Читать книгу The Lost Trooper - Talbot Mundy - Страница 6

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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 British 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.

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 considers 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.