Arabesque

by GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

11

IN Jerusalem, Armande was happy for the first time since the fall of France. She was back in a tiny apartment of her own: a penthouse on the top of a block of flats. The roof stood high above the modern suburbs, looking east to the scrub and boulders of the barren Judaean hills, and west to the walls and pinnacles of the Old City. She was free to choose her own friends, free of all those cheaply alluring competitors in the Hôtel St. Georges in Beirut; and, war or no war, it was pleasant to be back in a civilization that recalled London. At the King David Hotel there were even dinner jackets to be seen in the restaurant.

She had no financial worries. Soon after reaching Jerusalem she had taken a job at Palestine Headquarters which paid her as yet a mere five pounds a week, but gave her security and self-respect. She was at last a useful member of the fortress, not an idle mouth to be fed.

With all this outward peace she was gay at heart. She had carried out a difficult and secret assignment with such ease and efficiency. One night when she thought of the quiet commendation of David Nachmias she had hugged her pillow and kicked with exhilaration like a month-old infant, until the loneliness of the pillow reminded her that she was a woman, not a child.

David Nachmias had not told her very much of the end of the story — simply that at the appointed time and place Sheikh Wadiah had met the detachment of troops and led them to a temporary cache where the arms awaited collection; he had been mildly offended because the party would not stay to a considerable cold supper which he himself had carried out into the woods.

She sent Wadiah her Jerusalem address, and at once received a reply from him, written in a magnificent flowing hand on the most expensive paper obtainable in Beit Chabab, which happened to be pale pink and deckle-edged. The letter contained nothing but resounding compliments, yet was delivered confidentially by a Maronite monk. Sheikh Wadiah was too much of an individualist to believe in public services.

At the end of November the same monk, bowing, smiling, and disappearing with ecclesiastical smoothness, delivered another letter. For two pages it expressed Wadiah’s allegiance to her and her country, and then came to the point: —

You will remember my major-domo, Fouad, who, next to myself, was your most devoted servant in Beit Chabab. He has had the misfortune of some slight trouble in his family, and I have thought it best to send him over the frontier into Palestine. He will come to see you in person. His life is in your hands to do with what you will.

Armande discounted this conventionally exaggerated language. Fouad, she supposed, had some private business with army or government, and she was expected to do him a favor — probably a large and disreputable favor. She hoped that David Nachmias would help her to do whatever was required. Nachmias kept clear of her in Jerusalem, explaining that there should be no public connection between them. His influence in the background, however, had been of use. He had ensured that she met the colonel who was now her employer, and he had opened to her the Zionist circles of Jerusalem.

She liked the Jews of Palestine. They had the taste but not the conservatism of her husband’s stockbroking friends, the energy but not the vulgarity of the smaller fry of European commerce, and they had made Jerusalem a little capital of the arts and of science. Her sympat hies were wholly Zionist. To historical rights of Jew or Arab she was indifferent. The right of the Jews, for her, was that they were proud and happy, hard at work and secure. A joyous and intelligent folk had been re-created, and the world was ihe richer for it.

12

IT WAS a Sunday afternoon in early December. At the special request of her colonel she had spent the morning at work, and had come from the bare maps and tables of the cheerless military office home to her flat. The first, heavy winter rain roared out of the windless sky and capered on the roof outside the windows of her living room. Dry and warm amid a veil of water, she idled happily, still savoring her delicious privacy.

Her bell rang. It was her German-Jewish landlord, Dr. Finkelkraut. He bowed with Central European formality.

“Mrs. Herne,” he said, “it is my duty to alarm the tenants.”

She supposed the water was about to be cut off again. “I am alarmed,” she answered, smiling.

“You have taken notice, yes?” he insisted, as if asking her to sign a receipt. “It is the police!”

Armande had developed immunity to the excited noises that occasionally drifted up from the flats below. She now listened. The block was humming with hysterical exclamations.

“What’s all the fuss about?” she asked.

“An Arab murderer has been observed to enter my house,” replied Dr. Finkelkraut importantly. “By instantly organizing our microcosm I assist the police. They wish to search the flats.”

“Well, he wasn’t here and he can’t get in,” said Armande, “but the police can look around if they like.”

Dr. Finkelkraut vanished down the stairs.

Before Armande could shut her door, an Arab sprang from behind the housing of the stairhead and rushed towards her. She let him in. Fouad was Fouad, whatever he had done.

Fouad fell on his knees and carried her hand to his forehead. He was no longer the spruce, grayclad rider who had honored Wadiah by his attendance. The major-domo was wearing the black cotton of the poor. The wet rags clung to his body. His mustache, a black and proud edition of Wadiah’s, was weighed down by rain. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.

Armande caught him by the good arm, dragged him to the bedroom and shut the door. Then she dashed outside. There was no trace of blood on the roof; evidently Fouad had had the sense to keep his hand muffled in his rags. In her room there was blood on the parquet. She flung a rug over it. When she looked up, Dr. Finkelkraut and the police were at her door.

There were a British sergeant, an Arab and a Jewish constable. The constables began a thorough search of the roof and chimneys, while the sergeant smilingly addressed her in Hebrew.

“Mrs. Herne is English and works for the army,” explained Dr. Finkelkraut officiously.

The sergeant smiled with relief. He was a pleasant, fresh-faced young man. Armande’s excitement, fear, distress — she had no time to realize what she had done, why she did it, or what she fell began to ease in face of this male innocent. Him at least she could handle.

Bit of luck finding you here!” he exclaimed, as if Jews had neither eyes to see nor tongues to speak. “You can tell me all about it. Mrs. Herne, there must be a man somewhere on this roof.”

“there might be,” Armande answered. “I’ve been reading.”

“Could he have got into your flat?”

“Not without my seeing him. What’s he done?” “Committed a very brutal murder in the Lebanon. We’ve been on the lookout for him, and he was recognized while he was asking for this street. Then he ran for it, and the constable is sure he saw him bolt into this house. Now where can he have got to?”

“Fire escape?” she suggested.

“Impossible. I have a man at the bottom of it.”

“Well, he can’t be here,” said Armande. “But have a look round the flat if you like.”

She held the sergeant with smiling eyes; she was oddly terrified lest he should watch her throat and see the heavy beating of her heart.

