Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He chuckled while he talked, as if we had all played hookey from school and were having a gorgeous time. The cabman demanded a thousand marks, which I suppose was about the tariff in the circumstances; but Jeremy knew German pretty well, and offered to gamble with him — two hundred marks or nothing. He hadn’t a trace of fear of consequences, and proved it by getting out to walk when the cabman turned obstinate; whereat a settlement was soon reached; we agreed on a hundred and fifty marks as the fare, and reached the United States Embassy streets ahead of the news.

  The ambassador was out of town, as luck would have it; he might have been diffident, especially as one of us was an Australian. But there was a secretary there, whose aunt or somebody came from Miss Eliot’s home-town, and what with the girl’s influence, and Jeremy’s chuckles, we had him convinced before the military telephoned. They had drawn the British Embassy blank by that time as well as all the leading hotels, and were growing furious.

  I don’t know the full extent of the lies that that good secretary told, and I certainly won’t tell his name, for he did his duty and deserves a curtain. But I heard him say over the phone that we were all three intimate friends of Colonel Roosevelt; and when a red-necked colonel without corsets came to demand our surrender on about a hundred criminal counts, the secretary received him alone in a small room and contrived to satisfy him somehow. The long and the short of it was that Miss Eliot was permitted to continue her journey to Switzerland, which she subsequently did, leaving Jeremy disconsolate for fifteen minutes and the story to progress without her. I have never seen her since, although I have been told that she described me when she got home as a “great, dark lunatic, who might have got her into jail if it hadn’t been for the handsome Mr. Jeremy Ross.” But she never saw him again either, so no harm was done.

  Jeremy and I were ordered to leave Germany that night, under embassy escort as far as the frontier — for which we had to pay. We didn’t mind that much, since business with the von’s and zu’s looked stagnant. We were also forbidden to return for twelve months, and forbidden even after that lapse of time without a special police permit. But as neither of us ever wanted to go back, that hardly mattered.

  We had supper at the embassy, and Jeremy passed the time with conjuring tricks and ventriloquism, giving a performance with hardly any paraphernalia that would have passed muster on any stage in the world. He could do stunts with billiard balls, and make a Japanese mask talk in a way that brought to mind those ever-green romances about Indian fakirs. In fact, I don’t think it would have surprized anybody much when it was time for us to start for the train, if he had performed the fabled trick of throwing up a rope into the air, climbing up it out of sight, and pulling the rope after him.

  The only thing that could surprize you about Jeremy Ross after you had known him for an hour or two would be to see him gloomy or depressed, or at a loss for some unusual way of passing time.

  All the way to the Dutch frontier he kept the embassy escort and the train crew amused with sleight-of-hand tricks, banter, and ventriloquism. Perhaps his best stunt was making a fat man, who had a corner seat in our compartment say outrageous things about the Kaiser in his sleep. When he tired of that he spilled a flow of reminiscences that could not have been lies, because no man could have invented all that much.

  He seemed to have worked at every trade there is, and to have forgotten nothing. Youngest son of a well-to-do ranch-owner, he had rebelled at the station routine and set out to make his own fortune at the age of fourteen. When I met him in Berlin he was twenty-three or four, and though the fortune hadn’t taken shape yet he seemed to have enough to get along with and was certainly well equipped with experience.

  * * * * *

  WHEN we left the train in Holland the conductor, the ticketman and several passengers, including the fat one who had been made to say things in his sleep, insisted on shaking hands. It was a miserable little junction station, but that did not disturb Jeremy; as soon as the farewells were over and we had seen the embassy fellow into the return train for Berlin he took my arm and proposed that we should set out at once to explore Holland. But I demurred. I couldn’t afford in those days to wander at large — or thought I couldn’t, which comes to about the same thing.

  “Something’ll turn up. It always does,” he prophesied. “Dutch money’s all right; you can spend it. It’s round and it rolls. Let’s get some.”

