THE VOICE OF THE LEGION

It was all far worse even than Max had expected; and the next few days were a nightmare. The resemblance between the girl and her mother—once his mother, whom he had as a boy adored—made the effect more gruesome.

Josephine Delatour was coarse minded and sly, inordinately vain, caring for nothing in life except the admiration of such men as she had met and mistaken for gentlemen. Her way of receiving the news of her change of fortune disgusted Max, sickened him so utterly that he could not bear to think of her reigning in Jack Doran's house. She was torn between pleasure in the prospect of being rich, and suspicious that there was a plot to kidnap her, like the heroine of a sensational novel. She did not want to go to America. She wanted to stay in Sidi-bel-AbbÉs and triumph over all the women who had snubbed her. She boasted of her admirers, and hinted that even without money she could marry any one of a dozen young officers. But the one for whom she seemed really to care—if it were in her to care for any one except herself—was the namesake of whom Max had heard laughing hints.

At the time it had not occurred to him that the name of the alleged "cousin" must be Delatour; but so it was though the dark young man with the waxed moustache spelled his name differently, in the more aristocratic way, with three syllables. When Josephine boasted that, though he was from a great family, with a castle on the River Loire, he called himself her cousin, Max realized that the Lieutenant of Spahis must be a son or nephew of the de la Tour from whom Rose and Jack had taken the chÂteau. So far, however, was Max Doran from being elated by this tie of blood, that he mentally dubbed his relative a cad. It was all he could do to persuade Josephine not to tell Raoul de la Tour that she had come into money, and a name as aristocratic as his own—in fact, that she was qualifying as a heroine of romance. Only by appealing to the crude sense of drama the girl had in her could she be prevented from stupidly throwing out bait to fortune-hunters. But having wired again to Edwin Reeves, and hearing that Mrs. Reeves, already in Paris, had started for Algiers, a plan occurred to Max. He advised Josephine, if she thought that de la Tour cared for her, to tell him that she was giving up work in the Hotel Splendide; also that she was leaving Sidi-bel-AbbÉs forever; and then see what he would say. What he did say was such a blow to the girl's vanity that, when she was sure he had no intention of marrying a poor secretary, she flung the dazzling truth at his face. Repentant, he tried to turn his late insults into honest lovemaking; but the temper of the lynx was roused. Never having deeply loved the man, she took pleasure in using her claws on him. In taunting him with what he might have had, however, she let the identity of the newsbringer leak out.

De la Tour then warned her passionately against le jeune aventurier Americain, and almost frightened the girl into disbelieving the whole story. But proofs were forthcoming, and with the landlord's wife, who enjoyed sharing a borrowed halo, Josephine Delatour—or Josephine Doran—went to Algiers to await Mrs. Reeves's arrival. Meanwhile, with the money she procured from Max, the girl planned to buy herself a trousseau, and eventually departed, rejoicing in her lover's discomfiture. Whether or no this attitude were safe with such a man remained to be seen. As for Max—the messenger who had brought the tidings—since he showed no desire to flirt with her, Josephine saw no reason to be interested in him. Besides, she could hardly believe that he was not somehow to blame for having kept what ought to have been hers for his own all these years. She had not loved her supposed father and mother, who had interfered with her pleasure, disapproving of what they called her extravagance and frivolity.... There was no grief to the girl in learning that the Delatours were not her parents.

Nor did it seem to Josephine that gratitude was due Max for resigning in her favour. She was greedily ready to grab everything, without thanks, just as her lynx-prototype would snatch a piece of meat, if it could get it, from another lynx. She grudged the years of luxury and pleasure which she ought to have had; and could she have realized that she had made of Lieutenant de la Tour an enemy for Max Doran, she would have been glad. It was right that two men should quarrel over a woman.

