by Ouida
“Is my life worth much more under the French Flag than it was under the English?” thought the Chasseur, with a certain, careless, indifferent irony on himself, natural to him. “There I killed time — here I kill men. Which is the better pursuit, I wonder. The world would rather economize the first commodity than the last, I believe. Perhaps it don’t make an overgood use of either.”
The night was someway spent when the talk of wild-pigeon-blue mares and sorrel stallions closed between the Djied and his guest; and the French soldier, who had been sent hither from the Bureau with another of his comrades, took his way through the now still camp where the cattle were sleeping, and the fires were burning out, and the banner-folds hung motionless in the luster of the stars, to the black-and-white tent prepared for him. A spacious one, close to the chief’s, and given such luxury in the shape of ornamented weapons, thick carpets, and soft cushions, as the tribe’s resources could bring together.
As he opened the folds and entered, his fellow-soldier, who was lying on his back, with his heels much higher than his head, and a short pipe in his teeth, tumbled himself up; with a rapid somersault, and stood bolt upright, giving the salute; a short, sturdy little man, with a skin burnt like a coffee-berry, that was in odd contrast with his light, dancing blue eyes, and his close, matted curls of yellow hair.
“Beg pardon, sir! I was half asleep!”
The Chasseur laughed a little.
“Don’t talk English; somebody will hear you one day.”
“What’s the odds if they do, sir?” responded the other. “It relieves one’s feelings a little. All of ’em know I’m English, but never a one of ’em know what you are. The name you was enrolled by won’t really tell ’em nothing. They guess it ain’t yours. That cute little chap, Tata, he says to me yesterday, ‘you’re always a-treating of your galonne like as if he was a prince.’ ‘Damme!’ says I, ‘I’d like to see the prince as would hold a candle to him.’ ‘You’re right there,’ says the little ‘un. ‘There ain’t his equal for taking off a beggar’s head with a back sweep.’”
The Corporal laughed a little again, as he tossed himself down on the carpet.
“Well, it’s something to have one virtue! But have a care what those chatter-boxes get out of you.”
“Lord, sir! Ain’t I been a-taking care these ten years? It comes quite natural now. I couldn’t keep my tongue still; that wouldn’t be in anyways possible. So I’ve let it run on oiled wheels on a thousand rum tracks and doublings. I’ve told ’em such a lot of amazing stories about where we come from, that they’ve got half a million different styles to choose out of. Some thinks as how you’re a Polish nob, what got into hot water with the Russians; some as how you’re a Italian prince, what was cleaned out like Parma and them was; some as how you’re a Austrian Archduke that have cut your country because you was in love with the Empress, and had a duel about her that scandalized the whole empire; some as how you’re a exiled Spanish grandee a-come to learn tactics and that like, that you may go back, and pitch O’Donnell into the middle of next week, whenever you see a chance to cut in and try conclusions with him. Bless you, sir! you may let me alone for bamboozling of anybody.”
The Corporal laughed again, as he began to unharness himself. There was in him a certain mingling of insouciance and melancholy, each of which alternately predominated; the former his by nature, the latter born of circumstances.
“If you can outwit our friends the Zephyrs you have reached a height of diplomacy indeed! I would not engage to do it myself. Take my word for it, ingenuity is always dangerous — silence is always safe.”
“That may be, sir,” responded the Chasseur, in the sturdy English with which his bright blue eyes danced a fitting nationality. “No doubt it’s uncommon good for them as can bring their minds to it — just like water instead o’ wine — but it’s very trying, like the teetotalism. You might as well tell a Newfoundland not to love a splash as me not to love a chatter. I’d cut my tongue out sooner than say never a word that you don’t wish — but say something I must, or die for it.”
With which the speaker, known to Algerian fame by the sobriquet of “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” from the hair-breadth escapes and reckless razzias from which he had come out without a scratch, dropped on his knees and began to take off the trappings of his fellow-soldier, with as reverential a service as though he were a lord of the bedchamber serving a Louis Quatorze. The other motioned him gently away.
“No, no! I have told you a thousand times we are comrades and equals now.”
“And I’ve told you a thousand times, sir, that we aren’t, and never will be, and don’t oughtn’t to be,” replied the soldier doggedly, drawing off the spurred and dust-covered boots. “A gentleman’s a gentleman, let alone what straits he fall into.”
“But ceases to be one as soon as he takes a service he cannot requite, or claims a superiority he does not possess. We have been fellow-soldiers for twelve years—”
“So we have, sir; but we are what we always was, and always will be — one a gentleman, the other a scamp. If you think so be as I’ve done a good thing, side by side with you, now and then in the fighting, give me my own way and let me wait on you when I can. I can’t do much on it when those other fellow’s eyes is on us; but here I can and I will — begging your pardon — so there’s an end of it. One may speak plain in this place with nothing but them Arabs about; and all the army know well enough, sir, that if it weren’t for that black devil, Chateauroy, you’d have had your officer’s commission, and your troop too, long before now—”
“Oh, no! There are scores of men in the ranks merit promotion better far than I do. And — leave the Colonel’s name alone. He is our chief, whatever else he be.”
The words were calm and careless, but they carried a weight with them that was not to be disputed. “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort” hung his head a little and went on unharnessing his Corporal in silence, contenting himself with muttering in his throat that it was true for all that, and the whole regiment knew it.
“You are happy enough in Algeria?” asked the one he served, as he stretched himself on the skins and carpets, and drank down a sherbet that his self-attached attendant had made with a skill learned from a pretty cantiniere, who had given him the lesson in return for a slashing blow with which he had struck down two “Riz-pain-sels,” who, as the best paid men in the army, had tried to cheat her in the price of her Cognac.
