“Now for Gesang!” shouted Schubert, knocking the neck off a bottle of beer, and beginning to sing like a drunken pirate.

A man whom he introduced as “a genuine Jew from Jerusalem” came out from a gloomy recess filled with tusks and sacks of dried red pepper, and watched everything from now on with an eye like a gimlet, writing down in a book against each sergeant’s name whatever he took to drink.  They appeared to have no check on him.  Nobody signed anything.  Nobody as much as glanced at his account.

“What is the use?” said Schubert, noticing my glance and interpreting the unspoken question.  “There is just so much drink in the whole place.  We shall drink every drop of it!  All that matters is, who is to pay for the champagne?  That stuff is costly.”

They all took beer to begin with, knocking the necks from the bottles as if that act alone lent the necessary air of deviltry to the whole proceedings.  A small, very black Nyamwesi came with brush and pan and groped on the floor all night for the splinters of glass, sleeping between times in a corner until a fresh volley of breaking bottle necks awoke him to work again.

“Die Wacht am Rhein!” yelled Schubert.  “Start it up!  Sing that first!” He began to sing it himself, all out of tune.

Fred cut the noise short by standing up to play something nobody could sing to a jangling clamor of chords and runs on which he prides himself, that he swears is classical, but of which neither he nor anybody knows the name.  Then he drank some beer and sang a comic song or two in English, we joining in the choruses.

Meanwhile, Brown was soaking away steadily, taking whatever drink came first to hand, and having no interest whatever in anything but the task of assuaging the thirst he had accumulated in the course of all that long marching since he left home.  He had forgotten his cattle already—­the Greeks who stole them—­the Masai who stole from the Greeks.  He paid for all he took, to the Jew’s extreme surprise and satisfaction, and grumbled at the price of everything, to the Jew’s supremest unconcern.

“An’ my name’s Brown o’ Lumbwa, just in proof of all I say!” he informed the room at large at intervals.

When Will had exhausted all the American songs he knew, and Fred had run through his own long list there was nothing left for it but to make up accompaniments to the songs the sergeants had been raised on.  Fred made the happy discovery that none of them knew The Marseillaise, so he played that as an antidote each time after they had made the hard-wood rafters ring and the smoke-filled air vibrate with Teutonic jingoism.  The Jew, who probably knew more than he cared to admit, grew more and more beady-eyed each time The Marseillaise was played.

There was a pause in the proceedings at about ten o’clock, by which time all the sergeants except Schubert were sufficiently drunk to feel thoroughly at ease.  Schubert was cold-eyed sober, although scarcely any longer thirsty.