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 Jeremy 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