“I needn’t bother you, Mrs. Herne,” he replied. “I can see you have only these two windows and your door opening on the roof. So if you’ve been here all the time . . .”

When the police had left, Armande sprang into the bedroom. Fouad was crouching on his heels in a corner of the room: a wet Arab, pitiable and helpless as a wet kitten. So much of their dignity and grace depended on the free movement of the covering.

“Merci, Madame! Merci! Merci!” he murmured in halting French. _ .

“Show me the wound!” she cried anxiously. “Did the police shoot at you? ”

“Yes, yes, Madame. But it is nothing.”

It was nothing, a mere tear in the fleshy part of the upper arm which she dressed and bandaged. Fouad moaned as the disinfectant stung him, but held out his arm without wincing. Then she gave him a drink. Dry clothes? Heaven only knew what was the modesty of these feminine and conventional Arabs! At last she thought of a huge coat of rough sheepskin which she had bought in Hebron. He accepted it gratefully.

She left him to change, and paced up and down the living room, giving Sheikh Wadiah a mental dressing-down that would have shattered his selfcomplacence for a year. Fouad had slight trouble in his family, indeed! His life was in her hands, indeed! Well, it was. That had been no Oriental figure of speech. It was sheer lunacy to saddle her with a common criminal. It was cheating.

She returned to the bedroom. Fouad, wrapped in the sheepskin robe, was squatting on the floor, uncomplainingly awaiting the sentence of his judge.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, Madame. I eat before I come. But a cigarette—you have?”

Armande sat on the bed, and tried to extract his story. It was difficult, for Fouad had no English and only a hundred words of French. He told his crime frankly and with a modest pride, though he admitted that Sheikh Wadiah had considered it ill-timed, inconvenient, and out of date. He spoke of his chieftain as a boy of his schoolmaster, recognizing that Wadiah, as a responsible authority, had to hand out hard words but did not necessarily believe t hem.

Twenty years before, in a savage riot between Moslem and Christian, Foua’d s aunt had been raped and murdered, and his father killed while attempting to protect her. The murderer was well known, and wisely disappeared into the Mohammedan world of the Far East. While Fouad was on Sheikh Wadiah’s business at Damascus, the son of the criminal was pointed out to him. He followed his man into a quiet street, killed him, defiled his body, and escaped to Beit Chabab. Sheikh Wadiah could not deny his guilt and could not protect him.

“He say to me — escape to Palestine! See Mme. Armande. Maybe she use influence. Maybe they not hang you. So I am here.”

“But! Fouad, I —” began Armande.

“Madame, I not stay here,” Found reassured her. “I come only to speak. Madame not to fear. I not. tell police where I was.”

“You must stay here till I come back,” replied Armande decisively. “I am going out now to try to help you. Keep in the bedroom and do not. open the door whoever comes.”

13

THE Nachmias flat was in Abu Tor, on the edge of the bare Valley of Hinnom. Mme. Nachmias was at home, languid upon a sofa, with an ivory telephone, a box of expensive chocolates, and a French novel by her side. When she rose to greet Armande, the trim bulges under her smart housecoat revealed that even in privacy she would not surrender to the lax and corsetless ease of the Levant.

“But you must wait for my husband!” she cried, when Armande apologized for disturbing her. “He would be desolated to miss you. He is very fond of my naughty little Mme. Herne.”

Mme. Nachmias archly implied that it was good for the uncivilized David to have attractive friends, and that she chose them for him with care.

“The General wanted to see him,” she added importantly. “But he will not be long. I adore your English officers. They are so precise. Ten minutes, and everything is said!”

Armande’s experience in an army office had convinced her that British officers talked for the sake of talking, and seldom to the point. Madame’s opinion was an illusion. She was right, however, in prophesying that her husband would not be long. Half an hour later Nachmias entered the flat.

He showed to Armande the stolid gallantry that Madame expected of him, and then turned to his wife. “By the way, chérie, your cousin Susie is back in Jerusalem.”

“David! I must, I must absolutely speak to her!” declared Mme. Nachmias impetuously. “I will only be a moment,” she added to Armande, “just while David pours a drink for you.”

She picked up the telephone and began an exclamatory conversation. Nachmias carried the drinks to a far corner of the room.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” Armande warned him doubtfully.

“Madame and her cousin,” he murmured, “have equal politeness. On the telephone neither wishes to be the last to speak.”

Armande showed him Wadiah’s letter, and explained the sudden appearance of Fouad.

“That is awkward, yes,” he said. “But I assure you, Madame, it is an inevitable consequence of such a friendship as you made. In Wadiah’s mind, you see, you have become the protector of the Ghoraibs. All the same, he had no right at all to ask this of you.”

“He thought he had,” Armande retorted.

“Mme. Herne, you romanticize the Arabs! He did not even think he had. It was a last chance for this Fouad, and he tried it,” answered Nachmias with the first signs of impatience that she had ever seen in him. “You must send the man away at once. If he were caught with you — well, the complications might be disastrous.”

“But he ought to see a doctor.”

“For bullet wounds the police doctors are the best.”

“I can’t give him up to the police,” Armande cried. “And anyway, the police mustn’t know he was with me.”

“Why should they? Fouad told you he would not talk, and he will not. After all, the police searched your house. They know that Fouad was not in it. He has only to say, for example, that he never entered the house at all, and they will accept it. Send him away tonight as soon as it is dark! Watch the movements of the police, and see that he is not caught going out! And be careful, Madame — if you fail, I cannot protect you.”

Armande waited another ten minutes for the telephone conversation to finish, and said good-bye. She returned to her flat, hurt and annoyed. Nachmias had not only refused to help Fouad, but he had disapproved of her own perfectly natural action. As for his complications — what were they? Wadiah had done a discreet favor to the British; he had every right to expect a discreet favor in exchange. It was all nonsense for David Nachmias to say that he could not protect her. He was being professionally mysterious in order to force her to do her duty.

It was of course her duty to give up a murderer to justice — that she knew without any officious assistance from Nachmias — but neither law nor crime was quite so clear in this strange Levantine world as at home. There were loyalties between Wadiah and Fouad, Wadiah and her, Fouad and her. Beit Chabab had cherished her, saved her, given her self-respect and happiness. To that dear society fouad belonged. It was utterly impossible to turn him out into the street and hear the police whistles blowing five minutes later.

