He began by saying he thought it very decent of me not to have complained to the consul-general.
But I followed the banker’s instructions carefully and the major left with the impression that the least I wanted was the degradation of the provost marshal to the ranks, together with personal apologies from all concerned to almost everybody in America. The banker, who was present during the interview, dropped hints at intervals about my financial connections.
The General Staff was busy and worried, and in no mood to pause in its stride for the sake of a provost marshal’s dignity. Somebody higher up told him sharply that he must straighten the tangle out himself at once, or take the consequences; so he took the only course left to him and sent one of his assistants to ask for an appointment for his chief.
On the banker’s advice, I wasn’t in. But the door was open between the two rooms; the banker did the talking and I listened. “You know what these Americans are—pig-headed men. Once they’re set on a course they’re hard to turn. This man is a pretty good fellow, but he’s no man’s fool to be pacified with a perfunctory apology.”
“What does he want, then? Does he expect the provost to walk here on foot with peas in his boots and call out Peccavi through the back door? He’s crazy if he expects a man like Colonel Gootch to come and grovel to him.”
“I don’t think it would amuse him in the least to see anybody grovel.”
“Well, what does he want?”
“An apology, of course. He was publicly insulted; he’s entitled to an apology in public, and as a guest in my house I’d expect him to demand at least that. But he wants more. As a practical man he demands some practical proof of regret and of willingness to make amends.”
“Good Lord! You mean money?”
“Of course I don’t, nor does he. You know better than that. At the time of the insult he had an Australian with him—Sergeant Jeremy Ross by name—an old friend whom he’d met that afternoon for the first time in ten years. It seems the Australian was the cause of all the trouble—out of bounds at my friend’s invitation in a place reserved for officers. The Australian was very severely punished as well as reduced to the ranks, and my friend feels badly about it.”
“Good God! D’you mean he expects Gootch to go and kiss the sergeant on both cheeks and beg his pardon?”
“Hardly But you may tell Provost Marshal Gootch privately from me that if he cared to arrange that Australian’s transfer to Akaba for special duty under Captain Grim, there’s no doubt I could persuade my friend to accept an apology in this room and let the whole matter drop.”
“But Colonel Gootch hasn’t anything to do with transfers.”
“He has influence. Let him use it. You’d better make it clear to Colonel Gootch that he’ll have me to deal with unless he does the right thing pretty quickly. I have business at headquarters tomorrow noon. It might be best for all concerned if I could say at that time that the air is clear again. I’ve heard of bigger men than Gootch being transferred to less agreeable duties.”
“Well, I’ll tell him.”
“Put it bluntly. will you? Tell him you talked with me.” Gootch understood the situation and got busy. Napoleon may have told the truth about the British in that famous remark of his; maybe he spoke collectively; but I can certify that one highhanded colonel, at all events, knew when he was beaten. Jeremy was excused from digging holes that afternoon, and his transfer to Akaba was arranged the same evening.
The apology to me, too, left nothing to be desired; it began by being stiff and throaty, but ended in armchairs with whisky-and-soda. In fact, I rather think Gootch and I were on good terms before he left: it was his suggestion that I might like to travel with Jeremy as far as Port Said, and he provided me a pass that came pretty near to being the key of Egypt.
So I traveled in a troop-train through a hot night, listening to Jeremy’s accounts of what had happened to him in the years between. It seemed he had even been a police-court magistrate, and had done almost everything else from trading horses down to conjuring in small towns with a traveling vaudeville troupe. But he thought that none of the things that he had done were half as inexplicably marvelous as my getting him that transfer for special duty under James Schuyler Grim the American, and he swore friendship forever on the strength of it.
This time he waved good-by with his cock’s-plume hat from the deck of a decrepit tug in the Suez Canal, and his last words were of jubilantly roared advice to me to get attached to Grim’s command in some way.
“Grim’s the real thing,” he shouted. “Come along and see life!”
At the last glimpse I had he was dancing on the tug’s poop, laughing and making friends with everyone on board. He had promised to write, but of course he didn’t, and the letters I wrote to him were all returned eventually marked “undelivered for reason stated.” The fact that the reason wasn’t stated hardly shed much light on Jeremy’s career.
However, I received news of him almost simultaneously with those undelivered but carefully censored returned letters of mine. My banker friend in Cairo wrote to me after I got back to the States, enclosing a clipping from an official list of casualties. It read:
Trooper Jeremy Wallace Ross.
—th Australian Light Horse.
On special duty Akaba. Missing.
I wrote in vain for further details. Nothing seemed to be known about him, and although the authorities were courteous and apparently took great pains to find out for me, “presumably dead” was the final official verdict. So I wished I hadn’t engineered his transfer to Akaba, and more or less forgot him once again.
CHAPTER III
“Protection looks best from a long way off.”
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
