Arslan

the appetite of a field hand in harvest-time, and he washed every meal down with milk. The liquor didn’t come out till the day’s work was done.

He’d taken over everything except our bedroom and as much of the kitchen as Luella absolutely required for cooking. Anywhere else in my own house I might be refused admittance—at the very best, I had to share space and facilities with a bunch of enemy aliens—and those three upstairs rooms were completely off limits to me, where he presumably slept and certainly practiced his obscenities. What this came to in terms of practical living was one continual aggravating hassle. The bathroom had to serve a minimum of eleven people, counting Arslan’s bodyguard, and with the daily and nightly comers and goers there seemed to be no maximum.

It cost me an effort to open my bedroom door in the morning; and coming back to the house from outside, I could feel my neck prickle as soon as I got near the front walk. I had had that house built when I could ill afford it, when Luella and I were first married, the year after I came back to Kraftsville for good; and nobody but my family and myself had ever lived in it, and nobody had ever set foot in it without my invitation till now. And now I might as well have invited a circus in.

None of his soldiers lived in the house, strictly speaking. But there was an orderly forever popping up (the same corporal who had jumped onto the stage to tie his shoe), and there was a bodyguard of six men attending him every moment of the day and night. I counted seventeen individual guards, once I learned to tell them apart. They relieved each other according to some complicated system of rotation, so there always seemed to be a different combination of them on duty. “If it was my bodyguard,” I told Luella, “I’d have them set up in teams. You can train a team to work together.”

“It does seem inefficient this way,” she agreed. But maybe it wasn’t. They kept on their toes; they didn’t all get bored at once. Besides, it meant sharing the goodies all round. Because that bodyguard was with him enough to make voyeurism one of the main fringe benefits of their job.

Betty Hanson was still cloistered, if the word can be applied, in the northwest room. A cot had been brought in for her, and—after I insisted on it to Arslan—Luella’s sewing machine had been brought out. Luella cooked her meals, but one of the bodyguards always carried them up. As far as we were concerned, she might as well have been invisible. Even her trips to the bathroom were guarded sneak operations.

I could have wished, if only for Luella’s sake, that she was inaudible, too. She seemed to go into an explosion of some sort every few days—screams of what might have been fear or pain, sounding unpleasantly genuine sometimes; or long, heartbroken wails of sorrow; but most often just an outburst of assorted hysterics. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, short of suicide, so I got into the habit of ignoring these commotions right away. There was enough on my mind that I could do something about. But it was hard on Luella, no question of that.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but I noticed that Hunt Morgan rated a real bed, even if it was just a little rollaway. I didn’t ask for my record player out of that room; I thought it might be of some help to him. But I never heard it play except when Arslan was in there. There were no disturbances from Hunt. I’d have felt better if there had been.

Arslan must have been born in a crowd—or maybe picked up in the middle of a desert. Whatever the reasons, he couldn’t seem to get too much of human company. He was literally never alone, as far as I could tell, or not more than five minutes at a time now and then.

Not just human company, either, and not just the horses. Sam Tuller told me the fairground camp was full of dogs and puppies; and in a very short time my house was, too. “Every time he goes out in that Land Rover,” Luella complained to me, “he brings back another animal.” The first pup was a beagle. The next was a bluetick hound. Then came a German shepherd bitch with a litter of puppies that didn’t look much like German shepherds. In between he had picked up half a dozen kittens and Paula Sears’s pet monkey. All of them except the monkey had the run of the house, and all of us were under orders to let them in or out whenever they wanted—which wasn’t the kind of order I was going to pay any attention to.

Luella had to feed them most of the time and clean up after them all of the time, but it was Arslan who trained them, and did it very well, too—if you didn’t count the monkey. “To be fair,” I told Luella, “I don’t think you can housebreak a monkey.”

She sniffed. “Not without trying, I’m sure of that. But if he just won’t, he could at least keep it in a cage. Paula had a perfectly nice, big cage for it.”