The alternative? To spend an indefinite number of nights shut up in her penthouse with a murderer. She smiled to herself at this dramatic presentation of the affair. Fouad was no more a murderer than a seventeenth-century duelist. And he did not consider her as an attainable woman. She was above his world, his protectress, his princess. If he thought of her as a woman at all, it was as his chieftain’s woman, hedged around by more taboos than she could possibly imagine.

14

ARMANDE moved her bed and dressing table into the living room, leaving the bedroom and its safety to Fouad. I he first twenty-four hours were full of flavor. It was exciting to answer the smile of the policeman on the beat, and to buy extra food at shops where she was not known. It was a calm and personal jest after her own heart to receive an officer who came to fetch her for a dance, and to imagine his horror if he were to learn that she kept a tame murderer in the next room. Only the sharing of her bathroom, to which each of the two rooms had a door, did she find hard to accept. She shuddered at the thought of a ragged Arab among the intimacies of her toilet — though in fact Fouad turned out to be scrupulously familiar with all the complexities of the Western lavatory.

Fouad was quite content in complete idleness so long as he was well supplied with cigarettes, yet the vision of him sitting still behind closed doors began to obsess her nerves. On the third and fourth days the strain became barely tolerable. Armande began to realize that her hospitality was futile; it led nowhere, for she had no idea how to get Fouad away to a possible future.

On the following Saturday Fouad was still in the flat. When Armande came home from the office, with a free afternoon before her, hostess and guest lunched together in the kitchen. Then Fouad returned to his idle imprisonment and his cigarettes, and Armande settled down to write to her husband.

She wrote to John from Palestine with more ease, and her letters had been consistently cheerful, full of comment on her doings rather than her thoughts. Dear John, now proudly a petty officer! It was impossible to doubt that in convoying the merchant fleets back and forth across the Atlantic he was fulfilling himself and his dreams. She could sorrow for herself or for the partnership which she missed, but she could not pity his exposure to the cold and danger of the seas. John was so obviously happier than he had ever been without cold and danger. He did not need her.

She would have liked to tell him this adventure, but she realized that — apart front the risk of her letter being read by the censor — she could not write the story in any terms that would not shock him. He would cable her to see the District Commissioner immediately and explain her crazy act. See the man at the top and trust him — that was one of John’s favorite maxims.

The letter would not write itself, for the overshadowing worry of Fouad’s presence made all her cheerful trivialities inane. Then she heard steps crossing the roof to her flat. Instantly she glanced round the room to see if there were any traces of Fouad. There were none at all. She opened the door—to find facing her the difficult Sergeant Prayle.

“Bachelor girl!” said Prayle, when he had been graciously received and planted in a comfortable chair. “Aprons and inkpots! Suits you better than the St. Georges, Mrs. Herne.”

“Are you stationed in Palestine now?” she asked coldly.

“No. Just calling in on the Holy Places with a little bag of samples.”

“And which of them,” she inquired politely, “interest you?”

“Yours.”

“Mine? You mean . . . Have you come to see me officially?”

“Uncle,” said the Sergeant apologetically.

Armande felt a rush of anger against all these stupid people, personified in Prayle, with their interrogations and internments and vague minds; but she could not afford to show resentment. Had they traced Found to her? She thought it unlikely. “Isn’t it time uncle understood the modern generation?” she retaliated.

“Look, Mrs. Herne,” he answered gently, ignoring her changed voice. “It doesn’t matter what you think of me — we’re in the same game. And what I want to know is so simple. Who got the Ghoraib fountain pens?”

“That?” asked Armande, amazed. “Who got them? But, Sergeant, shouldn’t this be handled on what they call a higher level?”

“ Of course it should ! But keep on a low level, and the army runs smoothly. That’s what we are for.”

“Really I know very little,” Armande said. “And what I do know I can’t tell you without instructions.”

“Whose instructions?”

“I don’t think I should tell you that.”

“Well, what department?”

“What has gone wrong? I really don’t see what you want to know.”

“I want to know who swiped Wadiali’s guns. We didn’t. Nor did the French.”

“The French? No.”

“Well, it was their business. And they started collecting a month or so after Wadiah had unloaded his stock. That’s how the story came out. Wadiah swore to Montagne — you remember Major Montagne? Puss in Boots. Guillotines — he swore to Montagne that he had given the lot to the British.”

“So he did.”

“Sure?”

“Of course! Sheikh Wadiah is the soul of honor,” she answered indignantly.

She saw Prayle’s face light up with tenderness, amusement, relief — impossible to analyze the emotion. His odd-sized eyes and witch nose were integrated into a merry whole. She was reminded of some half-forgotten French print — of Villon or Panurge it might have been — wherein a crooked face shone with intelligence and enjoyment.

“Then to clear — Wadiah,” he said, “get in touch with the big cheese and tell him Field Security is interested. He’ll understand that if we aren’t in the picture there’s bound to be a stink. Drop us a hint, and the whole business can be ironed out without anybody’s pet racket being compromised. If I come and see you tomorrow, will you try meanwhile to get permission to tell me more?”

“Yes, but I won’t promise.”

“Or of course you might try to get it now.”

“I have told you that I can’t, Sergeant Prayle.”

“Hop into the next room and ask him.”

“Ask whom?” she replied, imitating the lazy surprise with which she invited him to explain his more abstruse remarks.

“The gentleman behind the door that you keep glancing at.”

“I keep glancing at the door,” she retorted, “because I want to go in there as soon as you have left.”

“That,” he said, “was a mean trick.”

“You asked for it.”

“I didn’t mean your very natural response. I meant me. You see, I’ve been admiring your courage. Not once have you glanced at the door.”

Armande saw that she was fairly caught.

“Sergeant,” she said, “even if you were right, there might be very simple reasons for a man in my bedroom.”

“There might. But not smoking cheap Anchor cigarettes. You forgot the north wind, you see. It’s blowing the smoke back under the door.”

Armande stared at him, her face deliberately calm and neutral. “Sergeant Prayle, I give you my word that whoever is in the bedroom has nothing to do with Wadiah’s arms.”

“Or with Wadiah?”

“Well — not in the sense that you mean.”

“Blackmail, Mrs. Herne?”

“No!”

“You’re looking a bit harassed —”

In his voice was such sympathy with helpless loneliness, Armande could not meet his eyes for fear of breaking down.

