which bad manners are less than a mistake. So I took the question at its face value and told all I knew about Jeremy from the beginning.
Grim closed his book and listened with apparently deep interest, never interrupting once. Not one least gesture betrayed previous knowledge of the Australian; and although he smiled once or twice at the accounts of Jeremy’s misdeeds, it wasn’t with any air of being familiar with them. All the same, I still wasn’t convinced. “I can’t tell you a thing about him,” he said at last, when I had come to the end of my tale and waited for Grim to make a remark of some sort. Then he resumed his reading, holding the book so that I could no longer see his face, which may have been an accident but left me less convinced than ever.
I formed the conclusion that my friend Jeremy Ross must have done something discreditable, which Grim preferred to leave undiscussed, that it might be forgotten the sooner. Strange, isn’t it, how we jump to the worst conclusions and associate all silence with unpleasantness? Since that was my judgment of the situation, decency obliged me to keep silence too—that and a discreditable, although not unique desire to dissociate myself from the record of a man who appeared to have failed in the last pinch. That’s another strange thing, isn’t it, how decency and despicable motives run in double harness!
There were plenty of incidents after that, when I ventured with Grim and his following of born thieves into the trans-Jordan country, which brought Jeremy to mind again; but I kept my thoughts to myself and never once referred to him. Nevertheless, the more I learned of the amazing story of what Lawrence and his handful did in the war, with another handful of untrumpeted zealots toiling in their rear, the less I liked to remain ignorant of Jeremy’s share in the doings. And the more I turned over in mind what I did know of Jeremy, the less probable it seemed that what I did not know could be much to his discredit. Wild he was certainly, and free with his opinions about men and circumstances that he did not like; but it seemed increasingly incredible that Jeremy, wearing the uniform of a free man who had volunteered for foreign service, would do anything meriting the name of treason.
In my experience, free-speaking men of courage are less likely to betray their flag than are some of the patrioteers, who wave their hats in air when the flag goes by, but would sell it, and throw their country in, for less than Esau took in exchange for his birthright. Neither was Jeremy Ross a likely plunderer. There are looseended men, of course, who constitutionally can’t let alone such opportunities for pouching money as unguarded army supplies provide. But Jeremy was one of those fellows who could make money easily without stooping to dishonesty. In fact, it was bellicose honesty in harness with boisterous humor that made him rail at shams and got him so often into trouble. That kind of fellow doesn’t steal.
The only plausible supposition left, then, was the oldest in the world. Jeremy was a handsome man with a little dark mustache that turned naturally upward and made you think of d’Artagnan. He had eyes and a smile, free shoulders and a horseman’s supple loins, that together with his bubbling spirits might easily have stirred the ambition of a desert-born Delilah.
There are women in all lands who are like spiders, not content to play the vampire game, but only satisfied when they have lured, bled white and finally destroyed. Moslem countries are the last in which a wise man would run that kind of risk; but Jeremy Ross—clever, brilliant, alert, courageous—was not nearly always wise. A woman seemed the likeliest guess; but that only added to my desire to learn all the facts.
Patience, however, is my long suit. I have had to acquire that quality, for lack of some of those more marketable talents with which men born under other stars than mine seem to attain to what they want so easily. I take it that patience had quite a lot to do with Grim’s selection of me to go with him on expeditions, for I have no strategic or diplomatic genius. True, he had my services for nothing, and that is quite a consideration when you remember how poor the governments are in these days, so that all the unspectacular, unpopular departments must have their expense sheets pared to the bone.
It is also true that hard knocks and harder work in all kinds of out-of-the-way places have made me in a sort of way dependable. I have been let down too badly and too often by men who called themselves assistants, to care to submit another fellow to that sort of mortification.
I can talk Hindustani pretty well, and my skin has been burned a sort of raw mahogany color by sun and wind and sea, which makes it comparatively easy for me to pose as an Indian Moslem in places where Indians are well known by repute but rather rare. And I have learned enough Arabic to understand the drift of things, and to hold up my end in any argument. But Grim, who can act the part of an Arab so perfectly as to deceive the most suspicious of them—and there isn’t a more swiftly suspicious race under heaven—could have found dozens of men who understood the Arabs better, and who could disguise themselves and act their parts better than I.
Grim is really a long-headed imaginative business man in a peculiar environment. Even in his major’s uniform he looks the part. In civilian clothes you couldn’t possibly mistake him. He is one of those men for whom the Napoleons of commerce hunt ceaselessly, and to whom, when discovered, they pay whatever salary the find considers himself worth.
For make no mistake about it, nine-tenths of the art of making millions lies in knowing a born executive when you see him in the raw. And again, nine-tenths of an executive’s worth consists in knowing men. Grim knows all about men. He has a genius for judging just how far a given individual will go in certain circumstances. He understands how far to trust, and just when to mistrust.
And, greatest art of all, he knows how to cajole a notoriously dishonest fellow into playing straight, as well as how to forestall the vastly more difficult customers who practise knavery under the cloak of a good reputation.
So I claim it is a feather in my cap that Grim made a friend of me, and invited me to share his quarters in Jerusalem in the funny little stone house down an alley at the back of the Zionist hospital. As his friend I must count myself among a score or two of cut-throats, some of whom are in the jail this minute, and two of whom they tell me are now under sentence to be hanged. But I don’t find the association unendurable. In fact, the meannesses of what is called polite society, where men and women commit their crimes by proxy, bore me rather soon, and I’m minded to go back and meet some of those honest thieves and murderers again. I like things and people labeled with their proper names.
We didn’t use Grim’s quarters for many days on end, for the Administration wasn’t paying him to sit down and grow fat. One expedition followed another with the swiftness and almost the regularity of a motion-picture serial, and between times, when Grim wasn’t reading, there was a constant succession of visitors, who brought in scraps of information from zones not reached by rail or telegraph.
We had almost daily news of Mustapha Kemal in Anatolia. Now and then there were tales of the Bolsheviki in northern Persia, and once when I was present a hairy, swarthy, smelly fellow brought information from as far away as Samarkand. The spies who reported at headquarters on the Mount of Olives were usually sent along to Grim to repeat their story to him personally, so that before you had been in his company a week you felt as if you were posted in the center of a great map, with all the roads, tracks, wires, and rivers radiating outward from you.
Few of the visitors knew how to behave in so-called civilized surroundings, and most of them when offered a seat preferred a mat or a cushion on the floor. Your progressive Arab likes to air what he thinks are occidental manners, but the men familiar with deserts can’t disgorge their news unless you let them sit at ease in their accustomed way.
By constant repetition one peculiarity became remarkable—the farther away the place from which any of our visitors came, the more insistent that man would be that Grim should return with him to help straighten matters out.
I don’t think that meant that Grim’s fame had reached all the way to Samarkand, for instance. His Arab name,
