Arabesque

by GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

27

NO LONGER was the Middle East a fortress. The dusty beaters had driven the game out of their deserts into Tunisia, where the guns, appreciative of such excellent shooting, stood ready for the kill. After dark the streets of Cairo blazed again with light.

Armande was happy as she had never been in all her life. Since Cairo had never been occupied, the underground organization had not been used for its original purpose; nevertheless, it had been busy. She began to suspect that her work for Mr. Makrisi — Montagne still kept up his disguise — was becoming pointless, and that her irregular wads of Egyptian pounds were no longer really earned; but her content, eager and warmhearted, was undisturbed. She had an object, and it was Dion Prayle.

His commission had done him good. During those first precious days in Cairo and Helwan, he had accepted his commandant’s offer. He was Captain Dion Prayle now (in his service it seemed to be understood that one remained a lieutenant for only a month or two) and, to her very private delight, he looked the part. Sergeant Prayle was eccentric and misplaced; the same face on Captain Prayle was that of a hard-bitten original. Whether he really liked his commission she could not decide. He obviously adored and mothered his Field Security Section, but he complained that a sergeant s life had been more amusing. One had not, he said, to put up with the conversation of officers.

It was odd that her surrender to Dion should have made the writing of letters to her husband easier than before. At her first attempt she had been overwhelmed by a sense of disloyalty; this precluded all emotion and any soulful effort towards intimacy, while encouraging the transmission of mere news. John had seemed delighted, and had replied with a letter that certainly showed no sense of strain and, for him, was almost witty. Thereafter their longdistance relationship was simpler. John had ceased to be an unsatisfactory ambition, and had become just a dear person with whom years ago she had lived.

To her amusement Dion Prayle was jealous. He maintained in obscure but uncompromising phrases that John should be told and that proceedings for divorce should be started; he could not be made to see that it was wicked to upset John in the steady course of his personal war, and that he might become careless of his life. It was not enough for Dion to lay it down that she had never been in love with John, and that by now ho must suspect it. John was not the sort of person to suspect anything which was not in full view.

Just now Dion was absent for a few days, and Armande had an appointment in a secluded alley of the Cairo Zoo. She was fond of the zoo; its overhanging creepers, its vast African trees, and running water made it the coolest of Egyptian gardens. She had chosen it as discreet and neutral ground for a first meeting with her chief. His request for a rendezvous was unexpected, and perplexing in that it had been passed to her by letter from Dion instead of through the normal channel of Mr. Makrisi. The meeting meant, she supposed, that she was to be thanked and that her employment was at an end.

No Gestapo could have got anything out of her, for she never saw cause or effect of what she did. She -was often used as a postbox, and sometimes she was simply told to be away from her fiat on certain dates. It was about time, she admitted, that they closed down. The war was far away, and their branch of Intelligence could be left to the small and efficient band of professionals. Mr. Makrisi still seemed very busy, but she was not. She had no idea what ho was up to; he was conspiratorial and uncommunicative.

Major Furney passed her seat, stopped to examine some decorative cranes in a paddock behind the bushes, repassed her, and then sat down.

“It’s curious, Mrs. Herne, that we have never actually met before,” he said.

“Isn’t it? I knew your face in Beirut, but not your name.”

He thanked her very formally for her work. She couldn’t help feeling as if she were leaving school with an elaborate certificate. She realized, however, why Dion liked Guy Furney. The precise face could not hide the fact that he enjoyed himself. lie might lack depth of character, but not of insight.

“ What I wanted to ask you,” he said, “is — what are your personal relations to Mr. Makrisi?”

“Personal?”

“Yes.”

“We have very little personal relationship. He’s not a man one can help outside the game. He doesn’t — well, he doesn’t encourage me.”

“You like him, I suppose?” Furney asked.

“Oh, yes. I’m so sorry for him.”

“I’m glad your loyalty isn’t engaged in any way,” he said with a smile of relief.

“My loyalty is exactly where it always has been, Major Furney.”

“Yes,” he answered with some embarrassment. “I know it and I knew it. But that question is now — academic. Mrs. Herne, I have given Mr. Alakrisi no work whatever for weeks. Does that surprise you?”

“I suppose he has been making contacts for the future,” she said.

“He has been busy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m uneasy.”