While he was arranging Josephine's affairs, Max saw nothing of Sanda and Colonel DeLisle. He had thought it best to take up his quarters at another hotel, and his only communication with them was by letter. He wrote Sanda that when his business was finished he would make up his mind what to do; but in any case he hoped that he might be allowed to bid her and Colonel DeLisle farewell. In answer, came an invitation from the Colonel to see the Salle d'Honneur of the Legion, the famous gallery where records of its heroes were kept. "That is," (Sanda said, writing for her father) "if you are interested in the Legion."

"If he were interested in the Legion!" Already he was obsessed by thoughts of it. Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, which at first had struck him as being a dull provincial town, now seemed the only place where he could have lived through his dark hours. Elsewhere he would have felt surrounded by a gay and happy world in which a man with his back to the wall had no place. Here at Sidi-bel-AbbÉs was the home of men with their backs to the wall. The very town itself had been created by such men, and for them. For generations desperate men, sad men, starving men, of all countries—men who had lost everything but life and strength—had been turning their faces toward Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, their sole luggage the secret sorrow which, once the Legion had taken them, was no one's business but their own.

Max Doran could not go into the street without meeting at least a dozen men in the Legion's uniform, who seemed akin to him because of the look in their eyes; the look of those cut off from what had once meant life and love. What they were enduring was unknown to him, but he was somehow at home among them. And the day Josephine went away, before he had yet made up his mind to the next step, for the first time he heard the music of the Legion's band.

It was in the afternoon, and he had strolled outside the Porte de Tlemcen into the public gardens for the music, only because he had an hour to pass before his appointment in the Salle d'Honneur. In winter the band played in the Place Carnot, but on this soft day of early spring the concert was announced for the gardens beloved by the people of Sidi-bel-AbbÉs. They were beautiful, but to Max it seemed the beauty of sadness; and even there, outside the wall which dead Legionnaires had built, everything spoke of the Legion. Men of the Legion had planted many of the tall trees of the cloistral avenue, whose columnar trunks were darkly draped with ivy. Men of the Legion swept dead leaves from the paths, as they swept away old memories. Men of the Legion walked in the gray shadow of the planes, as they walked in the shadows of life. Men of the Legion rested on the rough wooden benches, staring absently at mourning plumes of cypresses, or white waterfalls that fleeted by like lost opportunities. Yes, despite the flowers in the myrtle borders it was a place of sadness, and of a mournful silence until the musicians brought their instruments into the curious bandstand formed of growing trees. Then it seemed to Max that he heard the Legion speak in a great and wonderful voice.

As by studying a hive one feels the mysterious governing spirit, so he felt the spirit of the Legion in its music, its restlessness, its longings, its passions, and its ambitions, uttered and cried to heaven in prayers and curses. As individuals the men were dumb, guarding their secrets, striving to forget; and it was as if this smothered fire, seeking outlet, had sprung from heart to heart, kindling and massing all together in a vast, white-hot furnace. The music opened the doors of this furnace, and the flames roared upward to the sky. In the dazzling light of that strange fire, secrets could be read, if the eyes that saw were not blinded. Bitterness and joy were there to see, and the blending of all passions through which men ruin their lives, and need to remake their souls. Yes, that was the Legion's call. Men came to it, in the hope of remaking their souls. With his own drowned in the music of pain and regeneration, Max went to the Salle d'Honneur to meet Colonel DeLisle.

He knew where to find it, next to the barracks; a small, low building of the same dull yellow, set back in a little garden with a few palms and flowerbeds. Inside the gate was a red, blue, and white sentry box. But Max entered unchallenged, because at the door of the house stood the colonel, who came down a step to meet him. "Monsieur Doran!" he exclaimed cordially, holding out his hand.

"Will you still offer me your hand, sir," Max asked wistfully, though he smiled, "even if I've no name any more, and no country that I can claim? Mademoiselle DeLisle has told you?"

"She has told me," echoed the elder man, shaking the younger's hand with extra warmth. "I congratulate you on the chance of making a name for yourself. I think from what I hear, and can judge, that you will do so, in whatever path you choose. Have you chosen yet?"

