Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  In Grim’s company I have spent days in the intimate society of professional thieves, to whom murder was a side-line of the business, and I reckon I’m the better for it; for Grim has the faculty of bringing out what makes the world such an amazing place — the infinite capacity possessed by every rascal for doing the decent thing deliberately.

  Haven’t you seen men who can take ill-broken horses and drive them all day long without a kick or an accident, because of sympathy and understanding without a weak spot in it? That best describes Grim’s way. There isn’t any mush in him. Slushy sentiment won’t manage men when a crisis comes any more than petting will control stampeding cattle.

  He looks facts in the face without wincing, and where whip, rein, and voice are called for he can use them; but, though I have been in more than a score of uncommonly tight places along with Grim, I have never once heard him make an ill-considered threat, or seen him weak for a second when firmness was the cue. The truth is, he can read the hearts of men, which is the only book worth reading in the long run, although there are some printed ones that help you to understand; it is full from end to end of unexpected wonders, and those cynics who assert that man’s nature is predominantly evil are ignorant fools, who lie.

  And, as I have said, Grim hates publicity. He even hates to air his views, or to discuss information before the minute comes for using it. That makes him a rather disconcerting man to get along with, for he springs things on you when you least expect, and keeps you in the dark at times when you would give ten years of your life for the certainty of living ten more minutes. I think he is obsessed by the unusual belief that to share his thoughts lessens their fertility, and I know he regards all propaganda as a foolish and indecent waste of time.

  So the mere fact that he doesn’t answer, or shakes his head, or looks bored, or says he doesn’t know, doesn’t prove much. I remember asking him, not long after I first met him in Jerusalem, for some account of Jeremy’s doings in Arabia and of how the merry fellow lost the number of his mess.

  To my surprize Grim denied all knowledge of him, although not by any means convincingly. He didn’t seem to try to be convincing. He looked up from the book he was reading and stared at me for about thirty seconds with those baffling eyes of his that now and then gleam so brilliantly under the bushy eyebrows that they almost seem on fire. He had been smiling at something he had just read, but now his lips set noncommittally in a straight line.

  “Why? What do you know of him?” he asked.

  It struck me at once as improbable that Jeremy had never mentioned me to Grim, seeing that I had been instrumental in bringing the two together in Akaba. However, it isn’t always good manners to make a display of incredulity; and there isn’t a set of circumstances anywhere, nor ever was, in which bad manners are less than a mistake. So I took the question at its face value and told all I knew about Jeremy from the beginning.

  Grim closed his book and listened with apparently deep interest, never interrupting once. Not one least gesture betrayed previous knowledge of the Australian; and although he smiled once or twice at the accounts of Jeremy’s misdeeds, it wasn’t with any air of being familiar with them. All the same, I still wasn’t convinced. “I can’t tell you a thing about him,” he said at last, when I had come to the end of my tale and waited for Grim to make a remark of some sort. Then he resumed his reading, holding the book so that I could no longer see his face, which may have been an accident but left me less convinced than ever.

  I formed the conclusion that my friend Jeremy Ross must have done something discreditable, which Grim preferred to leave undiscussed, that it might be forgotten the sooner. Strange, isn’t it, how we jump to the worst conclusions and associate all silence with unpleasantness? Since that was my judgment of the situation, decency obliged me to keep silence too — that and a discreditable, although not unique desire to dissociate myself from the record of a man who appeared to have failed in the last pinch. That’s another strange thing, isn’t it, how decency and despicable motives run in double harness!

  There were plenty of incidents after that, when I ventured with Grim and his following of born thieves into the trans-Jordan country, which brought Jeremy to mind again; but I kept my thoughts to myself and never once referred to him. Nevertheless, the more I learned of the amazing story of what Lawrence and his handful did in the war, with another handful of untrumpeted zealots toiling in their rear, the less I liked to remain ignorant of Jeremy’s share in the doings. And the more I turned over in mind what I did know of Jeremy, the less probable it seemed that what I did not know could be much to his discredit. Wild he was certainly, and free with his opinions about men and circumstances that he did not like; but it seemed increasingly incredible that Jeremy, wearing the uniform of a free man who had volunteered for foreign service, would do anything meriting the name of treason.