“Tell me,” he said. “I’m not really a cop, you know.”

“But you might be forced to behave like one.”

“By what?”

“Oh . . . duty.”

“Got two of ‘em. One’s to the neighbor.”

“Beit Chabab,” she began. “You know I was there?”

“Of course.”

“And if I may I’ll tell you why. But — well, Sheikh Wadiah thought I was more important than I am.”

Sergeant Prayle nodded. That delusion was not confined to Wadiah.

“And naturally I did things for the Ghoraibs— all the nasty little favors that Arabs ask.”

“Human,” he corrected her. “Not nasty.”

“Yes, I agree. And then his major-domo killed a man in Damascus. And Wadiah sent him to me, of all people, to get him off. I can’t get him off and I won’t let him go, and there you are.”

“And now,” said Prayle, “let’s have all the details. How did he get here? And how much do the police know?”

Armande told him the story of Fouad’s arrival.

“And still you approve of yourself?” he asked.

“Yes. I don’t see. what else I could have done.”

“Nor do I. Well, I’ll have to make Fouad disappear for you.”

“But how?”

“Just wave the wand.”

“Are you sure you can do it without getting into trouble?” she asked anxiously.

“Were you?”

Armande called in Fouad from the bedroom. Prayle stumbled through the Arabic greetings, watching the man as he gravely answered. His eyes were merry and honorable. He was neither sullen nor effusive, and showed no sense of guilt. The word devotion sprang into the Sergeant’s mind. That was his instinctive summing up of Fouad. It was no rare quality among the Eastern Christians. They might be easygoing — in every bad sense as well as good — but they could love. It was that capacity for devotion, he supposed, which had appealed to Armande. Her own soul responded.

He smiled into the composed and lovely little face that watched the pair of them so intently. Here was the girl he had imagined, with immense reserves of loyalty and courage. He packed away the knowledge, to be squared sometime, whenever his army life gave him the hour and the solitude for slow reflection, with her exasperating and unreal detachment.

“Hardest first,” he said. “That mustache has got to come off.”

Fouad, recognizing word and gesture, looked appealingly at Armande; then burst into sad and passionate Arabic.

“Not quite sure,” Prayle interpreted, “but I think he said that if he has to swing, mustache swings too. It would be a proud day, you see, and he ought to look his best. How do you talk together, by the way?”

“Oh, Fouad understands simple French. I’ll get his mustache off him. Is there anything else you want?”

“Ravishing blondes,” he said thoughtfully. “I had shares in a dance hall once, and we used to make a packet out of selling beauty preparations. No demand for mouse-brown. But can do, I suppose?”

“Can do,” she laughed, “if I bleached him first. I’ll see my beauty parlor.”

“Good. His skin is so fair, you see, that he’d look quite a different person with brown hair and no mustache.”

Sergeant Prayle talked himself out of the room, remarking casually that he would see her or telephone her the following evening about their various troubles. He did not again refer directly to Wadiah’s arms. Armande, amusedly seeking the cause of his embarrassment, suddenly realized — and her heart leaped up with appreciation of his queer delicacy— that he was eager to impress it on her that there was no bargain, and that he completely dissociated the disposal of Fouad from the answer he demanded and expected.

15

SINCE it was the Jewish Sabbath, Armande was reasonably certain of finding David Nachmias at home. He was not religious, but he conformed. She called him up, and guardedly, as she thought, indicated trouble. He abruptly cut the conversation short, and said that he would come at once to see her. Armande was piqued that he should doubt her caution on the telephone. The click of the receiver as he replaced it was sharp as a rebuke from a commanding officer.

Her resentment vanished as soon as David Nachmias entered the room. Slow, massive, and courteous, it was no wonder that Arabs liked him. He asked her immediately of Fouad, and she lied boldly that he had gone. That was her own business — and she had ensured that there would be no smell but flowers and a faint memory of perfume.

Armande gave him coffee, and told him of the Sergeant’s visit.

“We have made a mistake, Madame,” he said at last.

Armande felt only pleasure at the we. If any mistake had been made, Nachmias had made it, but she was ready enough to be associated with him.

“I could not guess that the French would collect arms in the Lebanon,” he admitted frankly. “It seems incredible that you, the British, should occupy a country and then allow to others so intimate a detail of administration. Well, well, you could have thought of no surer way of making the French unpopular.”

Nachmias relaxed into silent contemplation of his coffee. Armande watched him, fascinated; she had never seen a man think with so little outward sign of any mental processes at all. After some minutes she ventured to recall him to her own problem.

“What shall I tell these security people? Can I mention your name?”

“I would rather you did not as yet,” he replied indifferently. “I will see them myself.”

“But what did happen to the arms?” she asked. “As you promised Wadiah, they were collected by soldiers in uniform.”

“Then what is all the fuss about?” Armande’s great eyes caressed him, soft with the tender amusement of a mother at the unnecessary evasions of her sons. “You have only to tell the General what happened.”

Nachmias did not respond. His face remained calm as a sultry summer evening.

“Madame, consider what you know. Wadiah is not lying. Prayle is not lying. But is it not possible that the Free French Major Montague is lying?”

“I don’t understand. When?”

“I suggest to you that he knew all about the deal. He was lying when he showed surprise.”

“But why should he say he hasn’t got the arms, if he has?” she asked with some agitation. “I don’t understand. You ought to let me know what I have done.”

“You are aware, Madame, that the French are divided into two parties?

“Vaguely. But they didn’t matter.”

“Perhaps not, when you were at Beirut in the days of their first enthusiasm. Now they do matter. There might even be open, violent collision. Catholics and royalists on one side, socialists and communists on the other. Well, Madame, imagine that I was ordered to give arms to the left wing and not to the right. Do you understand now? Major Montagne can never say that he had Wadiah’s machine guns.”

Armande felt utter revulsion from what she had done. Then men had time for this kind of ugly intrigue in the midst of a war for life and death? Poor, gallant Prance still keeping up its suicidal feuds in exile, and her own country encouraging and able and ready to split a helpless ally! If this was British policy, then all the accusations of French and German and Jew against perfidious Albion were justified. Divide and rule, divide and rule — it was no better than Hitler’s conquer and rule.

Her eyes filled with tears. They spread upon her cheek before she could stop them.

