The Little Blue Devil/Driftwood

Achille Chambasse let Tony go without much objection, and what he did make was mainly histrionic. True, it was not convenient to lose his mousse just then, but as the matter-of-fact Antoine reminded him (not meaning to be in the least annoying) he had often said that the world was overflowing with millions of better and more useful boys. He was fond of Tony too, and the boy’s proud mouth and anxious eyes touched him. If it had been his small Pierre-Edouard standing there asking for a chance of education—nom d’un nom! After all, there was no denying that the boy was well-born and should not be allowed to grow up like the beasts, and these religieux were of his mother’s people that was well too. Enfin, he would make a sacrifice and Antoine should go, and take his wages into the bargain. Let Antoine embrace him (this was a ceremony that Tony had never learnt to undergo otherwise than as a trial). And when the Deux-Frères called again at Smyrna Antoine should come down and see them all and show off his learning. “Bien! Es-tu content, mon rat?”

​Tony was more than glad, and the patron’s name went down in gold letters in his mental account-book.

He soon settled down at the Mission, though the life there was quite as strange to him as that in the Deux Frères had been, or stranger. Agatha’s father, a mild, spectacled man with a brown beard turning grey, had accepted him very calmly. He was used to vagabonds and rather liked them. The others did not take much notice of Tony—he was Agatha’s protégé. She was fond of him, though she would have liked him to be more affectionate, and though some of his ideas distressed her acutely.

He taught the native children conversational French; that is to say, he talked to them in that language, and jeered so bitterly when they made mistakes that they did their best to speak correctly. His method, if such it could be called, was most successful. Even the bigger boys were cowed by his virulent tongue; they were mild creatures for the most part, though greatly given to bragging. They loved stories of Tony’s travels in Europe and the East—Japan was sufficiently remote to be interesting—though they liked the European tales better still.

Agatha meanwhile was teaching him. She had no complaint to make of his application and intelligence; it is not often that an active boy of ten and a half studies as hard as Tony did; but his ideas on ethics were deplorable, and as she told her father, he was so hard and loveless sometimes.

“You mustn’t scowl at Ibrahim like that, and I’m sure you’re calling him wicked names. I don’t understand your French when you talk so fast. But he mustn’t, must he, papa?”

“You mustn’t show temper. It is a bad example for the other boys.”

One could never deny the truth of any of Mr. Wilcox’s ​remarks, but somehow Tony was seldom impressed by them. Now he addressed himself to Agatha.

“Ibrahim’s always trying to make things hard for me; he does his best to work the others up too.”

“But you mustn’t be unforgiving, Tony. Forgive and forget, you know.”

“But I don’t. I always remember. When people are nice to me too. I’ll pay it all back-that’s why I don’t want you to do too much for me, it makes it hard. . . . I hate owing things. . . . My father too. . . . but I was forgetting then; I said I wouldn’t talk of that any more.”

“But, Tony, that’s dreadful.”

“Well then, I’m dreadful. Nobody taught me that—it’s just there.”

“But we all owe each other things, we must make up our minds to that; but we can always go on paying back, though it’s not always possible to pay the very people we owe things to. Don’t you see, Tony, that it all comes to the same thing in the end—it’s very beautiful, I think—if everyone remembers to pay somebody for kindnesses they have received? Don’t you see how it all works out? And as for forgiving, we must forgive as we hope to be forgiven.”

Agatha, flushed with earnestness and extremely pleased with her own arguments, which she knew were true, though she had never put them into words before, ceased, and glanced at Tony to see what impression she was making, but that small person was annoyingly silent. Agatha knew she had sounded rather muddled, but it was all so plain and true really—he surely must see it as she did.

Tony hugged his knees and stared, intent but unseeing, at the small bald patch at the back of Mr. Wilcox’s head, which bobbed up and down with unfailing regularity as the missionary wrote. Agatha waited patiently for his reply, which came at last but was hardly satisfactory.

​“Seems to me it’s not much use trying to change that fixed part of me when there's such a lot of other things to learn. It’d take such an awful time.”

Tony had been at the Mission for nearly three months when Colonel von Braunitz came into his life. He was a white-moustached, distinguished-looking Austrian gentleman, a globe-trotter of many years’ experience, and Tony met him during play-hours on the quay. Von Braunitz took a fancy to Tony and offered to take him to Egypt, as the boy had said he wanted to “see things.” Tony asked the Wilcoxes, who, though slightly hurt at his readiness to leave them, really found it convenient, as they were leaving Smyrna in March for a holiday in England and Tony had been rather a problem. He could not very well be left at the Mission for the next comer, as he was not one of the legitimate responsibilities, and they could not afford to take him with them.