  In my experience, free-speaking men of courage are less likely to betray their flag than are some of the patrioteers, who wave their hats in air when the flag goes by, but would sell it, and throw their country in, for less than Esau took in exchange for his birthright. Neither was Jeremy Ross a likely plunderer. There are looseended men, of course, who constitutionally can’t let alone such opportunities for pouching money as unguarded army supplies provide. But Jeremy was one of those fellows who could make money easily without stooping to dishonesty. In fact, it was bellicose honesty in harness with boisterous humor that made him rail at shams and got him so often into trouble. That kind of fellow doesn’t steal.

  The only plausible supposition left, then, was the oldest in the world. Jeremy was a handsome man with a little dark mustache that turned naturally upward and made you think of d’Artagnan. He had eyes and a smile, free shoulders and a horseman’s supple loins, that together with his bubbling spirits might easily have stirred the ambition of a desert-born Delilah.

  There are women in all lands who are like spiders, not content to play the vampire game, but only satisfied when they have lured, bled white and finally destroyed. Moslem countries are the last in which a wise man would run that kind of risk; but Jeremy Ross — clever, brilliant, alert, courageous — was not nearly always wise. A woman seemed the likeliest guess; but that only added to my desire to learn all the facts.

  Patience, however, is my long suit. I have had to acquire that quality, for lack of some of those more marketable talents with which men born under other stars than mine seem to attain to what they want so easily. I take it that patience had quite a lot to do with Grim’s selection of me to go with him on expeditions, for I have no strategic or diplomatic genius. True, he had my services for nothing, and that is quite a consideration when you remember how poor the governments are in these days, so that all the unspectacular, unpopular departments must have their expense sheets pared to the bone.

  It is also true that hard knocks and harder work in all kinds of out-of-the-way places have made me in a sort of way dependable. I have been let down too badly and too often by men who called themselves assistants, to care to submit another fellow to that sort of mortification.

  I can talk Hindustani pretty well, and my skin has been burned a sort of raw mahogany color by sun and wind and sea, which makes it comparatively easy for me to pose as an Indian Moslem in places where Indians are well known by repute but rather rare. And I have learned enough Arabic to understand the drift of things, and to hold up my end in any argument. But Grim, who can act the part of an Arab so perfectly as to deceive the most suspicious of them — and there isn’t a more swiftly suspicious race under heaven — could have found dozens of men who understood the Arabs better, and who could disguise themselves and act their parts better than I.

  Grim is really a long-headed imaginative business man in a peculiar environment. Even in his major’s uniform he looks the part. In civilian clothes you couldn’t possibly mistake him. He is one of those men for whom the Napoleons of commerce hunt ceaselessly, and to whom, when discovered, they pay whatever salary the find conside
rs himself worth.

  For make no mistake about it, nine-tenths of the art of making millions lies in knowing a born executive when you see him in the raw. And again, nine-tenths of an executive’s worth consists in knowing men. Grim knows all about men. He has a genius for judging just how far a given individual will go in certain circumstances. He understands how far to trust, and just when to mistrust.

  And, greatest art of all, he knows how to cajole a notoriously dishonest fellow into playing straight, as well as how to forestall the vastly more difficult customers who practise knavery under the cloak of a good reputation.

  So I claim it is a feather in my cap that Grim made a friend of me, and invited me to share his quarters in Jerusalem in the funny little stone house down an alley at the back of the Zionist hospital. As his friend I must count myself among a score or two of cut-throats, some of whom are in the jail this minute, and two of whom they tell me are now under sentence to be hanged. But I don’t find the association unendurable. In fact, the meannesses of what is called polite society, where men and women commit their crimes by proxy, bore me rather soon, and I’m minded to go back and meet some of those honest thieves and murderers again. I like things and people labeled with their proper names.