“Madame . . protested David Nachmias.

“It is nothing,” she answered. “Leave me alone. It’s not your fault. I should have known. These things have to be.”

“But what you did was magnificent!”

“Ours not to reason why!” she cried hysterically. “Magnificent? Magnificently filthy! Wadiah is worth all of you.”

“He is. I admit it. But still, Madame, I do not understand.”

“No? Oh God, David Nachmias, are we living a hundred years ago? It was the fashion then — this beastly, crooked cleverness. But that is not what I thought I was serving. That is not why I am in the Middle East. Oh, go and build your Palestine. That at least is clean.”

His eyes were expressionless. There was a hint of pity in them, but neither protest at her emotion nor any fear of it. His very presence was a reminder that nothing mattered. Accept, accept, always accept! She was bitter at his complacence, but that calm made it easier for her to gain control of herself.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“I have been very mistaken in you, Madame,” he murmured regretfully.

“I dare say. I am sorry,” she repeated.

“I do not mean that as a criticism,” Nachmias assured her gently, “— or only of myself. You were so self-possessed in Beirut — almost Oriental. I thought — well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong.”

“A poule de luxe, like the rest of them,” said Armande savagely, flushing at her own vehemence.

“No! Never!” protested Nachmias.

Her angry desire to shake him out of his tranquillity had been well and unexpectedly fulfilled. She was sourly amused to see that he was shocked.

“Never, Madame, I assure you! But I thought that you cared for nothing but purposes of your own. That was the impression you gave: that you were waiting for — for power to come to you. But not through the methods of a — of ordinary women. And you have power. You are dangerous, Madame.”

“I am very weary of being called a dangerous woman,” said Armande. “M. Nachmias, I shall not speak a word of what has passed between us. So far as all this official curiosity goes, you will satisfy it. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And I shall do so.”

“And give my compliments to your charming wife. We shall see each other often, I hope.”

“Good-bye, Madame.”

“Good-bye. And do not worry about your secrets.”

16

WHEN his bus stopped at the Jaffa Gate, Prayle dived into the bazaar of the Old City and bought the black outer garment and thin, black veil of a respectable and old-fashioned Moslem woman. Then he disturbed Captain Fairfather’s Sunday evening leisure to demand the loan of the section truck to take him to the recruiting depot at Sarafand, where, he said, he wanted to interrogate a witness; and when Fairfather let him go, at midnight, with permission to use the truck and a lecture on the contradictory aspects of Jewish womanhood in bed and in politics, Prayle telephoned Armande, woke her up, and told her not to go to the office in the morning. He then went to bed himself, full of admiration for his own swift and efficient staff work.

At nine next morning he entered Armande’s street as an Arab woman, carrying his hat and boots in a basket under a neat white cloth. Half an hour’s patient waiting was necessary before he spotted the plain-clothes man who was watching the street, and had him where he wanted him at the far end of the; street and about to stroll back. It was essential that the man should see him enter Armande’s block, but not too closely. Prayle shrunk his height so far as he could, hobbling along with bent knees and imitating the gait of a worn village woman with the usual varicose legs. He turned into the house when the watcher was looking straight at him from a distance of two hundred yards.

He rang Armande’s bell.

“Any rags, bones, or bottles today, Mum?”

His cockney accent did not get a laugh. Armande smiled, wan and puzzled. Her slim, tense body had no life in it. Hell, thought Prayle, my little ship’s in harbor again!

“Just slipping Fouad into something loose,” he said, “and then we’re off.”

Fouad was not easily recognizable. His mustache had gone, and his hair was a dirty golden-brown. Prayle dressed him in the female clothing and veil, and he himself returned to his uniform. He gave Fouad an exhibition of the gait with which he had entered the house, and warned him to imitate it until he was clear of the immediate quarter.

“Walk out of town by the Jaffa Road,” he told him. “I’ll pass you in a truck and pick you up in about half an hour.”

Fouad said an emotional good-bye to Armande, his halting French made more incoherent than ever by tears of gratitude. She took his hand, gently smiling, but untouched by the femininely Arab outburst as if she herself had been some just and grimly masculine administrator. Prayle was astonished at her lack of warmth. What had happened to her since the day before yesterday? The only explanation was that she just died and departed into a hell of her own when things went wrong. But what the devil had gone wrong?

He looked out of the window. The plain-clothes man was talking to a shopkeeper halfway up the street.

“Now, Fouad!” he ordered. “Hobble! Let that man see you come out! Don’t forget the basket with your clothes in it! Imshi!”

Fouad again seized Armande’s hands, and then dashed down the stairs.

“I’ll follow him in a few minutes,” said Prayle, “and then come back and see you tonight.”

“I can tell you now.” Armande spoke with such a cold regret that it was obvious to him she was hurting even herself. “My department, whatever it is, will explain the whole thing to your security chiefs. I’m sorry. It’s so discourteous to tell you nothing. But Wadiah’s arms were a matter of High Policy.”

“Why are you so upset about it?” he asked.

“I am not.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Mrs. Herne, do you believe everything David Nachmias tells you?”

“You said I could trust him,” she answered.

“I never told you to take his orders. Who did tell you?”

“I never said I took them. I don’t want to discuss the subject, Sergeant Prayle. The whole thing will be settled, and I want to forget it.”

“Give me a hint. Did British troops collect Wadiah’s arms?”

“I hope to God they did not,” she answered bitterly. “I hope the French themselves collected them. And there’s your hint, and I am not going to say any more. What are you doing with Fouad? ”

“Enlisting him. Private George Nadim Salibah of the Palestine Bulls.”

“And you won’t be caught? Are you sure?”

“ Keeping my fingers crossed.”

He went out onto the roof and saw Fouad in the distance, well away from police and stepping boldly. Fouad’s slight build made a presentable woman of him; he was unlikely to attract attention.

“The worst is over,” Prayle said.

“I am so grateful. You’ve been an angel, a guardian angel. And I stand here like a stuffed owl,” she cried with a flash of spirit, “while you take such risks for me. Good luck, and — and bless you! ”

“For your own sake,” he persisted, “tell me the story.”

“I’d tell you so gladly for your sake,” she replied. “But I’m not allowed to. Don’t think too hardly of me.”