"Not yet," Max confessed. "Neither a name nor the way to make it. Nor the country most likely to make it in."

"As for that"—and Colonel DeLisle smiled—"we of the Legion are more used to men without names and without countries than to those who have them. Not that your case is allied to theirs. Shall we go in? I want to thank you, as I've not been able to do yet, for your chivalrous behaviour to my daughter. She has told me all about that, too—all. And I had a feeling that this room, in which our Legion commemorates honourable deeds, would be a place where you and I might talk."

As he spoke he led Max into a short corridor, at the end of which hung a large frame containing portraits and many names of men and battles with the crest of la Legion EtrangÉre at the top. Pushing open a door at the right, DeLisle made way for his guest. "Here are all the relics that are to us men of the First Regiment most sacred," he said. And as he passed in, he saluted a flag preciously guarded in a long glass case: the flag of the regiment decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour on an historic occasion of great bravery. An answering thrill shot through Max's veins, for in them ran soldier blood. Involuntarily he, too, saluted the flag and its cross. Colonel DeLisle gave him a quick look, but made no comment.

Two out of the four walls were covered with portraits of men in uniforms ancient and modern; paintings, engravings, photographs; and the decorations were strange weapons, and torn, faded banners which had helped the Legion to make history. There were drums and weird idols, too, and monstrous masks and great fans from Tonkin and Madagascar, and relics of fighting in Mexico. On the long table lay albums of photographs, and upon either side were ranged chairs as if for officers to sit in council.

"Whenever we wish to do a guest honour, we bring him here," said the colonel. "We are not rich, and have nothing better to offer; except, perhaps, our music."

"I have already heard the music," answered Max. "I shall never forget it. And I shall never forget this room."

"Such music wakes the hearts of men, and helps inspire them to heroic acts like these." Colonel DeLisle waved his hand toward some of the pictures which showed soldiers fighting the Legion's most historic battles. "I am rather proud of our music and our men. This room, too, and the things in it—most of all the flag. My daughter has spent hours in the Salle d'Honneur looking over our records. Presently she will join us. But I wanted to thank you before she came. Corisande is a child, knowing little of the world and its ways. Some men in your place would have misunderstood her—in the unusual circumstances. But you did not. You proved yourself a friend in need for my little girl, on her strange journey to me. I wish in return there might be some way in which I could show myself a friend to you. Can you think of any such way?"

The voice was earnest and very kind. A great reaction from his first prejudice against the speaker swept over Max. Beneath this one voice which questioned him and waited for an answer, he heard as a deep, thrilling undertone the voice of the Legion which had called to him through the music to come and share its bath of fire. A sudden purpose awoke in Max Doran, and he knew then that it had been in the background of his mind for days, waiting for some word to wake it. Now the word had come. All his blood seemed to rush from heart to head, and he grew giddy: yet he spoke steadily enough.

"I have thought of a way, Colonel DeLisle!"

"I am glad. You have only to tell me."

"Accept me as one of your men. Let me join the Legion."

"Mon Dieu!" The Legion's colonel was taken completely by surprise. Max had thought he might perhaps have expected the request, but evidently it was not so. The dapper little figure straightened itself. And from his place beside his adored flag, Colonel DeLisle gazed across to the other side where, close also to the flag, stood the young man he had wished to serve. Max met his eyes, flushed and eager and, it seemed, pathetically young. There was dead silence for an instant. Then DeLisle spoke in a changed tone: "Do you mean this? Have you thought of what you are saying?"

"I do mean it," Max replied. "I believe I have thought of it ever since I saw those men of all countries getting out of the train to join the Legion. I felt the call they had felt. But it is stronger to-day. I know now what I want. In the Salle D'Honneur of the Legion I decide on my career."