“Major Furney, it is utterly inconceivable,” Armande answered directly, “that Major Montagne would work for the enemy.”

“I’m happy you said that, though it only confirms what I too was sure of. But then, what is he doing? Can you watch him?”

“I’ve no organization except his.”

“ I’ll give you the start of one,” he said. “ Do you remember a certain Rashid, Rashid Abd-er-Rahman ibn Ajjucyn?”

“Rashid! Very well.”

“He’s devoted to you. He’d take your orders, and raise a few of his people to carry them out.”

“Where is Atajor Iloneymill?”

“D.S.O. Posthumous, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no! Poor Toots!” Armande protested, fighting the shock of sorrow and her tears. “I didn’t know! I haven’t spoken for months to anybody in the army but Dion.”

“They were playing hell with Rommel’s communications, and based on nothing themselves. They knew it couldn’t go on forever.”

“And Rashid got clear?”

“ Yes. He was wounded. But he is out of hospital now, and at a loose end. Would you like him?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all, then. You can ring me up and fix a meeting whenever you need to talk. Is there anything else that you think you are likely to want?”

“Could you help me to pay a debt?”

“How much?”

“Not that kind. A debt of friendship. You know the Rumanian I used to dance with at the Casino, and her mother?”

“Indeed I do. A pure Byzantine type. Most interesting.”

“ I want her to have a real chance. Aren’t there empty planes going to South Africa?”

“There are. But I can’t go shipping off pet cabaret girls. Only generals can do that.”

“Suppose she had worked for you and her life were in dangert” Armande suggested.

“Is it?”

“Not in the least. But if it were, you’d put her on a plane.”

“Oh my aunt! And her mother?”

“Yes.”

“You guarantee them?”

“They keep right out of the war. All Floarca Pitcscu wants is to dance in the capital of the winner. I think Johannesburg would be a good stop on the way.”

“I can’t do it. Really I can’t,” he said regretfully.

“Whisper, Major Furney. The simple soldiery will believe anything.”

Armande could not keep back her tears. All this while she had forced down a grim, military cover upon her longing for a lonely minute in which to weep for Toots; and now, thinking with half her mind of that day when he had first met and comforted her, the memory of his voice and of his laughing words, which she had just used in his own tone, came back to her too vividly.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Herne,” Guy Furney was repeating. “In the end I’m just a mass of files like the rest of them. Give me their passports, and I’ll do it. I promise you it shall be done.”

He patted her hand in agitation. Armande choked on a hoarse sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. She who had never deliberately used tears on a man was childishly, ironically, astonished to discover how effective they were.

28

Two days later Rashid came to see her. She sat him, gallantly protesting, down on a sofa while she mixed a drink of heroic size. Drinks, furniture, flat — none of them belonged to her. This floating life did not disturb her, for Dion Prayle represented the reality of past and future. Her present, wrapped in this chrysalis of government possessions, was unimportant.

Rashid had collected a Military Cross, and he pointed out the ribbon with a proud and reverent forefinger. Armande, too, was impressed, for the army, after nearly four years of fighting, had no medals later than the green and purple of the prewar Palestine campaign — and Rashid was most certainly not entitled to that.

He had none of the inhibitions of the British officer. He told the exploits of HoneymiU’s force in full and fantastic detail.

“We fought with the British as equal to equal. We have beaten the Germans. And now we will deal with the Jews,” declared Rashid as a peroration.

“Rashid Bey, shame on you!”

Rashid, unabashed, happily patted the unseen knife that lay upon his lean stomach.

“Willah!” he cried in his deep, gargling voice. “Only the British stand between the Jews and this! And the British are going. Everyone says so. Then we shall have Americans. I have seen them. They can fight. But they will not fight for the Jews as you did.”

“Café talk, Rashid,” she said in gentle reproof.

“I repeat what they say,” he admitted. “Who am I to know the truth? Perhaps there will be no Americans. Perhaps the British will stay forever, and my home is ever open to them. But I think they will leave us alone with the Jews.”

“And if you are — haven’t they a secret army called the Hagana, and trained by us too? Arc you so sure?”

“I am a soldier, Mrs. Armande. I have no other trade, and I understand it. I know the Hagana. They will die like men. They will win every battle against us, but they cannot be everywhere at once. The Jews are surrounded by Islam. If we raid them, they can punish us. They will. But they cannot occupy, for there is nothing to occupy. How then will they force us to peace?”

