XI

XI

The months went by. Hector ended his course at the School of Technical Military Instruction with honors, and his examiners, in recognition of the gift for languages, the bent for Science, the administrative and organizing capacities that were distinctive of this student, transferred him, with another equally promising youth, not to the Academy of Ways, Works, and Transport, where the embryo artillery and engineer officers of the School of Technical Military Instruction were usually ground and polished, but to the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff. An annual bounty tacked to the tail of the certificate relieved that pressing necessity for pocket-money. Redskin, with fewer anxieties upon his mind, could draw breath.

The Training Institute for Officers of the Staff was the School of Technical Military Instruction all over again, but upon a hugely magnified scale. To mention the School was the unpardonable sin: you spent the first term in laboriously unlearning everything that had been taught you there. On being admitted to the small gate adjacent to the large ones of wrought and gilded iron, you beheld the façade of the Institute, its great portico crowned with a triangular pediment supported upon stately pillars, upon which was sculptured an emblematical bas-relief of France, seated on a trophy of conquered cannon, instructing her sons in the military sciences, and distributing among them weapons of war. Following your guide, you shortly afterwards discovered two large yards full of young men in unbuttoned uniforms, supporting on their knees drawing-boards with squares of cartridge paper pinned upon them, upon which they were busily delineating the various architectural features of the buildings of the Institute, while a Colonel of the Corps of Instructors sternly or blandly surveyed the scene. Within the Institute, studies in Mathematics, Trigonometry and Topography, Cosmography, Geography, Chemistry, Artillery, Field Fortifications, Permanent Fortifications, Assault and Defense, Plans, Military Administration, Military Maneuvers, French, English, and German Literature, Fencing, Swimming,and Horsemanship in all its branches were thoroughly and comprehensively taught. And once a quarter the pupil-basket was picked over by skilled hands; and worthy young men, who were eminently fitted to serve their country in the inferior capacity as regimental officers, but did not possess the qualities necessary for the making of Officers of the Staff, were, at that little gate by the side of the great gilded iron ones, blandly shown out.

For, sane even in her maddest hour, France has never—under every conceivable political condition, in every imaginable national crisis, and under whatever government—Monarchical, Imperial, or Republican, that may for the time being have got the upper hand—ceased laboring to insure the supply to her Army, constantly renewed, of officers competent to command armies, of scientists skilled in the innumerable moves of the Great Game of War. Nor have other nations, Continental or insular, ever failed to profit by France’s example, and follow France’s lead.

The Marshal’s son was not dismissed by that dreaded little exit. The fine flower of Young France grew in the neat parterres behind those lofty gilded railings. Sous-lieutenant Hector Dunoisse found many intellectual superiors among his comrades, whose society stimulated him to greater efforts. He worked, and presently began to win distinction; passed, with a specially-endorsed certificate, his examinations in the branches of study already enumerated and a few more; served for three months as Supernumerary-Assistant-Adjutant with an Artillery Regiment at Nancy; did duty for a corresponding period in the same capacity at Belfort with a corps of Engineers; and then received his appointment as Assistant-Adjutant to the 33rd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, quartered at Blidah.

Money would not be needed to make life tolerable at Blidah, where mettlesome Arab horses could be bought by Chasseurs d’Afrique at reasonable prices, and the mastic and the thin Dalmatian wine were excellent and cheap. Algerian cigars and pipe-tobacco were obtainable at the outlay of a few coppers; and from every thicket of dwarf oak or alfa-grass, hares started out before the sportsman’s gun; and partridges and Carthage hens were as plentiful as sparrows in Paris.

Yet even at Blidah Dunoisse knew the nip of poverty, and there were times when the pack that de Moulny’s hand had bound upon his shoulders galled him sore. For—the stroke of a pen and one could have had all one wanted. It needed no more than that.

For in Paris, at the big hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, in the book-lined, weapon-adorned, half library, half smoking-room that was Redskin’s private den, and had been the boudoir of Marie Bathilde; there lay in a locked drawer of the inlaid ebony writing-table, a white parchment-covered pass-book inscribed with the name of Hector Dunoisse, and a book of pretty green-and-blue checks upon the Messieurs Rothschild, 9, Rue d’Artois. The dip of a quill in the ink, and one of the bland, well-dressed, middle-aged, discreet-looking cashiers behind the golden grilles and the broad, gleaming rosewood counters, would have opened a metal-lined drawer of gold louis, and plunged a copper shovel into the shining mass and filled the pockets of young Hector; or more probably would have wetted a skillful forefinger and thumb—run over a thick roll of crackling pink, or blue, or graybillets de banque, jotted down the numbers, and handed the roll across the counter to its owner, with a polite bow.

“So you think there is a curse upon my money, eh?” Monsieur the Marshal had said, upon an occasion when one of those scenes that leave ineffaceable scars upon the memory, had taken place between the father and the son.

Hector, spare, upright, muscular, lithe, ruddy of hue, bright of eye, steady of nerve, newly issued from the mint and stamped with the stamp of the Training Institute, and appointed to join his regiment in Algeria, turned pale under the reddish skin. He was silent.