He left next day, really sorry to say good-bye, and feeling more like a bit of driftwood than ever, especially as the understanding with Braunitz was that the position—“Which is hard to define, Anton—shall we say Court fool, or would jester please your vanity better?”—was not permanent. Tony had nodded to that.

“And—my temper is uncertain, my child. I may throw boots at you.”

“So’s mine,” said Tony with obvious truth. “I may throw them back.”

Braunitz’ bushy white eyebrows went up. “It is not necessary to be—what you call cheeky. Are you English enough to understand that, little hybrid?”

Tony grinned. “Court fools were,” he said. “Only the other day Miss Wilcox was reading about that. And I know what ‘cheeky’ means quite well—I’d rather talk English to you than French.”

​The word he did not understand was “hybrid,” but he would not ask its meaning, guessing from the tone in which it was spoken that it was not exactly complimentary. He determined to look it up when he had a chance.

Braunitz’s own English was almost as good as his French, and that was perfect. He enjoyed talking to Tony, and—a circumstance that the latter appreciated—he did not ask unnecessary questions. In his own mind he classed Tony as an unusually forceful specimen of the hotel-child, that modern product which is sprinkled over the tourist routes of the world in the trail of its restless parents, who go to hot places in the winter and cool places in the summer. It chatters and is blasé and has no country of its own.

Tony did not chatter, but he was undemonstrative enough to seem as blasé as any of his kind, and his knowledge of hotels was wide and varied. He had, however, rarely patronised them in such comfort and security as for the next month. They went lazily up the Nile, and then back again to Cairo, and he felt more childish than he had for years. Karnak and Luxor meant pure enjoyment to him, freed as he was from responsibility and from the irritant of his father’s presence which had bitten into his soul as soon as he left babyhood behind—which he had done far too early. He had no love for Braunitz, but he respected him as a powerful and selfish person who paid his way and who was not to be trifled with: he knew that he was no more indispensable to Braunitz than any paper-covered railway novel that is thrown away at the journey’s end; and yet when, at Cairo, he was told that there was no further use for him, he felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his world.

He took it like a stoic. Braunitz looked at him curiously. He had expected something different—not tears, he was too good a judge of character for that, but anger, or perhaps childish bitterness. Perhaps, too, he would have been better ​pleased if the boy had asked to stay with him, though he would not have agreed to that, being tired of his toy.

“Here’s a hundred piastres,” he said; “it will last you till you find someone—be sure of that. You will fall on your feet—you are light enough.”

Tony thanked him, staring sombrely.

“You’ve always been on your feet,” he was thinking. “You never had to fall.”

He went out aimlessly into the street and faced black despair. Not that he felt poverty-stricken; on the contrary, he had never possessed so much money in one lump—something over a pound—but nobody wanted him. It came home to him more than ever it had before.

He knew that he must leave that place (and he had loved Shepheard’s too!) and find something to do quickly, for the money would not last. Still, he was older now, and more valuable—and perhaps someone would want a guide; he knew as much as some guides!—and a hundred piastres was quite a lot to go on with. . . .

It was nine full years before Tony dared let his mind dwell on the fortnight which followed. No tourist did want a guide; they were extremely suspicious of a European boy who came cadging like that. Some tried to drive him away with their umbrellas; he backed from them, showing his teeth in a silent snarl, like a dog you strike at as you drive past it. The tourists not unnaturally congratulated themselves on not having softened towards that beggar. And gold is hard for a little boy to change, especially as he gets shabbier and hungrier-looking. The man who did change one of his fifty-piastre pieces at last gave him much less than the full value, but Tony was glad to take anything by then. He got food—plenty of bad food—and lodging for the night. And when he woke he found that the other fifty-piastres had disappeared. He knew that it had been stolen, but said ​nothing. By now he had learnt that it would be impossible to make good his claim to it, and he did not dare try. His courage was at a low ebb.

He tramped about looking for work till his feet burnt like fire and all his muscles ached, but he had no luck. He was out of place in Cairo. He had spent his last piastre when, out of pity, they took him on at the Hôtel Lafayette. It was a pity that ran no risk of hurting itself; Tony was to work for his food and shelter and get no pay, but just then he was glad of the chance.