“Damascus isn’t far away.”

“By God, Mrs, Armande, you should be a soldier! Your thought has the sharpness of the sword. Well, let them take Damascus — but they would need more warrior Jews than there are in the world to hold it!”

She let Rashid rave himself out, aware that in the unfamiliar, exciting presence of a European woman he became intoxicated by his own personality. Then she told him as much as it was wise for him to know: that the British Secret Service (to him, who would be impressed by it, she used the unnecessarily dramatic name) wanted information about the movements and contacts of a Mr. Makrisi. When he was ready, he could come to her flat, meet this Mr. Makrisi, and also leave with him, so that any men he might post in the street could recognize the person to be followed.

Armande herself knew where Mr. Makrisi was likely to be found at certain hours; thus, if she. were not suspected, it was child’s play to put Rashid’s men back on his track when they lost it. She did not like this assignment; it tasted of treachery. She hoped with all her heart that Montagne was not engaged in anything that might be taken overseriously, and that his activities could be unobtrusively checked in good time.

During the next three weeks Rashid called several times at the flat, for additional information on Air. Makrisi, and once with a dashing, blustering demand for money to reward his men. He was evasive, difficult, exclamatory, claiming results but refusing to admit what they were. Armande, taught by Wadiah and clients at the Casino, knew her Arabs. It was not hard for her. Whether Christian or Moslem, they resembled European woman so much more than European man.

At last he came to report, grinning with such candor and confidence that Armande knew perfectly well he was determined to tell no more than half the truth.

“It was easy,” he said. “He told me in the first week. He wanted me to work for the Arabs.”

“Against whom?”

“The Jews, of course.”

“That would be against us. Against me, Rashid Bey.”

“I do not know. Perhaps. But who am I ? What do you know of Makrisi’s friends, Mrs. Armande?’

“Nothing,” she answered, smiling. “I want you to tell me.”

“Believe me, Mrs. Armande, I am out of politics. I am a soldier.”

“You are all a soldier should be, Rashid Bey.”

“By God, you are beautiful! I would give three hundred black goats to your father for you.”

“But I am already married, my dear.”

“Then we are friends for always. Brother and sister as if we had played in the same dust. And I will never betray you.”

Armande suddenly saw light. This magnificent creature, nervously advancing and retreating, was full of mistrust. He suspected that he was being double-crossed, and that, so far from being engaged to report on Mr. Makrisi, Makrisi was really engaged to report on him.

“ Rashid,” she said, “ tell me — why do you think I doubted you?”

“By God, I thought no such thing!”

“But if you had thought so, why would you have thought it?”

Rashid grinned with delight at this courtesy.

“Why, Mrs. Armande? Billah! I will tell you why. Because your Makrisi incites people against the Jews, yet he makes secret visits to a house of Jews.”

“What about it? Can’t he have friends of all religions, as you and I?”

“Yes, but he is not open as you and I. My men have watched him. He goes secretly to this house. Two of the Jews he meets in a cafe near the station, also secretly, and once he gave them a small parcel. This is not mere friendship. This is what you told me to find. But what does it mean? Am I the hunter or the gazelle?”

“The hunter,” she said, “and a very good one, my dear. I can’t make any more of this than you, but we will see what they think higher up.”

Armande decided to test Montagne herself before she made any report, and arranged, by a pretense of aimless boredom, for him to invite her to dinner at one of the small native eating places he patronized. She had a cautious respect for Montague’s acute instinct for danger, sharpened by years of official and unofficial intrigue, but she reckoned that there would be nothing for him to suspect so long as she stayed within a part that was or had been natural to her. She gave deliberate expression to the worst in her: moody resentment of her treatment by David Nachmias. She had, in fact, very little resentment left, only a broad, warm, healthy anger. It was absurd to brood over a petty black-listing by Security when she was the trusted agent of a department of Intelligence at least as secret and as important to the war.

It needed little effort of the imagination to throw herself back to the raw sensitivity of that Armande who had been the loveless, shrinking, black-listed dancer at the Casino. She was too clever openly to abuse Nachmias, but she became depressed and bitter over her wine and allowed Montagne to draw his own conclusions. He drew them.