"Decide!" the other repeated. "No, not that, yet! You have got this idea into your head because you are romantic. You think you are ruined and that the future doesn't matter. You will find it does. This is no place for poetry and romance—my God, no! It's a fiery furnace. In barracks we should burn the romance out of you in twenty-four hours."

"If I've got more in me than any man who loves adventure ought to have, then I want it burned out," said Max.

"Adventures will cost you less elsewhere," almost sneered DeLisle.

"I don't ask to get them cheap," Max still insisted. "Though I've got nothing to pay with, except myself, my blood, and flesh, and muscles."

"That's good coin," exclaimed the elder, warming again. "Yet we can't take it. You may think you know what you mean. But you don't know what the Legion means. I do. I've had nearly twenty years of it."

"You love it?"

"Yes, it is my life. But—I have to remind you, I entered it as an officer. There is all the difference."

"At least I should be a soldier. I know what a soldier's hardships are."

"Ah, not in the Legion!"

"It can't kill me."

"It might."

"Let it, then. I'll die learning to be a man."

DeLisle looked at his companion intently. "I think," he said, "you are a man."

"No, sir, I'm not," Max contradicted him abruptly. "I used to hope I might pass muster as men go. But these last days I've been finding myself out. I've been down in hell, and I shouldn't have got there if I were a man. I'm a self-indulgent, pining, and whining boy, thinking of nothing but myself, and not knowing whether I've done right or wrong. If the Legion can't teach me what's white and what's black, nothing can."

The colonel of the Legion laughed a queer, short laugh. "That is true," he said. "I take back those words of mine about poetry and romance. You've got the right point of view, after all. And you are the kind of man the Legion wants, the born soldier, lover of adventure for adventure's sake. You would come to us not because you have anything to hide, or because you prefer barracks in France to prison at home, or because some woman has thrown you over," (just there his keen eyes saw the young man wince, and he hurried on without a pause) "but because we've made some history, we of the Legion, and you would like a chance to make some for yourself, under this"—and he pointed to the flag whose folds hung between them—"Valeur et Discipline! That's the Legion's motto, for the Legion itself must be Dieu et Patrie for most of its sons. I've done my duty as a friend in warning you to go where life is easier. As colonel of the First Regiment, I welcome you, if you sincerely wish to come into the Legion. Only——"

"Only what, sir?"

"My daughter! She wanted me to help you. She'll think I've hindered, instead."

"No, Colonel. She hoped I'd join the Legion."

DeLisle looked surprised. "What reason have you for supposing that?"

"Interpreting a thing she said, or, rather, a thing she wanted to say, but was afraid to say for fear I might blame her some day in the future."

"She, knowing nothing of the Legion, recommended you to join? That is strange."

"She knew a little of me and my circumstances. I'd been a soldier, and there seemed only one convenient way for a man without a name or country to start and become a soldier again. Miss DeLisle saw that."

"You're talking of me?" inquired Sanda's voice at the half-open door. Both men sprang to open it for her. As she came into the Salle d'Honneur, she seemed to bring with her into this room, sacred to dead heroes of all lands, the sweetness of spring flowers to lay on distant graves. And as she stepped over the threshold, like a young soldier she saluted the flag.

"I have just said to Colonel DeLisle that you would approve of my joining the Legion," Max explained. "Have I told him the truth?"

The girl looked anxiously from one man to the other. She was rather pale and subdued, as if life pressed hardly even upon her. "You guessed what I wouldn't let myself say in the train the other day!" she exclaimed. "But—you haven't joined, have you?"

"Not yet, or I shouldn't be here. The Salle d'Honneur is for common soldiers only when they're dead, I presume."

"But you could become an officer some day, couldn't he, father?"

"Yes," replied Colonel DeLisle. "Every soldier of the Legion has his chance. And our friend is French, I think, from what you've told me of his confidences to you. That gives an extra chance to rise. France—rightly or wrongly, but like all mothers—favours her own sons. Besides, he has been a soldier, which puts him at once ahead of the others."

