Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So I saw a way to help Jeremy once more out of a military entanglement and said a great deal fervently. But I was careful what I said and the provost marshal wasn’t. An officer in uniform, who has the law and regulations on his side, simply can’t afford to be abusive to a civilian who isn’t scared. There never was a military regulation yet devised that couldn’t be off-set somehow, as the Belgians proved to Von Bissing.

  He did exactly what I hoped he would do in the end — ordered me put out of the hotel, added one or two remarks about my nationality, called me a slacker because I wasn’t in uniform, and strode away fuming.

  Meanwhile, Jeremy had been marched off in disgrace, even so looking not at all dejected. His black cock’s feather danced along jauntily; and even the provost sergeant couldn’t keep the guard from laughing at his jokes.

  “Try your Embassy again!” he shouted to me from the street. But the U.S. doesn’t keep an embassy in Cairo, and a consulgeneral has his limitations; our consul might have made it all right for me, but couldn’t help Jeremy. Bankers are the boys, when they’re your friends; and you can’t live several years in Abyssinia, making money for other people, without being on good terms with a Cairo banker.

  There was a man of millions, whose head office was in London, who had instructions from my financial twins to do anything he could for me at any time. I found him in his office, and the rest was easy, although it did take a day or two. He sent for my effects from the hotel and put me up in his private house at Ramleh, pending a settlement.

  There was nothing that I wanted — not even an apology. The provost marshal hadn’t gone an inch beyond his rights in having me turned out of the hotel; and as for bad language, I’m no schoolgirl; I’ve listened to a lot of it, and used some too. But — well, you know the difference between men, whose troubles are their own affair and serve ’em right, and the other sort, whose part you’ll take whether they deserve punishment or not? I’d have stood by Jeremy if he’d committed murder.

  The solution was all the easier because my banker acquaintance had social notions and didn’t like that provost marshal’s manners; and you may believe it or not, but when a war is on, and the army, and army contractors need money every day, he who deals in cash across the counter has more influence than any ten ambassadors.

  THREE DAYS AFTER the incident I went down, armed with an official pass, to the Australian camp near the Pyramids to see Jeremy, and found him in a barbed-wire enclosure in the hot sun digging a nice square hole in the sand under the eyes of a sergeant-major.

  They had reduced him to the ranks for absence without leave, but weren’t content with that. A theory was being tried just then that drasticism was the only physic for Australians; so, for having dared to sit and drink in a hotel reserved for the higher caste, he was sentenced to dig ten holes, each to be exactly ten feet square and ten deep, in yielding sand and afterward fill them up again. He was still in the first hole when I found him; and because my pass expressly stated that I might talk to him alone the sergeant-major had to withdraw out of earshot.

  Jeremy didn’t say much at first. He smoothed the side of the hole with his shovel, grinned at me, patted another rough place, and presently expressed his judgment of the British Empire. “I hope the Hottentots get London,” he said. “I’d like to see an army of our Australian Aborigines looting the Bank of England. And the thing to do with the Royal Family is to put ’em in cages and send ’em on tour with the circus. The fall of Rome was a penny squib to what I hope happens to England, and I’d help anyone except the Kaiser who had sense enough to take a crack at it. No use helping the Kaiser; he hasn’t got guts; besides, if he won, he’d be worse, supposing that’s possible. But to think I volunteered — just think of it! Me that belonged to the regiment that won the Boer War and took oath to see the whole British Empire into Hell before we’d ever fight for that crowd again! But what’s the use of talking? Wait till I get out of uniform, and see. That’s all!”

  I helped him out of the hole, gave him cigarets, and we sat down on the sand together, facing.

  “How about that fellow Grim you told me about?” said I.

  “Would you care to join him?”

  “Wouldn’t I! Grim is for Feisul, and so am I. But it can’t be done. They keep Australians for the fighting and fatigues. They’re using Feisul the same way — ditch him soon as the war’s won — wait and see.”

  “I can’t get your rank restored,” I said.

  “Don’t try,” he answered. “I’d stuff the chevrons down the throat of the first British officer I met!”

  “But I know a man who can get you transferred to Akaba under Grim,” I went on.

  “Then you’re my enemy!”

  “How so?”

  “For not having done it already.”

  So I got his promise not to fall foul of any regulations, nor of any man — not even a sergeant-major until he should set foot in Arabia; and with that understanding I returned to my banker, who by that time had set three club committees by the ears and had cabled London and the U.S.A. Financiers don’t stop short of taking pains when they pursue vendettas.

  The cables weren’t working very well, and it was another week — Jeremy had dug more than half his holes — before the General Staff began to realize my nuisance value. I received an official call from a major, who knew nothing of what had taken place, but supposed he could straighten the matter out over a couple of cigars. He began by saying he thought it very decent of me not to have complained to the consul-general.

  But I followed the banker’s instructions carefully and the major left with the impression that the least I wanted was the degradation of the provost marshal to the ranks, together with personal apologies from all concerned to almost everybody in America. The banker, who was present during the interview, dropped hints at intervals about my financial connections.