Prayle hurried back to the Field Security office, thanking God for Fouad. If that damned, sympathetic murderer had never existed, his visit to Jerusalem would have ended, just as he had feared, in a straight rebuff from Armande. Well, he had got it; but it was no collision of their prides and their tastes, driving them irrevocably apart. It was merely a straight line, a reluctant line, among the complex curves of their relationship.

The truck was waiting outside the office. He jumped in alongside Fairfather’s batman-driver, and told him to go to Sarafand. Just outside Jerusalem, where the road began to sweep downwards along the hillside, the truck overtook Fouad.

“Let’s give the old girl a lift,” Prayle suggested.

“O.K., Sergeant, but she won’t take it,” the driver answered.

“Very heavy basket. Let’s see.”

Fouad climbed into the back without a word. Fifteen miles further on, in the wooded gorge of Bab el Waad, Prayle stopped the truck and, to the driver’s shocked surprise, led Fouad off into the plantations. There he gave him his papers and a sketch of the birthplace and past life of George Nadim Salibah, the name on Fouad’s new identity card.

“No thanks needed,” Prayle said. “Sheikh Wadiah helps us. We help him, and you too. Didn’t you help our soldiers when they came to Beit Chabab?”

Prayle’s shot in the dark was successful.

“Yes,moussié,” Fouad answered. “I guide them.”

“Did they speak English?”

“Yes, moussié, but not like Englishman.”

“You don’t understand it, do you?”

“I hear plenty English. These men not speak like English.”

“What did they look like? Dark or fair?”

“Dark, moussié, but not so dark as Arab.”

“Did Sheikh Wadiah notice anything?”

“No. He talk only with major and speak all the time. Much welcome.”

“No idea what they were?”

“No, moussié. Not English. Not French. I do not know what you send. Great country. Many allies. Me too British soldier now. Very proud.”

“That’s fine, Fouad,” said Prayle kindly. “And when it wears off, just remember Mme. Armande.”

The driver stared when he saw Prayle return from the woods with a man. Then he grinned. This was real secret service stuff. It was the first time in all his driving for Field Security that anything dramatic had happened.

“Keep it under your hat, chum,” said Sergeant Prayle. “Now off we go to Sarafand!”

He saw Private George Nadim Salibah duly sworn, and whispered to the sergeant who took charge of Fouad a mysterious and quite incomprehensible story of the new recruit’s services to Intelligence. Salibah’s prestige was firmly established, and Sergeant Prayle was invited to lunch at the mess.

17

BACK in Jerusalem, Prayle gave his whole attention to strict duty. He had solved the problem of Wadiah’s private arsenal, but not the problem of convincing his superiors. It seemed obvious that Nachmias had used Armande to acquire Wadiah’s machine guns for the Jewish National Home and that a party of Jews in British uniform had boldly collected them. Proof, however, was lamentably short unless Armande herself spoke out. Her hint about the French did not make sense. The French never had those arms. Montagne’s indignation had been too real.

Prayle decided to report to Captain Fairfather, by easy stages, as much as he knew.

“Well, did you have any luck with Mrs. Herne?” asked Fairfather as soon as Prayle entered the office.

“Yes and no, sir.”

“What did she say?”

“That she wouldn’t discuss the matter.”

“Who is the mastermind? Got any line?”

“Old Joab, sir.”

“Do you want a commission, Sergeant Prayle?”

“Baton in the knapsack.”

“Well, you’ll have to be a damned sight clearer for your men than you are for me. Who’s Joab.''

“David Nachmias.”

Fairfather leaned back in his chair, and relit his pipe. “I can’t imagine Nachmias doing anything so foolish that he would be caught out. But if he never dreamed that anyone would bother Wadiah for arms, the plan looked dead safe. It was a thousand to one against Wadiah ever having to produce that receipt. Why should he? He might frame it and hang it in his parlor some day, when the whole affair was too old for investigation; but that’s all. If the French hadn’t suddenly started to collect arms, we should never have heard a word of Nachmias’s intrigue and we should never have guessed that he used Armande.”

“She never knew,” Prayle insisted.

“Possibly. On the other hand, she’s inclined to take a line of her own, you know.”

“Can we get David Nachmias for impersonation of tlie military?”

“Not a hope!” said Fairfather, obviously relishing the subtlety of Nachmias’s crime. “Your poor old Wadiah handed over his arms to what he thought was a party of British troops. Who were they? They might be French, Syrians, Cypriots, anything in battle-dress. You’ve no proof that they were Jews. And if we accused the Jewish Agency, they would quite certainly reply that the troops wore British and that we were trying to frame them. My dear Prayle, it was a very clever coup!”

“But don’t these people care whether they are suspected or not?”

“Not a bit, so long as there’s no legal proof. The Agency wants arms. They say we have failed to defend them in the past, and they propose to make certain of defending themselves in the future. When you remember the massacres at Hebron and Haifa and Safad and half a dozen small colonies, it isn’t surprising ...”

As he left the office, Prayle doubted whether even once a year Captain Fairfather was not futile. It was pretty evident that he did not intend to forsake his fascinated contemplation of Palestine for the hard, perhaps impossible, task of bringing military justice to bear on David Nachmias. Armande would thus remain under suspicion.

The road Prayle took back to Beirut, along the coast, was Jewish as the road coming up, over the hills, had been Arab. Even the smells were different. From Tel Aviv to Haifa the wind carried scents of petrol and acacia and oranges; from Jerusalem to Haifa, it carried sage and dust. The Arab villages by the wayside smelled of donkeys and cooking-spices, the Jewish settlements of boiling cabbage and pickled cucumber; or, if a settlement were new and hygienic, its desolate neatness was rendered more inhuman than ever by smelling of nothing at all.

Prayle, lying sleepily back upon the mailbags in the truck, watched the orange groves and Jewish colonies reel off behind. It was odd, he thought, how Biblical history —in which he was well and unwillingly grounded at a grammar school of true Puritan tradition — had been reversed. Then the Jews had inhabited the hills, and the Philistines the coast; now the Jews held the coast, and the Arabs the hills. The Jews, in fact, had no historical right to the whole of Palestine. Jehovah might have promised them the land, but, except perhaps to Solomon (and offhand he couldn’t say whether even Solomon had ruled over the Philistines), Jehovah had been well content with partition.