“In the jolly little dog kennel,” he said, “where I hide myself among the excrement of my own thoughts, I pass my time in making a special study ol Jewish politics. Jewish Palestine is an explosive, Armande. It can be made to destroy itself. And there is no lack of those who want it to. Some for one motive, some for another, will help them blow themselves up. You and I, because we hate them. I have hated Franco. And Petain. And the Catholics and monarchists who pervert my general. . . .”

Armande watched his eyes. They should have been burning, but they were cold, even a little hazy, at the bottom of the deep sockets,

“. . . But they were decent little hates — mere dislike, shall I say? — if I compare them to my hatred for this Jewish Agency. After Hitler and his crew are in hell, the Zionists will be the only National Socialists left in the world.”

Armande’s acting broke down in indignation.

“That isn’t so!” she cried. “They are nationalist and they are socialist, I know. But you cannot call them Nazis. They have to be strong in order to create.”

“Strength through joy,” spat Montagne, “and the same pretty tactics. We were in their way, eh? Little people in their way!”

Armande had ruined her chance of discovering more. She was sure that he was not suspicious, but ordinary common sense would prevent him telling any more of his anti-Zionist intrigue to a person who was not in sympathy.

There was now plenty to tell Guy Furney. She called him up. He asked her to lunch at a garden restaurant on the banks of the Nile, where the grilled pigeons were famous and a table could be discreetly arranged among shrubs at a distance from other guests.

“That’s a very clear story,” said Furney when she had made her report. “Now let us see what facts there are.” He smiled at her as if to disclaim any superior intelligence. “We know (a) that Montagne blames the Jews for his misfortune. Personally I think he should blame me or the French or this damned GHQ which shifted me out of Beirut at the beginning of the case. But there it is. (b) That all his fanaticism has been channeled into this personal grudge; in fact, that he’s running amok, (c) That, in contradiction to all this, he is mixed up in an intrigue with Jews. It would all become much clearer if we knew what sort of Jews — Zionists, anti-Zionists, neutrals, or just plain black market. Well, I have the addresses of Montagne’s enigmatic friends, and I’ll find out their names. Then, I am afraid, we shall have to pass the whole case over to Security.”

29

CAPTAIN DION PRAYLE crossed and recrossed his long legs as he sat in a comfortable basket chair and discussed current business with Laurence Fairfather, in the Jerusalem Field Security office. Prayle’s section had a roving commission in Trans-Jordan, which allowed him, if he wished, to drop in at conferences anywhere between Palestine and Bagdad.

“Has uncle’s loaf found any solution to our problem?” he inquired.

“It has,” Fairfather replied. “I’m going to ask the Jewish Agency.”

“Trip up, bo, and you’ll get a bowler hat.

“Of course. And Palestine Headquarters know I wouldn’t complain. That’s why they have given me a free hand. I think I’d like David Nachmias on this job.”

“Have a heart, bo!” Prayle exclaimed. “Here’s Montague nipping up through Trans-Jordan, dressed as an Egyptian with a packet of filthy postcards under his arm, and you want to tell the Jewish Agency what we know and ask for cooperation. It’s cuckoo!”

“What’s he really carrying, Dion?”

“Detonators? Machine-gun parts? Something small and valuable.”

“They could steal whatever they want in that line from the dumps and ordnance depots without any trouble at all. I think he’s carrying money.”

“Why not use the bank?”

“Bank transfers can be traced. I also suspect that Montague or his backers want to be quite sure it reaches the right hands — and so the personal visit.”

“The Agency are lousy with money,” Prayle remarked.

“Exactly. So it isn’t for them. And anyway Furney and Armande are quite certain that Montagne is working against the Agency. He’s obviously dealing with the Stern people or the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and don’t ask me where one begins and the other ends. Anyhow, the first thing to do is to sec the Agency. You’d better come with me. Useful contacts, and they won’t eat you.”

Prayle reluctantly agreed.

The Jewish Agency building was a government office in miniature. It was low, massive, and dignified, suggesting a bank and a fort. The interior, with its gray stone and paneling, was restful. Fairfather exchanged some chat with the clerk at the slitlike reception desk — beneath the counter of which Prayle felt sure would be a tommy gun — and turned back with a grin as they went upstairs.