  But I hadn’t yet learned the difference between being timorous and being cautious. I quoted the old jingle that has somehow lasted down the years as a label for the Meinheers —

  “In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch

  Lies in giving too little and asking too much.”

  “All right,” he answered. “Come with me to Australia. Let’s try West Aus. Get some camels and find gold in the desert. Great game. Make a pile quick and settle down to a life of roving. Come on!”

  I wonder what it is that makes a man deliberately decide against his inclination. There wasn’t really any reason why I shouldn’t go with Jeremy. A merrier companion couldn’t be, or a braver. He would get into trouble, of course, but chuckle his way out of it; and you don’t mind sharing any sort of difficulty with a mate who is game to lift his end of it. His optimism and my comparative caution might have made us good partners. But I had London in mind and a brace of millionaires whose profitable passion is to finance such folk as me, and Jeremy wouldn’t try London on any terms.

  “Dukes, knights, lords, earls — afternoon tea in the office — wipe your feet on the mat, please — one of the Empire’s splendid sons when dividends ain’t rolling in and the bankers want a war — blooming Botany Bay Colonial when the fighting’s over! No, I’ve seen London. The king may have it! I wouldn’t fight for the Empire again, not if they offered to give me the whole damn thing for my trouble!”

  He spent the best part of two days trying to lure me to Australia, recounting the delights of “humping bluey,” the romantic possibilities of pearling on shares, the carefree existence that a man might live trading cattle on the long drive down from the northern territories, and the fortunes to be made by “paddocking” in West Aus.

  But that something — maybe intuition — that so many people offer to explain and no man understands, urged me elsewhere. I offered to share up with Jeremy whatever arrangement I could contrive with the men in London; but the notion seemed to be fixed in his head that making profits for anyone outside Australia was treason. I don’t say he wasn’t right. Nobody ever made it clear to me why international financiers should be allowed to weave empires on a basis of percentages for the fellows who do the work. But Jeremy couldn’t, or wouldn’t see a difference that looks clear to me between grub-staking a man on shares and criminal plutocracy. He said there was no such thing as fair play in financial circles outside Australia, and not even too much of it there. Not that he was a socialist, or a communist, or any other kind of reformer. He could sum up his philosophy and politics in about ten words: “If there’s gold in a stream, and I can pan it, what in Hell do I need a financier for? I’m the young feller that’s going to finance any operations I’m engaged in.”

  I asked him what he proposed to do when he had made the pile he talked of hopefully; how would he invest it?

  “I won’t,” he said, “I’ll spend it. You wait and see!”

  I don’t carry my craving for independence all that far. I’ve made my little pile, and used the money of more than one financier to do it. The dollars are salted down in United States Government securities, and I figure now that the world will have to go to pieces before any man can crowd me to the wall. I’ll tell you what happened to Jeremy presently; and although my method has worked so well for me, I’m still not sure that his hasn’t suited him equally well. It’s a matter of individuality, each man to his own affairs, of which there is a lot too little nowadays.

  I said good-by to Jeremy in Rotterdam, where he took passage for Australia, glorying rebelliously in the steamer’s forei
gn registry. He swore over the taffrail — I was going to say solemnly, but he never did anything that way — at the top of his lungs, at all events, that he would never sail again under the British flag, salute another British officer, set foot in England, or pay taxes. He also gave me a specific message to deliver to the king, wished me well rid of my financiers, and begged me to get religion and come to Australia “where God rides horseback.”

  The last I saw of him on that occasion he was performing on the bridge deck as the steamer swung into the tide, juggling with three opened, but not empty, beer bottles and as many tumblers, dancing to his own tune simultaneously. And the tune that he whistled was as free from care or any real malice as his own heart. For a day or two I missed him sorely and wished I had gone with him. Then, as such things do happen in this rapid motion-picture world, he passed from mind in a new welter of business negotiations. My twin millionaires saw a chance in the prospect that I offered them; we signed up, and I went to Abyssinia, where I was able to pack up a decent competence and return them several hundred per cent on their outlay; which may be immoral, but is something I peculiarly like to do.