"I shouldn't trade on that! I'd rather begin on a level with other men, not ahead of them," Max said hastily. "My object would be not to teach, but to learn—to cure myself of my faults——"

The colonel drew a deep breath, like a sigh. "We do cure men sometimes, men far more desperate, men with souls far more sick than yours. There's that to be said for us."

"His soul isn't sick at all!" Sanda cried out, in defence of her friend.

"Perhaps he thinks it is." Colonel DeLisle looked at Max as he had looked after those chance words of his about a woman.

"Do you think that, Mr. Doran?" the girl questioned incredulously. "I shall be disappointed if you do."

"Don't be disappointed. I do not think my soul is sick. I want to see how strong it can be, and my body, too. But you mustn't call me 'Mr. Doran' now, please. It isn't my name any more. Colonel DeLisle, may I ask your daughter to choose a name for a new soldier of the Legion? It will be the last favour, for I understand perfectly that after I've joined the regiment, as a private soldier, you can be my friends only at heart. Socially, all intercourse must end."

"Oh, no, it wouldn't be so," Sanda cried out impulsively, though the old officer was silent. "It wouldn't, if I were not going away."

"You are going away?" Max was conscious of a faint chill. He would have found some comfort in the thought that his brave little travelling companion was near, even though he seldom saw and never spoke to her.

"Not home to the aunts! I told you I'd never go back to live with them, and my father wouldn't send me. But there's to be a long march—— Oh, have I said what I oughtn't? Why? Since he must know if he joins? Anyhow, I can't stay here many days longer—I mean, for the present. I'm to be sent to a wonderful place. It will be a great romance."

"Sanda, it is irrelevant to talk of that now," Colonel DeLisle reminded his daughter.

"Forgive me! I forgot, father. May I—name the new soldier, and wish him joy?"

DeLisle laughed rather bitterly. "'Joy' isn't precisely the word. If he hoped for it, he would soon be disillusioned. You may give him a name, if he wishes it. But let me also give him a few words of advice. Monsieur Doran——"

"St. George!" broke in Sanda. "That is to be his name. I christen him, close to the flag. Soldier, saint, slayer of dragons." She did not add "my patron saint," but Max remembered, and was grateful.

"Soldier Saint George, then," DeLisle began again, smiling, "this is my advice as your friend and well-wisher: again, I say, why should you not take advantages you have fairly earned? My men are wonderful soldiers. I suppose in the world there can be none braver, few so brave; for they nearly all come to heal or hide some secret wound that makes them desperate or careless of life. They are glorious soldiers, these foreigners of ours! But at the beginning you will see them at their worst in the dulness of barrack life. There are all sorts and conditions, from the lowest to the highest. You may happen to be among some of the lowest. Why not start where you are entitled to start? When, in being recruited, you are asked to state your profession, you're at liberty to say what you choose. No statement as to name, age, country, or occupation is disputed in the Legion. But once more, let me advise you, if you write yourself down "Soldier," things can be made comparatively easy for you."

"I thank you, sir, and I will take your advice in everything else. But I don't want things made easy."

"You may regret your obstinacy."

"Oh, father," pleaded Sanda, "wouldn't you be the very one to do the same thing?"

"In his place," said Colonel DeLisle, shrugging his shoulders, "I suppose I should do what he does. What I might do, isn't the question, however. But I've said enough.... Now I have to get back to barracks. For you, Sanda, this must be 'good-bye,' I fear, to the friend of your journey."

"My friend for always," the girl amended, holding out her hand to Max. "And I'd rather say 'Au revoir' than 'Good-bye'; we shall meet again—away in the desert, perhaps."

She caught her father's warning eye and stopped. "Good-bye, then—Soldier of the Legion."

"If he doesn't change his mind," muttered DeLisle. "There's still time."

Max looked from the girl to the flag in its glass case.

"I shall not change my mind," he said.