“You have used none of it since you heard that story,hein? It would defile the soul and dirty the hands,hein?” queried Monsieur the Marshal, plunging one of his own into the waistcoat-pocket where he kept his snuff, and taking an immense pinch. “Yet let me point out that the allowance you disburse in pious alms and so forth——” Hector jumped, and wondered how his father had found out, and then decided that it was only a good piece of guessing, “may not be any portion of your mother’s dowry. I was not poor when I recovered those three hundred-and-twenty-thousandsilver thalers from the Prioress of the Carmelite Convent at Widinitz. I wished to be so much richer, that is all!”

“Poverty,” said his son, breathing sharply through the nostrils and looking squarely in the Marshal’s swollen, fierce-eyed, bushily-whiskered face, “poverty would have been some excuse—if anything could have excused so great an——”

“‘Infamy,’ was the word you were going to use,” said Monsieur the Marshal, smiling across his great false teeth of Indian ivory, which golden bands retained in his jaws, and scattering Spanish snuff over his white kersey, tightly-strapped pantaloons, as he trumpeted loudly in a voluminous handkerchief of yellow China silk. “Pray do not hesitate to complete the sentence.”

But Hector did not complete the sentence. The Marshal went on, shrugging his shoulders and waving his ringed hands: “After all, it is better to be infamous than idiotic. You hamper your career by playing the incorruptible; you are put to stupid shifts for money when plenty of money lies at your command.”

“Do I not know that?”

“You have won honors, and with them a reputation for parsimony—are called a brilliant screw,—name of a thousand devils!—among your comrades. You coach other men for pay; you translate foreign technical works for military publishers; you burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. It is all very honorable and scrupulous, but would those who have sneered at you think better of you if they knew the truth? You know they would not! Instead of being despised, you would be laughed at for playing Don Quixote. That is one of the books I have read,” Monsieur the Marshal added, pricked by the evident surprise with which his son received this unexpected testimony of his parent’s literacy. “One can get some useful things out of a book like that, even though the hero of it is mad as a March hare. It is one of the books with blood and marrow in them, as the Emperor would have said: books that—unlike those of your Chateaubriands, Hugos, Lamartines, the devil knows who else!—are the literature that nourish men who are alive, not wooden puppets of virtue and propriety whose strings are pulled by priests—sacred name of——”

The Marshal went on, as his son stood silent before him, to lash himself into a frenzy of rage that imperiled the seams of a tight-waisted high-collared frock-coat of Frogé’s own building, and gave its wearer what the Germans term a red head; with such accompaniments of gasping and snorting, rollings of the eyes and starting of the forehead-veins as are painfully suggestive of bleedings and sinapisms; cuppings and hot bricks; soft-footed personages with shiny black bags, candles, wreaths of white, purple and yellowimmortellesinscribed with “Regrets,” and all the plumed pomp and sable circumstance of a funeral procession to the Cemetery of Père La Chaise. He wound up at last, or rather, ran down; sank, puffing and perspiring and purple, into an easy chair.... Hector, who had listened with an unmoved countenance and heels correctly approximated, bowed and left the room, across which a broad ray of sunshine fell from the high, velvet-draped windows, across the inlaid ebony writing-table near which the Marshal lay back, wheezing and scowling, and muttering.... The thousands of shining motes that danced in that wide golden beam might have been wasps; the old man about whom they sported was so goaded and stung. Who wants to watch the Marshal in his hour of rageful humiliation.... He fumed and cursed awhile under his dyed mustaches, and then hit on an idea which made him chuckle and grin. He wheeled round, and splashed off a huge blotty letter to his bankers, and from that day the sum of One Million One Hundred and Twenty-five Thousand Francs stood to the credit of Hector Dunoisse upon Rothschild’s books, and stood untouched.... One did not need much money out in Algeria, the temptation to dip into the golden store was barely felt, the malice of the Marshal was not to be gratified just yet awhile.

Though perhaps it was not altogether malice that inspired that action of Monsieur. His son forgot to question before long; forgot that old desertion of de Moulny’s and its fanged tooth; forgot that check-book dimming with dust that drifted through the keyhole of the locked drawer in the writing-table, whose key was on his ring.

For there came a day when the boy—for he was little more—rode out at the Algiers Gate in command of a squadron of Chasseurs d’Afrique, under orders to reinforce the Zouaves garrisoning a hill-fort in Kabylia, threatenedwith siege by a rebellious Arab Kaïd who had thrown up his office, and his pay, and declared war against the Francos.

The rustle of the white cap-cover against his epaulet as he turned his head, the jingle of the scabbard against his stirrup, the clink of the bridle, made pleasant harmony with the other clinking and jingling. The air was cool before dawn, and the blue shadow of mighty Atlas stretched far over the plain of Metidja. In the deep-foliaged sycamores; from the copses of mastic, the nightingales trilled: turtle-doves were drinking and bathing in the mountain-rills, Zachar lifted a huge stony brow upon the horizon.... A slender young trooper with a high, reedy, tenor voice, sang an Arab song; his comrades joined in the chorus:

“Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor. Ride on! Who knows what lies at the end of the long journey? Ride on!

“Life and Love, Death and Sleep, these are from the Hand of the Giver. Ride on! Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor! Ride on!”

So Dunoisse rode on; the feet of his Arab mare falling softly on the thick white dust of the Dalmatie Road. And the great mysterious East rose up before him, smiling her slow, mystic smile, and opened her olive-hued, jeweled arms, and drew the boy of twenty to her warm, perfumed bosom, and kissed him with kisses that are potent philters, and wove around him her magic spells. And he forgot all the things that it had hurt him so to remember, for a space of two years.

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