“Ordinary chaps, just like you and me,” Fairfather said encouragingly. “You’re going to enjoy Josh.”

Josh was dressed, with a proper degree of negligence, in light English tweed, and his face had a cultured diffidence which suggested an Oxford or Cambridge background. He was indistinguishable in type from one of the High Commissioner’s young officials.

Josh welcomed Prayle unaffectedly and charmingly. He evidently knew something of Prayle’s general duties along the frontier, and offered him the hospitality of any of the Jewish colonies from Dan to the Dead Sea; his face had a weary strength, while he talked, which showed him to be neither so young nor so conventional as he had appeared at first sight. Prayle guessed that this perfect facade of Anglicism must be extraordinarily useful to the Jewish Agency; the brigadiers would be impressed and cordial. Yet one could not say the manner was assumed. Whatever his opinions, this official was a whole and a fine whole.

“Did you just bring Captain Prayle round to introduce him, or is there something special?” Josh asked, coming to business.

“Both. It’s a long story, Josh. There’s a gentleman called Montagne whom you will doubtless remember.”

“Not my department, Laurence.”

“I know. I’m not going to bring that up.”

“He escaped in ‘42, didn’t be?”

“Yes, he is now known as Makrisi.”

“Makrisi!” Josh exclaimed.

“I thought you might be interested. Makrisi is traveling up through Trans-Jordan, pretending with great success to be an Egyptian peddler. He’s watched all the way, but he doesn’t know it. Imperalist secret police, Josh.”

“They want some help as usual, I suppose?”

“They do. Makrisi is carrying what I believe to be money.”

“It is money.”

“Any information on the source of the cash?”

“I am not sure. Certainly Gentile.”

“Where’s Makrisi going, Josh?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Give me credit for some intelligence! I know he isn’t working for the Agency.”

“Thank God for that!” said Josh sardonically.

“All right. More cards on the table. Dion Prayle has watched — well, facilitated his journey as far as Deraa. From Deraa and over the Palestine roads we shall watch him together. But if he plays hideand-seek with us in a town we shall lose him. Our men haven’t the experience. The police could possibly trace him right to his destination, but we rat her want to keep this affair in the family. And so, Josh,” he added sternly, “do you.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t want a nice, open airing of the Montagne-Heme business. Who were those troops who collected Wadiah’s arms, Josh?”

“ It does seem a case where I could be allowed to cooperate.”

“Come off it! You damn well know it is.”

“What do you want?” Josh asked.

“I want Makrisi to deliver the money, and then I want the whole lot detained by the Hagana, and Makrisi handed over to me.”

“Utterly impossible, Laurence, You know I can’t use the Hagana against the Irgun Zvai Leumi.”

“Well, if I mayn’t have some hot numbers from the Hagana, can I have David Nachmias?”

“Why don’t you arrest Makrisi now?” Josh asked.

“Because we have no case against him till he delivers that money. If we arrest him now, he is sure to produce a good story to account for it.”

“I see. Well, we’d better ask David Nachmias to come up. He’s in his office downstairs. I wouldn’t mind so long as you both keep out of trouble.”

30

DAVID NACHMIAS greeted Fairfather with affection and Prayle with the slightest hesitation, which then was wiped away by a dignified and selfdepreciatory smile. Prayle, with his acquired knowledge of the Arab, could make more of Nachmias than he could of the ambiguous Josh. The man was a foul criminal, but just like some sheikh of the Beduw caught out in an atrocity that he couldn’t deny but for which he couldn’t be touched. David Nachmias might, of course, know nothing at all of Prayle’s paper warfare against him for the sake of Armande, but Dion was certain that he did.

Nachmias listened to a flow of Hebrew which sounded more like a speech than a story. Prayle noticed that Josh in Hebrew was far more fiery and animated than he was in English.

“What do you want me to do?” Nachmias asked Fairfather.

“To go with us wherever Montagne is going.”

“And then?”

“I shall take Montagne away. No possible scandals, David. He has done well for us, and we just want him to cool down. We might send him to East Africa, or give him a chance of dropping in France.”

“And what about the people he has come to see?” asked Josh.

“Unless I recognize one of them as wanted for a crime, there’s nothing I can do. Have you any idea who they are likely to be?”

