by Talbot Mundy
“We came to an agreement pretty soon, and that boy stayed with me in Lourenço Marques — finally coming with me to see Montdidier. Montdidier recognized him, of course, and the boy was word perfect. Between us we told a tale that disgusted Mister Lord Montdidier to the point of saying he’d shoot you at the first sight! I’ll tell you what I said, and what that boy confirmed.”
Oakes had been pale with the fever, but I noticed now that a dull flush of rage had colored his face, and his eyes would have scared me if I had had to face them. But du Maurier seemed to me to be regarding him as he might a trapped animal, amused at the spectacle of ferocity that could not reach him.
How he was so confident that we two would not shoot was beyond me, until it occurred that he might have a score of blacks in ambush among the rocks behind him, and I began to search for a glimpse of black skin or a spear head, although without avail. I have come to the conclusion since that he was depending entirely on his knowledge of the reluctance of an Englishman to shoot without first giving warning.
“We explained to Mister Lord Montdidier, that boy and I did, that you’d gone! We said you were sick — not very sick in health, but sick of the whole business, and that you’d decided to trek through to Swaziland and leave him to do as he pleased. We said you’d sent that boy to say that Mister Montdidier’s things were lying where you’d left ’em on the veld; and I added that I held myself responsible that none of the blacks hereabouts would touch a thing. I promised him that, and that if they did touch anything I’d see he got it back.
“Well — I’ve seen angry men, but he was the angriest! He didn’t believe a word at first, but the native’s tale convinced him. I’d drilled that boy until he was word perfect. And finally I bribed a Goanese Government clerk to go to him and say word had come in from the natives that his tent and belongings were left lying on the veld, and what was to be done!
“Oh, we had him convinced all right! And his anger was the terriblest thing I’ve seen. He swore he will shoot you, and this gentleman here along with you, at the first glimpse he gets; and he’s off to Swaziland, by rail to the British border, to look for you!”
He lit his pipe again, that had gone out during that triumphant recital, and watched for a minute to judge the effect produced.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked with a leer. “Are you going to get out and leave this gentleman,” once more he pointed at me with the appropriative thumb, “and me to strike a bargain between ourselves? My advice to you is to get out of the country, by Inambane or somewhere, before Mister Lord Montdidier gets wind of you and hunts you down! What’ll you do?”
“I’ll make no terms with you, anyhow!” growled Oakes. “Get out of my sight!”
Du Maurier laughed.
“I’ll give you until tomorrow dawn to think it over!” he announced. “Then I’m coming down with my men to take possession of Mister Lord Montdidier’s belongings and to pack them, and deal with them as directed! No, I won’t take a drink, thanks!” he added sarcastically. “No, thanks, I won’t stay to lunch! And if you’re man enough to shoot me in the back as I ride away, let’s see you do it! I’ll have my mule, if your boys are through with admiring it!”
Our natives, at a shout from Oakes, brought him the mule and he rode away. I sat in silence, for there was very little I could say that would have helped.
“Have you paper and a pencil?” Oakes asked after a few minutes, and I hunted until I had found them. He wrote out a few words, and handed the paper to me.
“Read!” he said. I read:
IF YOU WANT YOUR THINGS COME AND GET THEM. FRED OAKES.
“That’s a telegram. Take it to Chai Chai,” he ordered, “as fast as you can travel. See it dispatched, and make sure it gets there. Then come back!”
It was addressed to Lord Montdidier at the only big hotel.
“I was to guard you,” I objected — and then checked myself, remembering that those instructions had been received from Lord Montdidier.
“I suppose I needn’t remind you that you receive a salary for obeying orders?” he asked. Then he relented, judging, I suppose, that my objection had been solely on his own account. “You see that rising ground among the rocks?” he asked, and I looked toward a sort of island a half mile from the nearest hill, perhaps fifty feet higher than the level land surrounding it.
Judging by the splurge of green below it there was a spring of water, and there was no place within rifle range from which an enemy could snipe. “I shall move camp this morning, and pitch up there. You’ll find me there when you return. Don’t waste any more time.”
I was not afraid of the climate. It takes time for the pestilential low veld to sap a man’s strength. I was young, and strong, and scarcely rid of the sea air in my lungs. So I took a mule and one native — to make sure I should not lose myself — and was in the saddle and away within fifteen minutes of receiving orders.
The pace I set was exactly as fast as the native could possibly manage and the mule endure, and I overdid the thing rather than waste time. So that when night shut down on us I had a spent mule and an utterly weary servant, and we were all three utterly grateful for the shelter of a big kraal that lay a little to the right hand of the track. I had turned into it, and the natives were about dragging the brush obstruction across the entrance behind me, when I noticed there was another party of travelers encamped there.
None too pleased — for I thought it might be a Portuguese official party, and that could only mean many questions and delay — I took the mule’s saddle off, watered him from a woman’s crock, and fed him from the bag I had slung from the saddle. That done, I walked forward to find the head man and get supper for the native and myself. I saw a white man come striding to meet me through the gloom, and stood still, dumb. But as he came on I was compelled to believe my eyes, and when he spoke at last, cheerily, there was no denying him — Lord Montdidier!
