flattered; and that was what Billie Brookton wanted. As for what Max Doran might think if he saw the portrait, why should she care? For her, he was numbered with the dead.

Max was no longer in love with Billie. The shock of Rose Doran's terrible accident, the story she had to tell, and her death, had chilled the fire of what he thought was love. The letter of farewell had put it out. But the scar of the burn sometimes hurts. To-night was one of those times; and Max believed that his disappointment in Billie had had its influence in driving him to the Legion. She stood now as a type of what was mercenary, calculating, and false in womankind, just as (almost unknown to himself) Sanda DeLisle stood for what was gentle, yet brave and true. He felt that Billie Brookton had made him hard, with a hardness that was not good; and that not only she, but all those he had cared for most in his old life, had deceived and tricked or at best forgotten him. Lying in his narrow bunk, Max lifted his head and let his eyes wander over the faces of his comrades, turned to gray stone by the moonlight. Not one which was not sad, except that of the Alsatian who had joined on the day of his own recruitment. The boy was smiling in some dream and looked like a child, but a sickly child, for the heat and the severe marching drill for les bleus were telling upon him. Faces of twenty different types, faces which by day masked their secrets with sullenness, defiance, or stolidity, could hide nothing in sleep, but fell into lines of sadness that gave a strange family resemblance to the stone soldiers on the tombs. Saddest of all, after Manöel Valdez, perhaps, was the wrecked visage of Pelle, whose own particular cafard had been leading him a merry dance the last few days.

To Sidi-bel-Abbés, with a letter of introduction to the colonel, had come an old officer of the British army, a man of distinction. Pelle, as an Englishman and an ex-soldier, had been honoured by being appointed his guide. The two had recognized one another. Pelle had served under the officer years ago. The encounter had been too much for Quatro Oyos: that, and the money the general gave him at parting. Remembrance of past days was the enemy in the Legion. Four Eyes had been half drunk ever since, and had escaped prison only by a miracle. That, however, was nothing new for him. He had been corporal twice and sergeant once; each time he had been "broke" because of drink. In spite of all, he had stuck to the Legion. There was no other place for him on earth. The Legion was his country now—his only country and his only home. His medals he had asked Max to keep till he "settled down again." They mustn't go to the places where the cafard would take him. They mustn't risk disgrace through things which the cafard might make him do. He looked like the ruin of a man in the revealing moonshine. But to-morrow he would be a soldier again till night came, and sooner or later he would pull himself together—more or less. The medals he had won and his love of sport were his incentives. Yet there were other men who had no medals and no special incentives, and to-night Max felt himself down on a level with those.

"What incentive have I?" he asked, in a flash of furious rebellion against fate, conscious yet not caring that such thoughts spawned the beetle in the brain. Five years of this life to look forward to!—the life he had pledged himself to live. The officers did their best. It was vieux style nowadays for an officer of the Legion to be cruel. But try as they might to break the sameness of barrack life by changing the order of drill and exercise—fencing one day, boxing the next, then gymnastics, target-practice, marching, skirmishing, learning first aid to the wounded, giving all the variety possible, the monotony was heart-breaking, as Colonel DeLisle had warned him it would be. And a great march, when a march meant the chance of a fight, didn't always come in the way of a young soldier, even one whose conduct was unsmirched by any stain. Max did not know yet whether he would be taken on the march that all the garrison was talking of. To-night the beetle in his brain tried to make him think he would not be taken. There was no luck any more for him! And as for his corporal's stripe, if he got it soon, what a pathetic prize for a man who had been a lieutenant in the —th Cavalry, the crack cavalry regiment of the United States Army!

Oh, better not to think of future or past! Better not to think at all, perhaps, but do as some of the other men did when they wanted to forget even as they had been forgotten: take the few pleasures in their reach, do the very things he had been prig enough to warn Valdez not to do! Let the beetle burrow, as a counter-irritant!

"Soldier St. George—my soldier!" a girl's voice seemed to encourage him.

Max heard it through the scratching of the beetle in his brain.

Sanda! Yes, Sanda might care a little, a very little, when she had time to think of him—Sanda, who loved another man, but had promised to be his friend. He thought of her eyes as they had looked at him that day in the Salle d'Honneur. He thought of her hair, her long, soft hair....