He kept it in the coal bin. A couple of his men shoveled what little coal there was left into a corner of the furnace room, and mopped out the bin. From then on, it was Luella’s job to go in every day and clean up; and of course that was on top of all the damage it managed to do around the house when Arslan had it out. I objected, not only because it was a dirty, mean job, and it was his monkey, or rather Paula Sears’s, but because Luella was getting physically worn out.

“You are wrong, sir; it is woman’s work. My men have other occupations.”

“Then let one of those girls help her—or Betty. It wouldn’t hurt Betty to do a little work around here.”

He shook his head. “They do woman’s work also,” he said cheerfully, “but of another type.”

I hadn’t ridden a horse in ten years, hadn’t owned a hunting dog in six, and I had missed them. In a way, it did me good to have them around the place again. And Arslan was undeniably good with all of the animals. He would pet a cat about the same way he petted his girls—expertly and with interest, but a little offhandedly. I’d never had anything against cats, but it still looked peculiar to me, a grown man fondling one like a little girl with her doll. What was beautiful was to see him with the dogs. He reminded me of a good teacher—the kind whose technique is so good it looks like all rapport and no technique. The dogs wanted to please him, wanted to understand what he was telling them to do, and do it; and he could make them understand. He knew something about training, no doubt of that.

Which didn’t mean I liked having my house transformed into something between a barracks and a menagerie. Just the smell disgusted me every time I came in the door: the smell of the monkey, of too many cats and too many dogs, of too many soldiers and too many muddy boots, of too much cooking and too much laundry, of liquor, of tobacco. And it was never really quiet. There were always people moving around, if not inside the house, then in the yard. All day there was tramping in and out, up and down the stairs, doors slamming, foreign voices. And there was always some uproar or other likely to erupt at any hour of the day or night. It would be a dog fight, or Betty Hanson in hysterics, or some indecipherable Turkistani crisis that had soldiers gallumphing down the walk, radios crackling, Arslan machinegunning out orders. I was used to spending my workdays amid noise and confusion—yes, and some smells, too; but I was used to peace and quiet and cleanliness in my own house.

Along about lettuce-planting time, which was February 11 by Kraft County tradition, I had the year’s outline pretty well set. The details remained to be filled in. “I can’t do all this from an office chair,” I told the Colonel. “I’ve got to get out and talk to people, and look at what we’ve got.”

He contemplated his cigarette, while he constructed his clauses. “You will give me two lists. Of people to whom you wish to talk. Of things at which you wish to look. Before noon tomorrow.”

I gave him his lists first thing in the morning. A little past ten he sent for me. Lieutenant Z and two soldiers were waiting in his office. “You will follow this route,” said Nizam, holding up a paper for me to take. He didn’t bother to look at me; after all, he’d glanced up when I came in. “You will return between noon and curfew, eighteen February. Dismissed.”

Nizam, or his staff, had laid out a very sensible route. It not only took in all the people and places on my lists with just about the minimum of wasted miles and minutes, but it also made allowance for the type and condition of different roads. In fact, unless we were just peculiarly lucky, it made allowance for the visibility from different spots. I’d learned to respect the Turkistani organization, if nothing else. They were thorough, and they digested information fast. I came back with two notebooks full of data, and raring to get on with the job. Lieutenant Z watched me sidelong but wide-eyed. It was the first time he’d seen me with my hands on really solid material I knew I could work with.

We checked in with Nizam first, and from there I started home on foot. But Leland Kitchener’s wagon came moseying out of the last alley before my house. Leland had a very handy way of just happening to run into you when he wanted to tell you something. We said hello, and I asked him how things had been while I was gone.

“Pretty quiet. The Commies got their stable about finished. Nothing new out of your houseguest, that I know of—except he’s sent Miss Hanson somewhere out of county, and he’s got a girl for Hunt Morgan.”

“A what?”

“A girl—you know what I mean; one of them little Russian girls. A girl for Hunt. Now ain’t that