18

ARMANDE’S lonely mood harmonized with, indeed was in part created by, that of the great garrison of the Middle East. She was doubly an alien, being a woman on sufferance among these soldiers who themselves were utterly alien to their surroundings. In her work there was neither gaiety nor excitement; nor, after the bitter use that had been made of her, did she seek for either. She was checking stores in two languages. The fact that some of the stores were confidential made the job no more interesting. She was checking stores, and probably would continue to check until the war ended.

Communication with home was worse than ever. For Armande there was little comfort in the exchange of letters with her husband. Letters from England answered those that she herself had written four months earlier. Her own words were lost in the passing of time. She had forgotten what on earth the correspondent was replying to, so that the response was either stale or meaningless. Much of marriage, she now thought, depended on the little daily intimacies; those lost, a husband and wife had no live subjects to talk about in letters.

What, she wondered, had really happened to the great lovers of fiction and history when they were years absent from one another? Surely their longing must have been so desperate that longing alone created a bond? Each, deprived of half a soul, lived in darkness, and of the darkness wrote. Longing she had, but it was for the life she had lost — not so much for John as for John coming home from the office, John opposite to her at the dinner table, John fussing about the oddness of her friends. Longing for John as a lover — but of that she did not think. It was inconvenient, difficult, and led to disloyalty of thought. Observing the emotional follies of these exiled men and women with no conventional outlet for their capacity to love, she could not believe that she had a passionate temperament, or that hers was a passionate marriage.

One evening early in February, Armande was called to an interview with her colonel. He was alone in his office, a small, bleak shed furnished only with a map, a security poster, two trestle tables belonging to himself and his adjutant, and a couple of chairs. It had the usual smell of a staff office in winter, compounded of stale ash trays, wet battledress, and the fumes of a small, overworked kerosene stove.

Armande recognized in his eyes a well-known look of yearning, which meant that he had an unpleasant administrative job in hand and was longing for the open-air life he had enjoyed as a subaltern, or, alternatively, a tent at Advanced Headquarters in the Western Desert where he might occasionally hear a bang. Longing for his wife and children produced a different expression, of sultry ill temper, when the sergeant-clerks stuck firmly to the main office and only Armande and the typists could approach him at all.

In a voice that he was obviously striving to keep clear of any note of criticism, indeed of any implication whatever, he told her that her employment was at an end.

“But why?” asked Armande, smiling.

She had never been sacked before. The experience was incredible.

“Uniformly satisfactory. Excellent character,” grunted the colonel uncomfortably.

“I know,” Armande laughed. “If it’s just because I can’t type fast yet, I’ll go away and learn.”

“Good Lord, no, Mrs. Herne! I say, do sit down! This is quite informal.”

Armande sat down. The poor old colonel seemed to call for a more intimate touch than could be supplied while standing opposite to him. Poor old? It was just the effect., she supposed, of being a colonel and sitting important (though reluctant) in an office. He was still in his early forties.

As soon as she sat down, he got up and began to dance round the room, his hands thrust deep into trouser pockets, like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“You — you just have to take it,” he told her. “Army orders, you know. Very unjust. Often very unjust, indeed. The same for all of us. It will all come right in the end, Mrs. Herne. It always does. But you have to obey.”

“But do tell me in what way I’ve been a nuisance,” begged Armande.

“Not a nuisance. You’ve been so very kind to me. And you could do it standing on your head, all we’ve given you to do. In your place I should ask for a court-martial, Mrs. Herne.”

“ But I can’t ask for a court-martial,” Armande replied, smiling at his incoherence.

“No. No, I suppose not. You’re a civilian employee. No, you can’t, of course. Dirty shame, I call it!” answered the colonel, wriggling off round the room. “But — but you have to go.”

“If you won’t tell me what the matter is, shall I ask the adjutant?”

“No, no! No, no! He couldn’t tell you any more than I.”

“But you must see I can’t let it go like that,” said Armande reasonably. “If you won’t tell me, whom am I to ask?”

“Oh Lord, it’s difficult! Look here —the Intelligence wallahs — you go and see one of them.”

“I know Captain Fairfather very slightly,” said Armande with disdain.

“Just the man! You go and see Captain Fairfather. Just a personal call, if you see what I mean. I should be so glad to see you back. We all would.”

Armande left without good-byes, as if she were to return to the office next morning. She was dull with anger at the stupidity of—well, not the colonel, but the army. Somewhere, somehow, this was one of the army’s maddening, collective stupidities. It was so futile to be sacked and to be unable to give any reason.

19

You look like something out of the Tatler,” Captain Fairfather said when she entered his office.

“Yes?” she replied indifferently.

“So refreshing after all this local color. A cigarette?”

“Thank you. I was told to come and see you by my colonel.”

“Very naughty of him.”

“Oh, please!” said Armande impatiently.

“But it was. He’s not supposed to indicate to you in any way why you lost your job. Of course it would be ideal if every army employer were a born actor and could pretend, when we order him to sack somebody, that the reason was disgraceful conduct or inefficiency. But they aren’t actors.”

“So it’s true you had something to do with it!”

“I, personally? Nothing at all. Nor your Sergeant Prayle either.”

“Then “for heaven’s sake tell me what has happened.”

“Certainly. You have been black-listed for employment by any of the Services.”

Armande stared at him. The Jewish and Arab employees in the army offices had talked mysteriously of this black-listing. It was one of the bogeys, like arms dealing, to be discussed only in a lowered voice, and dreaded, since its victims, from the point of view of the humble, seemed to be arbitrarily chosen. They were cut off, then and there, from all further attempts to bleed the army payroll. What a phrase! Armande shuddered at her racing, uncharitable thoughts.

“Why?” she asked casually, as if the whole matter concerned some other woman.

“Because, I suppose, we are afraid of you.”

“No, you are not. Not a bit. Is this a punishment because I have Jewish friends?”

“As many as I?” he asked gently.

“Oh, you! You can get away with anything.”

“So can you. Or at least you ought to be able to. I don’t know what has gone wrong. I don’t know why you are so touchy on this Palestine problem. Just what is your opinion of Zionism? ”

“I think we have broken our word,” she exclaimed with a flashing vehemence that sprang from her personal humiliation rather than any political anger. “I think the White Paper was a scandal, and the League of Nations said it was a scandal. We have stopped the Jews building up their National Home. And it doesn’t matter in the least what the meaning of National Home is.”