“I, sir? Never was so happy in my life, sir. I’d be discontented indeed if I wasn’t. Always some spicy bit of fighting. If there aren’t a fantasia, as they call it, in the field, there’s always somebody to pot in a small way; and, if you’re lying by in barracks, there’s always a scrimmage hot as pepper to be got up with fellows that love the row just as well as you do. It’s life, that’s where it is; it ain’t rusting.”
“Then you prefer the French service?”
“Right and away, sir. You see this is how it is,” and the redoubtable, yellow-haired “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort” paused in the vigorous cleansing and brushing he was bestowing on his Corporal’s uniform and stood at ease in his shirt and trousers; with his eloquence no way impeded by the brule-gueule that was always between his teeth. “Over there in England, you know, sir, pipe-clay is the deuce-and-all; you’re always got to have the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or it’s all up with you; you’re that tormented about little things that you get riled and kick the traces before the great ‘uns come to try you. There’s a lot of lads would be game as game could be in battle — aye, and good lads to boot, doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to anything like war — that are clean drove out of the service in time o’ peace, along with all them petty persecutions that worry a man’s skin like mosquito-bites. Now here they know that, and Lord! what soldiers they do make through knowing of it! It’s tight enough and stern enough in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all through the campaigning; but that don’t grate on a fellow;
if he’s worth his salt he’s sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he’s to go to hell at double-quick-march, and mute as a mouse, if his officers see fit to send him. There ain’t better stuff to make soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless ’em! But they’re badgered, they’re horribly badgered; and that’s why the service don’t take over there, let alone the way the country grudge ’em every bit of pay. In England you go in the ranks — well, they all just tell you you’re a blackguard, and there’s the lash, and you’d better behave yourself or you’ll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you’re a bad lot or you wouldn’t be there, and in course you’re riled and go to the bad according, seeing that it’s what’s expected of you. Here, contrariwise, you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests with yourself whether you won’t be a fine fellow or not; and just along of feeling that you’re pricked to show the best metal you’re made on, and not to let nobody else beat you out of the race, like. Ah! it makes a wonderful difference to a fellow — a wonderful difference — whether the service he’s come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothing but a scamp, or as a rascal that’s maybe got in him, all rascal though he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. And that’s just the difference, sir, that France has found out, and England hasn’t — God bless her, all the same!”
With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal’s pipe.
“An army’s just a machine, sir, in course,” he concluded, as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. “But then it’s a live machine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel’s body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature goes wrong — there’s the mischief.”
Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung full-length on the skins.
“I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when — when I was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what you say. Yet — fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible blackguards!”
“In course they are, sir; they wouldn’t be such larky company unless they was. But what I say is that they’re scamps who’re told they may be great men, if they like; not scamps who’re told that, because they’ve once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the difference in life.”
“Yes — it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or — left out!”
The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.
“Won’t there never be no hope, sir?” he whispered, while his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.
The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.
“Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny.”
“No, sir,” said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice. “You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again — —”
He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.
The other moved with a certain impatience.
“How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France? — forget as I have forgotten it!”
The audacious, irrepressible “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel.
“I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how his lordship’s death—”
“No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death that some day an Arbico’s lunge will give me; and that is a long time coming.”
“Ah, for God’s sake, Mr. Cecil, don’t talk like this!”
The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if a bullet had struck him.
“Never say that again!”
Rake, Algerian-christened “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” stammered a contrite apology.
“I never have done, sir — not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me like — you talking of wanting death in that way — —”
“Oh, I don’t want death!” laughed the other, with a low, indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while. “I am of our friends the Spahis’ opinion — that life is very pleasant with a handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one’s saddle. Unhappily harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household — specially when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals at the core, or we should never find such an infinite zest in the death grapple. Good-night!”
He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the skins that made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the pipe still in his mouth, and its amber bowl resting on the carpet which the friendship and honor of Sidi-Ilderim had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the hills around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab of rock, or with the knowledge that at every instant the alarm might be given, the drums roll out over the night, and the enemy be down like lightning on the bivouac. But now a name — long unspoken to him — had recalled years he had buried far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi d’ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among its wild and brilliant soldiers.
Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light in the single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and died away, the Chasseur d’Afrique lay wakeful; looking outward through the folds of the tent at the dark and silent camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory drift backward to a time that had grown to be to him as a dream — a time when another world than the world of Africa had known him as Bertie Cecil.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE.
“Oh! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings of Europe,” said Claude de Chanrellon, dashing some vermouth off his golden mustaches, where he lay full-length on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Place du Gouvernement, where the lamps were just lit, and shining through the burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored, many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were all fluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored moths.
“Hein! Diamonds are found in the rag-picker’s sweepings,” growled a General of Division, who was the most terrible martinet in the whole of the French service, but who loved “my children of hell,” as he was wont to term his men, with a great love, and who would never hear another disparage them, however he might order them blows of the stick, or exile them to Beylick himself.
“You are poetic, mon General,” said Claude de Chanrellon; “but you are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal.”
“But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that the devil made them if the drill have molded them!” urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes.
Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar.
“Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in this world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge of life, but devilry is its champagne!”
“Ventre bleu!” growled the General. “We have a right to praise the blackguards; without them our conscripts would be
very poor trash. The conscript fights because he has to fight; the blackguard fights because he loves to fight. A great difference that.”
The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale effeminate, dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger than a hot-house flower, yet who, as many an African chronicle could tell, was swift as fire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard’s leap, untiring as an Indian on trail, once in the field with his Indigenes.