  The General Staff was busy and worried, and in no mood to pause in its stride for the sake of a provost marshal’s dignity. Somebody higher up told him sharply that he must straighten the tangle out himself at once, or take the consequences; so he took the only course left to him and sent one of his assistants to ask for an appointment for his chief.

  On the banker’s advice, I wasn’t in. But the door was open between the two rooms; the banker did the talking and I listened. “You know what these Americans are — pig-headed men. Once they’re set on a course they’re hard to turn. This man is a pretty good fellow, but he’s no man’s fool to be pacified with a perfunctory apology.”

  “What does he want, then? Does he expect the provost to walk here on foot with peas in his boots and call out Peccavi through the back door? He’s crazy if he expects a man like Colonel Gootch to come and grovel to him.”

  “I don’t think it would amuse him in the least to see anybody grovel.”

  “Well, what does he want?”

  “An apology, of course. He was publicly insulted; he’s entitled to an apology in public, and as a guest in my house I’d expect him to demand at least that. But he wants more. As a practical man he demands some practical proof of regret and of willingness to make amends.”

  “Good Lord! You mean money?”

  “Of course I don’t, nor does he. You know better than that. At the time of the insult he had an Australian with him — Sergeant Jeremy Ross by name — an old friend whom he’d met that afternoon for the first time in ten years. It seems the Australian was the cause of all the trouble — out of bounds at my friend’s invitation in a place reserved for officers. The Australian was very severely punished as well as reduced to the ranks, and my friend feels badly about it.”

  “Good God! D’you mean he expects Gootch to go and kiss the sergeant on both cheeks and beg his pardon?”

  “Hardly But you may tell Provost Marshal Gootch privately from me that if he cared to arrange that Australian’s transfer to Akaba for special duty under Captain Grim, there’s no doubt I could persuade my friend to accept an apology in this room and let the w
hole matter drop.”

  “But Colonel Gootch hasn’t anything to do with transfers.”

  “He has influence. Let him use it. You’d better make it clear to Colonel Gootch that he’ll have me to deal with unless he does the right thing pretty quickly. I have business at headquarters tomorrow noon. It might be best for all concerned if I could say at that time that the air is clear again. I’ve heard of bigger men than Gootch being transferred to less agreeable duties.”

  “Well, I’ll tell him.”

  “Put it bluntly. will you? Tell him you talked with me.” Gootch understood the situation and got busy. Napoleon may have told the truth about the British in that famous remark of his; maybe he spoke collectively; but I can certify that one highhanded colonel, at all events, knew when he was beaten. Jeremy was excused from digging holes that afternoon, and his transfer to Akaba was arranged the same evening.

  The apology to me, too, left nothing to be desired; it began by being stiff and throaty, but ended in armchairs with whisky-and-soda. In fact, I rather think Gootch and I were on good terms before he left: it was his suggestion that I might like to travel with Jeremy as far as Port Said, and he provided me a pass that came pretty near to being the key of Egypt.

  So I traveled in a troop-train through a hot night, listening to Jeremy’s accounts of what had happened to him in the years between. It seemed he had even been a police-court magistrate, and had done almost everything else from trading horses down to conjuring in small towns with a traveling vaudeville troupe. But he thought that none of the things that he had done were half as inexplicably marvelous as my getting him that transfer for special duty under James Schuyler Grim the American, and he swore friendship forever on the strength of it.

  This time he waved good-by with his cock’s-plume hat from the deck of a decrepit tug in the Suez Canal, and his last words were of jubilantly roared advice to me to get attached to Grim’s command in some way.

  “Grim’s the real thing,” he shouted. “Come along and see life!”

  At the last glimpse I had he was dancing on the tug’s poop, laughing and making friends with everyone on board. He had promised to write, but of course he didn’t, and the letters I wrote to him were all returned eventually marked “undelivered for reason stated.” The fact that the reason wasn’t stated hardly shed much light on Jeremy’s career.

  However, I received news of him almost simultaneously with those undelivered but carefully censored returned letters of mine. My banker friend in Cairo wrote to me after I got back to the States, enclosing a clipping from an official list of casualties. It read:

  Trooper Jeremy Wallace Ross.

  — th Australian Light Horse.

  On special duty Akaba. Missing.

  I wrote in vain for further details. Nothing seemed to be known about him, and although the authorities were courteous and apparently took great pains to find out for me, “presumably dead” was the final official verdict. So I wished I hadn’t engineered his transfer to Akaba, and more or less forgot him once again.

  CHAPTER III. “Protection looks best from a long way off.”

  NOW skip several more years. Mastery of time and space is the prerogative of him who tells tales and possibly has something to do with the reader’s contentment. In what is called real life the days are steps of a tedious stair, up which we climb unhandily enough with never a chance to take ten dozen in a stride during the monotonous interludes when nothing seems to happen. Even when we fall instead of climbing we must bump down one day at a time, with the bottom everlastingly receding as discomfort grows. For nothing I ever read, or heard, or saw convinced me that there is top or bottom; we just go on forever, either way, one step at a time.