  What with digging gold, and hunting elephants on the side, I don’t believe I thought of Jeremy Ross more than once or twice during all the time I stayed in Abyssinia, a land whose riches are kept idle under a blanket of graft that gives you all you need to occupy your mind.

  CHAPTER II. “Grim’s a bird — you ought to meet Grim.”

  NOW skip a number of years. The end of 1913 found me still in Abyssinia endeavoring with varying success to protect my financiers’ investment. But in January, 1916, I got out at last and headed down the Nile for Cairo, where, after a deal of arguing, the military let me have a room at one of the two big hotels. Some of you don’t need telling what those places were like in war-time. The Mount Nelson in Cape Town during the Boer War was a kindergarten to it. The notice at the front door, “Out of Bounds to all Enlisted Men,” summed up the situation. You couldn’t breathe for brass hats, or do a thing without being told you mustn’t; and all the things you mustn’t do were being done right and left by everyone who had a relative at the War Office or a good-looking wife who entertained.

  I tried for a while to horn in somewhere and be useful; but you couldn’t get near Allenby or Lawrence or any man who was really responsible. The rest were willing to have you know that the ground whereon they stood was holy; in fact, you had to concede that point before they’d talk to you at all. Thereafter, whatever you wanted to know was an official secret, but you were usually allowed to pay for drinks.

  It petered down finally to the alternative of going home, or taking a hand along with the Levantines in profiteer contracts for army supplies, which is a trade I don’t take to readily. So I decided it wasn’t my war, put my name down on the waiting list for a passage to the States, and waited. There are worse places to wait in, once you’re definitely a spectator and don’t care who cheats whom, or why. And while I waited I ran into Jeremy Ross again. It was no surprize to see him once more in British uniform. Peter the Apostle set the example of protesting and then swallowing the protest. Jeremy erred in first-class company, and appeared to thrive on it. But he was sinning, too, against the army regulations, which is much worse, as well as likelier to bring instant punishment. Within ten paces of that notice by the hotel door, directly facing it, he, Jeremy Ross, a sergeant with the worsted chevrons on his sleeve, sat drinking whisky-and-soda at a table between two palms on the front veranda, in full view of any righteous personage who might pass.

  It was scandalous, outrageous, subversive of all social order — more dangerous, I dare say, than trading with the enemy or spying for the other side. So I went and sat down on the chair in front of him, and ordered the Nubian waiter to charge the drinks to me, having a notion in the back of my head that for the second time I was going to steer Jeremy out of a scrape.

  Well, glad to see me was no word for it. Some men blaze out like the sun from behind a cloud when they meet a friend, and Jeremy was one of them. He couldn’t have made more noise if he had struck it lucky in the gold-fields of West Australia, where men don’t celebrate in whispers; and he tried to tell me all his adventures since we parted in one long sentence. But he couldn’t crowd it in or talk sense for high spirits.

  He was perfectly sober and looked handsomer than ever in his broad-brimmed felt hat with the black cock’s feather; moreover, he was as full as usual of disrespect for possible consequences and bubbling with amusement at the discomfort of one or two officers not far away, whose business it didn’t happen to be to substitute for the provost marshal. They were as indignant as ruffled turkeycocks, and I remarked on it.

  “On edge, ain’t they,” laughed Jeremy. “But we Australians have made a bit of a rep for ourselves. You’ll notice none of them’ll interfere until somebody comes who’s big enough to give them Hell for letting dirt like me sit in the sight of nabobs. Crikey! I could tell you tales about what’s happened up there in Palestine when the staff tried to what they call discipline us chaps that would make you gasp. We’ve done most of the hard fighting; that’s all right; that’s what we’re here for. But they haven’t got us feeding out of their jeweled hands exactly. Listen to this.”