Without a word I passed him the telegram. It was growing pitch-dark, so he struck a match and read it.
“Oakes wrote this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“On your way to Chai Chai to send it?”
“Yes.”
I thought for a second he was going to ask me for an explanation, but I wronged him.
“My spare mule!” he shouted, and I saw his boys come running out of a hut to do his bidding.
He must have bought new mules at Lourenço Marques and have brought them with him on the tug:
“You’re not going tonight?” I asked.
“Going now,” he answered.
“But — lions!” I objected.
“Please bring my outfit along tomorrow,” he answered. “You’ll find cloth and beads — or money if he’d rather — in my bag to pay the head man. Start early, and make it in one day if you can. Good-by!”
And he mounted the mule, ordered the obstruction taken from the kraal gate, and was gone — with one faithful native boy trotting with a lantern at his mule’s heels.
It took me two days, however, to return, for I had his boys and new purchases to bring along. About three in the afternoon I came in sight of the new camp, and not long after that I made out him and Oakes in two chairs side by side, talking and laughing together as if they had never parted. When I reached them, they were kind to me, but did not refer to what had happened by word or hint; and in those days I was not intimate enough with either man to care to ask personal questions.
It never did occur to me to ask what happened when they met, until Oakes and I sat together on the club veranda in New York that afternoon and we discussed old times.
“When he showed up, why didn’t you shoot him?” I asked, and he sat up with a start, and laughed.
“Because,” he said, “I believe in respecting my adversary! I wouldn’t stick a pig with a dirty knife, and du Maurier was dirty! I’d made up my mind to ignore every word du Maurier said, and to let Monty pick a fight with me on any ground he chose.”
“But M
onty was a proud man,” I said. “How did he come to forgive your distrust of him?”
“Yes, he was a proud man,” Oakes answered. “But there’s a Providence looks after fools, and Monty never found me out! Just think of that brute du Maurier inventing all those lies! He never even saw Monty in Lourenço Marques! As soon as Monty showed up, he skunked out, covering his trail! Those documents he had were Lord knows what — some old ones!”
“How did you explain that telegram away?” I asked.
“I didn’t. Monty explained it for me. He took it to mean that there was trouble — danger. ‘If you want your things, come and get them!’ He understood he might not find them if he came too late!”
“All the same,” said I, and checked myself.
“All the same, what?” demanded Oakes.
“Nothing,” I answered. “I was merely thinking.”
I was thinking what would be the use of suggesting to Oakes at that late day that Monty divined well enough that Oakes mistrusted him, but was too splendid a gentleman ever to let the knowledge of the secret out.
THE END
THE SOUL OF A REGIMENT
I
SO long as its colors remain, and there is one man left to carry them, a regiment can never die; they can recruit it again around that one man, and the regiment will continue on its road to future glory with the same old traditions behind it and the same atmosphere surrounding it that made brave men of its forbears. So although the colors are not exactly the soul of a regiment, they are the concrete embodiment of it, and are even more sacred than the person of a reigning sovereign.
The First Egyptian Foot had colors — and has them still, thanks to Billy Grogram; so the First Egyptian Foot is still a regiment. It was the very first of all the regiments raised in Egypt, and the colors were lovely crimson things on a brand new polished pole, cased in the regulation jacket of black waterproof and housed with all pomp and ceremony in the mess-room at the barracks. There were people who said it was bad policy to present colors to a native regiment; that they were nothing more than a symbol of a decadent and waning monarchism in any case, and that the respect which would be due them might lead dangerously near to fetish-worship. As a matter of cold fact, though, the raw recruits of the regiment failed utterly to understand them, and it was part of Billy Grogram’s business to instill in them a wholesome respect for the sacred symbol of regimental honor.
He was Sergeant-Instructor William Stanford Grogram, V.C., D.S.M., to give him his full name and title, late a sergeant-major of the True and Tried, time expired, and retired from service on a pension. His pension would have been enough for him to live on, for he was unmarried, his habits were exemplary, and his wants were few; but an elder brother had been a ne’er-do- well, and Grogram, who was the type that will die rather than let any one of his depend on charity, left the army with a sister-in-law and a small tribe of children dependent on him. Work, of course, was the only thing left for it, and he applied promptly for the only kind of work that he knew how to do.
The British are always making new regiments out of native material in some part of the world; they come cheaper than white troops, and, with a sprinkling of white troops among them, they do wonderfully good service In time of war — thanks to the sergeant instructors. The officers get the credit for It, but it Is the ex-noncommissioned officers of the Line who do the work, as Grogram was destined to discover. They sent him out to Instruct the First Egyptian Foot, and it turned out to be the toughest proposition that any one lonely, determined, homesick fighting-man ever ran up against.
He was not looking for a life of idleness and ease, so the discomfort of his new quarters did not trouble him overmuch, though they would have disgusted another man at the very beginning. They gave him a little, white-washed, mud-walled hut, with two bare rooms in it, and a lovely view on three sides of aching desert sand; on the fourth a blind wall.