  But in a story you can leave out the uninteresting parts, and omit mention of the people who crowd the steps uncomfortably. The whole world’s history, and the gamut of human cussedness go to the making of every incident and give biologists a deal of material to keep them busy. But we, who for our peace of mind are not biologists or dry-as-dust historians, may sum up every situation in five monosyllables: So it came to pass.

  It came to pass, then, that in 1920 I was back in the Near East — in Jerusalem, to be exact — not at a loose end, nor on a lost trail, but venturing more or less at random for an opportunity. Being independent and in the prime of life — which is the present moment in which every healthy fellow finds himself and has nothing to do with middle age — I was in position to engage in any pursuit that interested me.

  I like to see the fruit of my labor in the form of invested dollars. I think a man is a fool who doesn’t salt down more than half of what he earns; but no man is entitled to an opinion who lacks the courage of it. I’ve been called more than my share of hard names by men who describe themselves as generous, but I shan’t have to tax their generosity when old age comes, because I have made it a rule to reckon costs up in advance and never to engage in anything until I can see which side the bread is buttered on. You might call me a cautious man, and in one sense conservative.

  Nevertheless, I have had my full share of fun and look forward to plenty more; and the reason of that is as simple as addition. I have never looked for money merely for the sake of getting money. The game has got to interest me first; and I’ve discovered this: That when you’re really interested you can start a good game anywhere. The fact that you are interested opens doors.

  So, although Jerusalem looks at the first glance like a strange choice for a professional prospector as a jumping-off-place into the unknown; and although it certainly would be the worst place imaginable for a man dependent on his earnings from month to month, with its prodigious interest as a maelstrom of human emotions fixed in the centre of the habitable surface of the world, within a day’s ride of the unknown in more than one direction, it suited my case perfectly.

  Where all the tribes, all the politics, most of the creeds and a generous sprinkling of cranks foregather, there the tales blow like blossom in the wind. Blossom that sticks begets fruit; every blown blossom had to have a tree to grow on, and you can find the tree if you look long enough. In other words, most tales are worth investigating for the truth that underlies them; and if you want one tale a minute, each wilder than the last, just try Jerusalem for a month or so.

  And as I have already told, it was in Jerusalem that I at last met the James Schuyler Grim who Jeremy had said was such a first-class fellow. Lawrence, who did more than any living man to defeat the Turks, by composing Arab differences and swinging the Arabs into line behind Feisul to fight on Allenby’s right wing, had returned to England long ago. Most of the quiet handful who achieved impossibilities for Lawrence’s sake had followed him into retirement or scattered over the earth to new fields of activity. But Grim stayed on in the Intelligence Department, and I have told several adventures that I had with him. Grim isn’t a man whom you would normally expect to lead you on to fortune — nor to fame; for he appears to find his meagre pay sufficient, and isn’t even keen enough on that to cling to his job unless the British let him have his own way. And publicity offends him like a bad smell. He had to know me intimately for months, and I had to make him all kinds of promises, before he gave me permission to lay bare some of his doings.

  And I don’t mean by that that he is modest in the usual meaning of the word; for he isn’t. He knows his own value and pits himself with confidence against odds and in situations that would make his seniors in the service gasp. But he is a man of one idea; and as well as I can describe it in a sentence it consists in using his own extraordinary ability to the utmost. What he knows is Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Arabs.

  What he can do is to understand the Arab and bring out his good qualities. What he thinks is that Feisul, third son of the King of Mecca, who — for the first time since Saladin — united the Arabs under one banner in one cause, should be allowed to work out some form of independent Arab government. What he does is to devote his whole energy along that line, making use of his commission in the Bri
tish army because it gives him authority and funds.

  Mind you, he earns the money that the British pay him; and, seeing that he is an American, with no real claim to their consideration since peace was signed, it isn’t likely they would continue him in the service unless they were sure they had their money’s worth. I found him as Jeremy described, a man “game at any time to tell a full-blown general to go to Hell,” and the convenience must therefore be considered mutual; the British pay Grim because he is useful to them; he accepts their pay, and wears their uniform at times, because that is the line of least resistance to the furtherance of the cause he has at heart.

  Most people like him, although some officials are jealous of his ability and of the scope that he enjoys in consequence; for he goes just where and when he chooses as a rule, which makes his lot considerably pleasanter than that of the routine men tied down to stuffy quarters in Jerusalem, Nablus, Haifa, and such posts. Most criminals like him, for though he frustrates their more important schemes with an ingenuity that must seem almost supernatural to them, he is never vindictive. The crowded jail in Jerusalem is full of Grim’s friends; and the toughest rogues of the Near East are his best assistants, for if ever a man took others as he found them, discovered the best in each, and bent it to the cause he has espoused, that man is Grim.

  I remember how in my callow days I couldn’t sit down at ease with men possessed of a different notion of morality from mine. Nowadays, on the rare occasions when I lie awake, I spend the time laughing at the superior airs of that aspiring young moralist who once on a time was me. Contact with the earth’s ends soon kicks out of you, of course, ninety per cent. of your puppyhood but a modicum remains that varies with the individual, and it needed Grim to teach me that a murderer, for instance, isn’t necessarily a bit worse than a politician, nor either of them so much worse than you and me that you could measure the difference with a micrometer.