  And he told me tale after tale that never got into the papers about how the Australians had left their mark on the General Staff as well as on the Turks and Germans. Maybe he exaggerated, but I dare say not. I know what those fellows did and did not do in South Africa, and there were more of them on this occasion, farther from home and possessed of even less respect than formerly for swank, eye-wash, and petty tyranny.

  The inevitable happened at the end of half an hour. A staff major came out of the hotel, who thought more of the line between enlistment and commission than of that great gulf reported to be fixed between heaven and the other place. He marched straight up and demanded to know what Jeremy thought he was doing there. “He’s my guest,” I answered, before Jeremy could get a word in. “You can find out, if you care to, that whatever he has had to drink is charged to me.”

  But all that did was to include me in the class of undesirables. I was told I had sinned more grievously than Jeremy, and that I would be turned out of the hotel if I didn’t mend my ways. He demanded my name. I offered to exchange cards, which he refused; so I advised him to mend his manners, if he thought that could be done without any risk to his health, and he went off in a towering rage in search of the provost marshal.

  I was fully determined by that time to stick it out and see the affair through with Jeremy. It wouldn’t have been the slightest use for either of us to clear out, for there was a provost sergeant watching us from over the way, who would simply have arrested Jeremy out of hand. I suppose the only reason why the staff-major hadn’t ordered him to do that anyhow was his ambition to include me in the picnic, and anyone less than a full-blown marshal with the correct stars on his shoulder and the proper badge might shake down a windfall of enforced apologies, and all that disagreeable kind of thing, for an assault on an American civilian. And Jeremy was simply in his element. It was a long time before the provost marshal came, and he passed it calling full attention to his crime, laughing, chuckling, cracking jokes, and describing for my benefit the comforts of the desert bull-pen out by the Pyramids, where he assured me I should be locked up along with him.

  Then came one of those dusky magicians who produce day-old chickens out of a tarboosh on hotel verandas, and we watched him for about ten minutes, until Jeremy grew scornful of such amateurish stunts and elected to give the fellow a lesson. But it wasn’t all professional pride; he wanted, too, to show me what a mastery he had of Arabic, which he must have learned in about a year in between terrific bouts of fighting.

  “Picked it up, haven’t I?” he said over his shoulder between one superb trick and the next. There were officers all around us now, ignoring military caste for the sake of being mystified. A subaltern brought the pool balls from the billiard table, and Jerem
y made them crawl all over his arms as if they were bewitched; the Egyptian was pushed into the background, and slunk away disgruntled.

  An officer came along with a fox-terrier; Jeremy took the dog on his knee — he has a way with animals that makes them instant friends and turned on his ventriloquism, making the pup give Arabic answers to his remarks in English.

  “Wish Grim was here,” he said to me when he paused to swallow a drink and light a cigaret.

  “Who’s Grim?”

  “One of you Yanks. First-class fellow. Working under Lawrence over in Arabia. I tried to get a transfer to his show damned free and easy — independent — no airs — just the kind of job I like. Grim was willing, but nothing came of it; some brass hat got jealous, I suppose; nobody loves an Australian. If Grim was here now I’d show him a thing or two. He’d apply for me quick, and have his own way about it. Grim’s a bird — quiet chap nearly all the time, but game to tell a full-blown general to go to as soon as look at him. You ought to meet Grim. Watch this.”

  But watching him was no use; you couldn’t tell how he did it. He spun twenty coins of different sizes on the table and palmed the lot with one swipe of his hand. You could hear them click into place on top of one another, but half a second later when he opened his hand it was empty. It looked logical and easy after that when he produced them, with his other hand, out of the pup’s mouth.

  Then came the provost marshal, whose profession is to spoil sport and put the lid on entertainment. He had been brought away from an afternoon bridge-party, and was in a corresponding frame of mind — didn’t know me — didn’t want to know me — hadn’t time to listen to me — ordered Jeremy under arrest at once — and threatened to arrest me in the bargain if I had any more to say.