It was as hot inside as a baker’s oven, but It had the one great advantage of being easily kept clean, and Grogram, whose fetish was cleanliness, bore that in mind, and forbore to grumble at the absence of a sergeant’s mess and the various creature comforts that his position had entitled him to for years.
What did disgust him, though, was the unfairness of saddling the task that lay in front of him on the shoulders of one lone man; his officers made it quite clear that they had no intention of helping him in the least; from the Colonel downward they were ashamed of the regiment, and they expected Grogram to work it into something like shape before they even began to take an interest in it. The Colonel went even further than that; he put in an appearance at Orderly Room every morning and once a week attended a parade out on the desert where nobody could see the awful evolutions of his raw command, but he, actually threw cold water on Grogram’s efforts at enthusiasm.
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” he told him a few mornings after Grogram joined, “or well-drilled soldiers out of Gyppies. Heaven only knows what the Home Government means by trying to raise a regiment out here; at the very best we’ll only be teaching the enemy to fight us! But you’ll find they won’t learn. However, until the Government finds out what a ghastly mistake’s being made, there’s nothing for it but to obey orders and drill Gyppies. Go ahead, Grogram; I give you a free hand. Try anything you like on them, but don’t ask me to believe there’ll be any result from it. Candidly I don’t.”
But Grogram happened to be a different type of man from his new Colonel. After a conversation such as that, he could have let things go hang had he chosen to, drawing his pay, doing his six hours’ work a day along the line of least resistance, and blaming the inevitable consequences on the Colonel. But to him a duty was something to be done; an impossibility was something to set his clean-shaven, stubborn jaw at and to overcome; and a regiment was a regiment, to be kneaded and pummeled and damned and coaxed and drilled, till it began to look as the True and Tried used to look in the days when he was sergeant-major. So he twisted his little brown mustache and drew himself up to the full height of his five feet eight inches, spread his well-knit shoulders, straightened his ramrod of a back and got busy on the job, while his Colonel and the other officers did the social rounds in Cairo and cursed their luck.
The material that Grogram had to work with were fellaheen* — good, honest coal-black negroes, giants in stature, the embodiment of good-humored incompetence, children of the soil weaned on raw-hide whips under the blight of Turkish misrule and Arab cruelty. They had no idea that they were even men till Grogram taught them; and he had to learn Arabic first before he could teach them even that.
They began by fearing him, as their ancestors had feared every new breed of task-master for centuries; gradually they learned to look for instant and amazing justice at his hands, and from then on they respected him. He caned them instead of getting them fined by the Colonel or punished with pack-drill for failing things they did not understand; they were thoroughly accustomed to the lash, and his light swagger-cane laid on their huge shoulders was a joke that served merely to point his arguments and fix his lessons in their memories; they would not have understood the Colonel’s wrath had he known that the men of his regiment were being beaten by a non-commissioned officer.
They began to love him when he harked back to the days when he was a recruit himself, and remembered the steps of a double-shuffle that he had learned in the barrack-room; when he danced a buck and wing dance for them they recognized him as a man and a brother, and from that time on, instead of giving him all the trouble they could and laughing at his lectures when his back was turned, they genuinely tried to please him.
So he studied out more steps, and danced his way into their hearts, growing daily stricter on parade, daily more exacting of pipe-clay and punctuality, and slowly, but surely as the march of time, molding them into something like a regiment.
Even he could not teach them to shoot, though he sweated over them on the dazzling range until the sun dried every drop of sweat out of
him. And for a long time he could not even teach them how to march; they would keep step for a hundred yards or so, and then lapse into the listless shrinking stride that was the birthright of centuries.
He pestered the Colonel for a band of sorts until the Colonel told him angrily to go to blazes; then he wrote home and purchased six fifes with his own money, bought a native drum in the bazaar, and started a band on his own account.
Had he been able to read music himself he would have been no better off, because of course the fellaheen he had to teach could not have read it either, though possibly he might have slightly increased the number of tunes in their repertoire.
As it was, he knew only two tunes himself— “The Campbells Are Coming,” and the National Anthem.
He picked the six most intelligent men he could find and whistled those two tunes to them until his lips were dry and his cheeks ached and his very soul revolted at the sound of them. But the six men picked them up; and, of course, any negro in the world can beat a drum. One golden morning before the sun had heated up the desert air the regiment marched past in really good formation, all in step, and tramping to the tune of “God Save the Queen.”
The Colonel nearly had a fit, but the regiment tramped on and the band played them back to barracks with a swing and a rhythm that was new not only to the First Egyptian Foot; it was new to Egypt! The tune was half a tone flat maybe, and the drum was a sheepskin business bought in the bazaar, but a new regiment marched behind it. And behind the regiment — two paces right flank, as the regulations specify — marched a sergeant-instructor with a new light in his eyes — the gray eyes that had looked out so wearily from beneath the shaggy eyebrows, and that shone now with the pride of a deed well done.