  We didn’t use Grim’s quarters for many days on end, for the Administration wasn’t paying him to sit down and grow fat. One expedition followed another with the swiftness and almost the regularity of a motion-picture serial, and between times, when Grim wasn’t reading, there was a constant succession of visitors, who brought in scraps of information from zones not reached by rail or telegraph.

  We had almost daily news of Mustapha Kemal in Anatolia. Now and then there were tales of the Bolsheviki in northern Persia, and once when I was present a hairy, swarthy, smelly fellow brought information from as far away as Samarkand. The spies who reported at headquarters on the Mount of Olives were usually sent along to Grim to repeat their story to him personally, so that before you had been in his company a week you felt as if you were posted in the center of a great map, with all the roads, tracks, wires, and rivers radiating outward from you.

  Few of the visitors knew how to behave in so-called civilized surroundings, and most of them when offered a seat preferred a mat or a cushion on the floor. Your progressive Arab likes to air what he thinks are occidental manners, but the men familiar with deserts can’t disgorge their news unless you let them sit at ease in their accustomed way.

  By constant repetition one peculiarity became remarkable — the farther away the place from which any of our visitors came, the more insistent that man would be that Grim should return with him to help straighten matters out.

  I don’t think that meant that Grim’s fame had reached all the way to Samarkand, for instance. His Arab name, Jimgrim, can be conjured with throughout northern Arabia and Syria, but hardly beyond that; and at any rate he put a totally different construction on the circumstance.

  “You see?” he laughed one afternoon. “When they’re not familiar with western methods and only know of them by hearsay, they’re crazy to call us in. But the folk nearby, who’ve had a dose or two of our enlightenment, would rather be let alone in future. Notice it? The stories from fifty or a hundred miles away are mostly given one kind of twist calculated to calm the Administration’s nerves; from beyond that the twist is exactly reversed. European protection looks best from a long way off. Well, I’m dead set against outside interference. If I could have my way, there’d be no meddling in foreign lands. Each to his own affairs is my creed.” But, like the rest of us, Grim can’t have his own way very often and has to be content with compromise.

  * * * * *

  ONE afternoon, about a month after our return from the affair with Ali Higg at Petra, there came a man on camel-back, followed and noisily rebuked by a couple of mounted policemen, who insisted that he should report himself and his business first at police headquarters.

  But he had no use for the police, and was much too wise to stop and argue, or to draw his weapons and give them an excuse to call assistance and arrest him. He knew the way to Grim’s quarters and sent his camel along at top speed, stone-deaf to shouts, threats, commands, and all abuse.

  He dismounted at the narrow stone gateway without making his camel kneel, and leaving the beast for the police to watch strode straight in unannounced, brushing aside the servant who ran to the door to question him.

  Grim and I happened to be playing chess, with the board between us on a stool in front of the fireplace. The man stood watching us in silence for two or three minutes, patient now that he had reached his goal; and Grim didn’t appear to notice him, although the smell of human and camel sweat blended and the fellow’s heavy breathing were remarkable, to state it mildly. It was five minutes before the Arab saw fit to interrupt. “Salaam aleikum, ya Jimgrim!” he said at last. “That game you play there is a slow one. I have brought you word across the desert of a swift one that a man must play between life and death. Ben Saoud summons you!”

  CHAPTER IV. “In the name of Him Who never sleeps it is a bargain!”

  OUR visitor was tall as well as smelly, and he smelt of other things besides sweat — the desert, for instance, which, like the salt sea, has its own aroma. It makes some folk afraid before they are conscious of what frightens them, filling others with a vague restlessness.

  All smells are certainly to be included in that new elusive law of relativity. Grim and I, freshly tubbed, in a clean-swept room, were more offensive to that Bedouin than he to us. He had cotton stuffed in his nostrils, an habitual indignity the desert people offer to the cities on the rare occasions when they leave behind the safety of all outdoors and contemptuously tread the peril-haunted streets.

