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;
