Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

"He won't bother about that," said Kandorff; "he'll stick on to some wandering tribe and most likely the next time we meet him he'll be fighting us down south somewhere. That is the sort of man worse to let loose than a plague, and he will very likely raise a holy war of his own if he is not caught."

Kandorff—whose name was not Kandorff and who had spent some years in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Foreign Office—was a man who knew what he was talking about. He turned and entered the barrack yard with Jacques and the business passed from their minds. A légionnaire has no time to bother about murders, even if the murdered man is a légionnaire. Jacques and his companion had not even time to think about resting. They had their washing to do.

Jacques had annexed a piece of soap that morning and hidden it under his bed; he shared it now with Kandorff as they stood at the great washing trough, and then, the uniforms washed, pressed and packed safely away, they started off on their usual evening's walk to the town.

Arrived there they parted company, Kandorff going on some business of his own, whilst Jacques, left to himself, strolled off down one of the boulevards. The evening was delightful after the heat of the day, and the wind from the desert, warm but stimulating, played with the leaves of the trees bordering the street and blew in the face of the légionnaire as he walked, glancing in at the shop windows and pausing here and there to inspect their contents.

He reached the Crédit Lyonnais, which was closed, and stood for a moment looking at the building as though measuring the strength of it. This was the place where fellows shovelled twenty-franc pieces across the counter with copper shovels and pulled out drawers stuffed with pink and blue five-hundred-franc notes. Dreams rose before him of what the Legion could do if it only had the courage of its desires and opinions. The looting of Sidi-bel-Abbès rose up before him, a gaudy picture with himself in the foreground armed with a copper shovel and a sack. Then he resumed his way, striking from the boulevard into the native quarter, or rather the Moslem quarter of the town.

He was quite at home here and well known to many of the traders. He had eaten kouss-kouss in the terrible little native cafés where the front premises are only the stage curtains that conceal an opium joint or worse; he was known to black-eyed Arab children and to the quick-eyed Arab police, and to-night, being hard up for cigarettes, he was on the look-out for someone amidst all this host of acquaintances who could supply him.

In a narrow street and before an open booth he paused. Here on a bench beneath a swinging lamp sat a yellow man, cross-legged and wearing a red fez. He was rolling cigarettes.

He had rolled cigarettes since the time when he was a little boy, son of a cigarette-maker in Blidah. He would continue rolling cigarettes till they took him to the grave. He did not know how many he had rolled since his fingers had first closed on the rice paper and the yellow opium-tinctured tobacco. He might have rolled millions, tens of millions, he did not know. He never smoked the things he rolled and one might have taken him for an automaton, but for the song that was always humming upon his lips, a song without words, monotonous, dreary and fateful.

Jacques paused before this image and greeted it. It nodded in reply to his greeting and went on with its work.

Jahāl, for that was the name of this man, did not work for his own hand. He was only a servant in the employ of the Kassim company. It supplied him with the tobacco and cigarette-papers and paid him for the finished product. He sat now without replying to the remarks of the légionnaire, for he guessed Jacques was hard up for a smoke and had come to borrow.