  There was nothing about our quarters that he enjoyed. He stood with his big brown eyes wide open, not distrustful, for he knew Grim, but about as alert as a horse just in off the range, turning his head an inch at a time to examine every detail of the furniture. Grim told him to sit down, and he chose the rug in the center of the floor, gathering his brown cloak about him and arranging its folds as if to protect himself from unseen evil.

  “How did you get as far as this without surrendering your rifle?” Grim asked him.

  “By damn, Jimgrim, it was either that or not at all. If I had come by way of El-Kerak and taken the bridge over the Jordan the Sikhs on watch there would have been too many for me. They would have required it according to custom.”

  “They would have given you a receipt,” said Grim. “You could have had it back on your return.”

  “Maybe. A rifle is a man’s life. Who leaves his life in a stranger’s keeping, against words on a scrap of paper in a foreign speech? I came by the south end of the Dead Sea, avoiding Sikhs and such folk. At El-Kalil there was an officer — an Englishman — a young cock-sparrow full of mirth and brains, who bade me give my rifle up. But I gave him talk instead of it. ‘In the name of Allah the Omnipotent,’ said I, ‘you shall fight me for the rifle if you want it. I killed a German for it in the war; now it is mine until another man kills me. Maybe thou art the man,’ said I, ‘although I think not.’ “ “That would be Captain de Crespigny, I dare say?” Grim suggested, smiling.

  “Aye, that was the youngster’s name. A straight-standing child with a smooth face. Mashallah! He told me he is Governor of El-Kalil! Did he lie?”

  “Not he. What did he answer you about the rifle?”

  “He laughed, and said it would be a shame to kill such a specimen as me. Whereat I started on my way again, but he called me back and wrote out a permission, lest, as he said, I should slay all the soldiers in Jerusalem.”

  “Did you show the permit to the police here?” Grim asked him.

  “By damn, not I! I let the dogs bay after me! What I have in my pouch is my affair. Who has permission from the Governor of ElKalil needs no favors from lesser folk; and besides, he might not have been the governor after all. Who am I to stop and trade curses with policemen?”

  “
Let’s see what de Crespigny wrote,” said Grim.

  The Bedouin reached into the mysterious recesses of an under-garment and produced a greasy, thumb-marked sheet torn from a memorandum book. It was folded criss-cross fashion, and addressed in pencil to Grim. Grim read it, smiled, and passed it on to me. It ran:

  Dear Grim,

  this fellow Aroun, of the Saoud clan swears he is a friend of yours. I rather hope it’s true. I like him. But if he’s a liar, send him back this way, and I’ll have some fun with him in the jail here.

  Yours, C. de Crespigny.

  Grim handed the note back to its bearer, who pouched it proudly. It has probably done yeoman service since in the heart of Arabia, displayed to folk who can’t read as proof conclusive of any wild statement its owner cares to make.

  “Well, what message do you bring?” Grim asked him.

  “Hassan ben Saoud says you are to come to him.”

  “To what place? When?”

  “Now, at once, to Abu Kem, which is two days’ camel-ride to the south and east of Abu Lissan. He said, ‘Tell Jimgrim to do no dallying but come at once.’”

  Grim crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in his armchair lazily.

  “In a hurry, is he? What’s the trouble?”

  “He said: ‘No need to tell the nature of the trouble. Let it be enough that there is trouble. Jimgrim interfered between me and Ali Higg of Petra. By a trick he came between me and sure victory. I had pledged my word, and I kept my word. Now Jimgrim keep his word to me. He promised to come and help me at my call. It should therefore be enough to say that Hassan ben Saoud the Avenger summons him. If he doesn’t answer that, let him go the way of all dogs and I will do without him. But I think he is not a dog, and will answer the summons.’ So spake Saoud the Avenger and I rode a seven days’ journey to repeat his words.”