LITMIR.BIZ

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wait another five hours, Mr. Discharged Legionary," said the functionary, "and come again at 9.20 for your third single to Oran—if you are not too drunk. Meanwhile, you cannot sleep here, unless it is in the permanent-way with your ugly neck across a rail."

      The time-expired considered this.

      "No, I go on a Quest," said he, and the station-master, with a gesture of a spatulate thumb in the direction of the door, indicated that the sooner the son of a camel commenced it the better for all concerned.

      He was an unsympathetic person—but then he was held responsible when unconsidered trifles of Government property were stolen from the station precincts. And it is well known that a Legionary will steal the wall-paper from your wall while your back is turned, cut it up small, and try to sell it back to you as postage-stamps as soon as darkness sets in.

      Ex-No. 32867 got to his feet once more, marched mechanically to barracks, was somewhat roughly handled by the guard at the order of Sergeant Legros, and, having staunched the bleeding from his nose, split lip, and cut cheek with the lining of his beret, made his way to the Café de la Legion. Entering, he bowed to Carmelita with a dignified flourish of his pulpy beret, fell at full length on the floor, and went to sleep.

      "Queer, how differently drink takes different people," mused Carmelita, as she again applied the cushion to supporting the battered head—and yet she had hitherto known this Guillaume Iyoné or Dhyoni (or William Jones!) of the IIIrd Company, as a soldier of the soberest and quietest. Quite like old Jean Boule of the VIIth. Doubtless he had been "wetting his discharge papers." Apparently he had done it to the point of drowning them.

      At l'heure verte, l'heure de l'absinthe, the café began to fill, and for a time the sleeper was undisturbed by the va et vient of Carmelita's customers....

      "'Ullo, Cocky!" remarked le Légionnaire 'Erbiggin ("'Erb"), entering with his compatriots Rupert and John Bull, followed by the Grasshopper and the Bucking Bronco. "Gorn to yer pore 'ed, 'as it? Come hup—an' 'ave s'more," and he sought to rouse the sleeper.

      "Strike me strange ef it 'ent thet com-patriot o' yourn, John," said the Bucking Bronco. "Willie the Jones, o' the IIIrd Company.... Guess he's got a hard cider jag. Didn't know he ever fell off the water-cart any."

      "William Jones" sat up.

      "Really, I beg your pardon," he said, "I thought I..." and then peered through the heavy blanketing veil that was daily thickening between him and his fellow-men.

      "He's no more drunk than I am," said John Bull.... "I suppose he's just discharged. I thought he was in hospital.... Looks as though he ought to be, anyhow."

      "I have rested, and I must begin my Quest," said "William Jones," Ex-No. 32867. "I have a glorious Quest to undertake, and I have little time. I..."

      "Yus. Ingkquest's abaht your mark, Cocky," observed 'Erb. "Crowner's ingkquest."

      "Help me up," added the sick man. "I must begin my Quest."

      "De sot homme, sot songe," murmured La Cigale, shaking his head mournfully. "I too have Quests, but they tangle and jangle in my brain—and folk say I am mad or drunk.... Some will say you are mad, mon ami, and some will say you are drunk."

      "Are you going to England?" asked John Bull, as he helped the man to his feet.

      "England? ... England? ... Oh, yes. I am going to England. Where should I go? She lives in England," was the reply.

      "Have you friends?"

      "She is my Friend. Of Friendship she is the Soul and the Essence."

      "Chacun aime comme il est," remarked the Grasshopper. "This is a gentleman," and added, "Il n'y a guere de femme assez habile pour connaître tout le mal qu'elle fait."

      "I allow we oughter take him daown town to the railway deepôt and see him on the cars," put in the Bucking Bronco. "Ef we don't tote him thar an' tell him good-bye, it's the looney-house for his. He'll set down in the bazaar and go as maboul¹⁴ as a kief¹⁵-smoker." ...

      "I was going to say we'd better see him off," agreed John Bull. "If he gets to England, he'll have more chance than as a discharged Legionary in Algiers—or France either. Wish we could get an address from him. We could tie a label on him."

      But they could not, and after the Bucking Bronco had procured him food from Carmelita's "pie-foundry," as he termed her modest table d'hôte, they took him to the station and, under the cold eye of the Sergeant of the Guard at the platform gate, saw him off....

      As one in a dream, as one seeing through a glass darkly and beholding men as trees walking, Ex-No. 32867, William Jones, alias Geoffry Brabazon-Howard, Esquire, made his way to London. There is a providence that watches over children and drunken men, and Ex-No. 32867 was as a compound of both. He knew he was exceeding ill and quite abnormal in some directions, such as never being quite certain as to whether he was really doing and experiencing things, or was dreaming; but what he did not realize was that, concurrently with severe insomnia, he was liable at any moment to fall suddenly asleep for a few minutes, wherever he might be, and whatever he might be doing. He was aware that he had brief periods of "abstraction," but was quite unaware that they were periods of profound slumber. Unfortunately they only endured for a few seconds or a few minutes, and, though serving to place him in endless dangerous, ridiculous, and awkward situations, did not amount to anything approaching a "living-wage" of sleep—rarely to more than an hour in the twenty-four and generally to much less.

      At times he was, for a few hours perhaps, entirely normal, to all appearances; and could talk, behave, and transact business in such a way that no casual observer would be aware of anything unusual in the man. He himself, however, when at his best, was still aware of the isolating-medium in which he moved and lived and had his being; the slowly thickening cloud, the imponderating veil, that shut him in, and cut him off, with increasing certainty and speed.

      What would happen when he could no longer pierce and penetrate this fog, or wall, of cloudy glass; this vast extinguisher of sombre web, and could hold no communication with the outer world?

      Was he becoming an idiot before becoming a paralytic, and thus having the gross presumption to reverse the order of things foretold by Médecin-Major Parme?

      On arrival at Charing Cross, he had strolled idly through the streets of London, slept on a bench in Leicester Square; had thought he was in the public gardens outside the Porte de Tlemçen at Sidi-bel-Abbès, and hoped that the Legion's famous band would come and play its sad music in that sad place; and, being "moved on," had wandered away, dazed and bewildered, going on and on until he reached Hammersmith. Here he found his way into one of those Poor Man's Hotels, a Rowton House—vaguely under the impression that it was some kind of barrack.

      Here he had a glorious time of Rest, broken only by the occasional misfortune of having a night's sleep, or rather a nightmare in the unnameable Hell to keep out of which he exerted all his failing faculties. And at the Hammersmith Rowton House he became an object of the intensest interest to such of his fellow-inhabitants of that abode of semi-starvation and hopeless misery as were not too deeply engulfed in their own struggle with despair and death to notice anything at all.

      For "William Jones" began to blossom forth into a "toff," a perfect dook, until it was the generally accepted theory that he was a swell-mobsman just out of gaol, and now working the West End in the correct garb of that locality.

      Little by little the man had replaced his old clothes by new, his beret by a correct hat, his scarf by the usual neck-wear of an English gentleman, his fourrier-sergent's suit of mufti by a Conduit Street creation, his rough boots by the most modish of cloth-topped kid; and generally metamorphosed William Jones, late of the Foreign Legion, into Geoffry Brabazon-Howard, Esq., late of St. James's Street and the United Service Club.

      In one of his hours of mental clarity and vigour, he had called at his bank and drawn the sum of ninety pounds, left at current-account

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