“We also kept the Arabs quiet.”

“That may be. But if I were a Jew, I’d be an extremist.”

“Do you often say things like that?”

“Yes, if I feel like it. Is that why I’m blacklisted?”

“No. We aren’t quite such fools, you know. Your opinions, of course, might be considered — well, some slight additional evidence. But I don’t know if anyone ever bothered with them.”

He offered her another cigarette, and lit it. His eyes were annoyingly and steadily returning to hers.

“Good God, what a glowing person you are!” he said with a half laugh. “And we continue to talk nonsense.”

“Captain Fairfather, have we got to fence with one another?” she begged. “What crime am I supposed to have committed?”

“Really I don’t know. It’s in Beirut that they know, or think they know. It appears that in a moment of carelessness or idealism — not, I am sure, for money — you did a job for the French or the Jews.”

“I did neither,” Armande retorted indignantly. “Doesn’t one department of Intelligence ever tell another what it is doing?”

“Not if one department is David Nachmias.”

“You mean I’ve been sacrificed to — what?”

“Something worthy, I hope. I’m not in this, you see. Palestine — contrary to what you thought — has nothing whatever against you. My only information comes from Captain Wyne, whom I trust, and he trusts Prayle, and Prayle says — he’s far from complimentary for so devoted an admirer — he says you are not only innocent but a sweet innocent into the bargain.”

“Sergeant Prayle said that?” she asked coldly.

“Well, I’m translating his thought into my own words, you know. He may have put it quite differently.”

“Something about my little loaf, probably,” Armande replied, measuring contempt into every word.

Captain Fairfather chuckled. “Noggin, I think,” he corrected her.

Armande had to smile. Nevertheless Prayle’s impudence was exasperating. A sweet innocent, indeed — she a disciplined, calm, worldly woman, who had taken an active interest in every intellectual movement of her time!

“Why on earth don’t you people ask David Nachmias about me?” she said.

“Has it occurred to you that he must have been asked before you were black-listed?”

Armande stared at him. “Oh!”

It was a cry of pain, childlike and uncontrollable, as if caused by some small, surprising wound. His words opened an abyss of human infamy. And it was no valley through which she had to pass. She was in it. Now. And what he said was true, so obviously and unchallengeably true.

“But then — I’m back where I was.”

“Where was that?” he asked.

“Oh, just — Beirut.”

“I don’t know what sort of hell that means to you. But you aren’t back where you were. My poor Armando, this is a scandalous thing!”

She accepted the sudden use of her Christian name. So timed, it nearly made her cry.

“What am I to do?”

“Well, if I were you, I should go to Egypt.”

“Will I be . . .?”

She hesitated over the word.

“Black-listed there too? Yes, I’m afraid so. But there are two good reasons for going. One is that you may get home from there. The other — you’re better out of Palestine till this can be cleared up. In your present situation you’re open to police slanders, exploitation, anything. My driver has an odd story of women changing into men, and I see a man is wanted who disappeared from Beit Chabab. No, don’t tell me anything! I liked your Sergeant Prayle. But the connection with you is there to be made if the right policeman reads our black list. Have you a passport?”

“Of course.”

“Give it me. I’ll fix up your visas.”

Laurence Fairfather’s suggestion that she should go to Egypt was wise. She had certainly no wish to be asked any polite questions about Fouad. And every intimate impulse prompted her to get out of Palestine. It was impossible to sit idly in her flat and put off all the awkward and friendly inquiries; impossible even to talk to her acquaintances while wondering how much they knew.

“Who knows about this?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About what I am supposed to have done.”

“Your name is just one among hundreds. If you don’t apply for jobs with the Services, and don’t come to the notice of officialdom —”

“But how long must I endure this?” she interrupted. “Can’t I be cleared? Can’t I ask for some sort of inquiry?”

“Yes, I think you could. But would you be any better off? Who really were those troops in British uniform who collected the arms?”

“French. Montagne’s French.”

“Who told you that?”

“David Nachmias.”

“When?”

“When Sergeant Prayle was here asking about it.”

“And what did he tell you when you took on the job?”

“That British would collect them.”

“Any witnesses?”

“No.”

“Did he say why on earth we should waste men and money collecting arms in the Lebanon?”

Armando repeated the explanation that David Nachmias had given her on the terrace of the Hôtel St. Georges, and the shocking tale of intrigue that he had told her later in her flat.

“Detailed, and to you convincing,” said Fairfather. “I don’t wonder. But when one knows the general layout, it’s tosh! We have enough to do in Syria without bothering about the armament of an old Christian coot in the middle of nowhere. As for David’s second story, we should never encourage these divisions of the French. We would give anything to prevent them. No, Mrs. Herne, it’s as plain as can be that what you did was to acquire some much wanted Hotchkiss guns for the National Home.

“But it’s the most horrible treachery!” she cried. “I didn’t know people really did such things.”

“There you are then,” said Captain Fairfather, handing back her passport, “all fixed for tomorrow afternoon’s train. I couldn’t get you a sleeper — they’re only for generals and contractors — but the train people will look after you, and you’ll be all right. Where will you stay in Cairo?”

“Oh, I’ll find a hotel and then look round,” answered Armando.

“Hotels are rather full, you know,” he said doubtfully. “Well, I’ve written a note about you — just saying I knew you in London — to a pal of mine, a Major Honeymill. Here’s his telephone number. Give him a call if you’re in any trouble. He’ll be delighted. He has nothing whatever to do except train a sort of Arab legion, and he knows everybody in Cairo society and takes none of them seriously. Just the person to get you a job in — well, civilian life, if there’s any left.”

“Thank you. And you will do everything you can?”

“To clear it up? Of course. But, as I told you, that depends on Beirut, not on us. However, you have Sergeant Prayle there.”

She held out her hand, and Laurence Fairfather kissed it. Unnecessarily, she thought. It was his casual manner that made him so disconcerting. He never hid the fact that he thought her lovely and desirable, yet assumed, without any real attempt to test his opinion, that their temperaments were entirely incompatible. She left his office full of gratitude, but wishing that, on the tide of temporary emotion, he had either kissed her very lonely lips or played the silent comrade and grimly but tenderly shaken the offered hand.

(To be continued)