“As individuals? No idea at all,” Josh replied. “I just knew that Makrisi had been collecting funds for the Irgun Zvai Leumi. I didn’t know he was Montagne, and I didn’t know he was on his way up from Egypt.”

“Forgive my suggestion, Captain Fairfather,“ said Nachmias slowly, “but I do not understand how your service can keep Montagne shadowed without him suspecting it.”

“That’s easy, David! We’re not shadowing him. We’re helping him. Mr. Makrisi has done good work for a certain department. When he pretended to have business at Deraa, they pretended to believe him and passed us the word. Prayle, here, has booked him a room at a disreputable hotel.”

“But why not travel through Palestine?”

“Because the thought of a peculiar Gentile calling at the office doesn’t please the Irgun one little bit wherefore he feels safer traveling through Trans-Jordan.”

“Yes,” said Josh, “I think you are right. And Montagne must have insisted on coming in person. But, Laurence, there is one thing I can’t understand — why is he doing this?”

Because, Josh, he thinks the Jews have done him dirt.”

“Revenge? Simple revenge?”

Josh, 1 thank my God daily that I am not concerned with the sordid means by which that department of yours — the one you have nothing to do with — acquires arms. But they shouldn’t get caught. And when they do get caught, they should not let the innocent suffer. And above all they shouldn’t panic and tell David here that he’s got to get them out of it or carry the can back himself. Am I right, David?”

“Your imagination, Captain Fairfather!” murmured Nachmias. “How I envy it!”

“Montagne looks very far ahead,” said Josh thoughtfully.

“Do you agree that the Irgun is your worst enemy?” Prayle asked Josh.

“No! You are!” Josh answered with sudden asperity. “Because you will not see there are two points upon which we can never give way. Free immigration and the right to self-defense. When you prohibit both, you force us to illegality and you may force us to violence.”

“And if we allowed both, we should force the Arabs to violence,” Prayle retorted. “One hell of a price to pay for your nationalism!”

“Nationalism? Well, call it that if you like. But doesn’t its quality count for you, Captain Prayle? Where did nationalism ever have the beauty and self-sacrifice of ours? When have you seen, since t he Middle Ages, rich men giving up their possessions for the sake of an ideal? When have you seen lawyers, doctors, intellectuals, and men who have got used to luxury in the dirtiest of commerce (which was all you would allow them) stripped to the waist and building and planting in a wilderness where there was nothing? You cannot beat such a spirit. A Jewish Palestine is inevitable. Nothing and nobody can stop it.”

David Nachmias accompanied the two officers when they left the Jewish Agency. He stumped along King George Avenue, discussing with Prayle the notables of Trans-Jordan, the help they had given in founding the early Jewish settlements, and the strong bonds of friendship that still existed between individual Arab and Jew. Naehmias’s implicit belief was quite clear: that the Jews were only in Palestine by favor of the British, and that they could only continue by favor of the Arabs. In listening to him, Dion Prayle was conscious of a nasty sense of disloyalty to Armande. But David Nachmias was so courteous and reasonable. It was at last easy to see how Armande had been taken in by him.

31

CAPTAIN PRAYLE lay on the hillside, looking down upon the Jordan Valley between Lake Hula and the Sea of Galilee. Whenever there was traffic on the hairpin bends of the road to Safad, he raised his field glasses; the slight movement of elbows stirred the scent of the sweet mountain herbs crushed by his body. Up the valley he could just see a shoulder of Hermon, shining a metallic yellow between the tenuous pillars of cloud that were distilled from its gorges by the cool of evening. To his right, three thousand feet below, the sea, reflecting the last of the sun, had turned a pale magenta, and along the Syrian shore parallel scarves of mist were of so frank a mauve that they reminded him of solemn high teas in childhood and the dress worn by a beloved great-aunt.

Ah, that might be Mr. Makrisi, paddling up the hill astride a donkey. Prayle steadied his elbows and trained his glasses on a bend of the road where the traveler would come into full view. Makrisi had changed the clothes he wore at Deraa, but that beard was his. A darkness bet ween check and forehead, which was undoubtedly the hollow of deep-set eyes, made his identity certain. He was dressed in an old khaki jacket from the last war and dusty Turkish trousers. For disguise to be perfect, he should have had a dusty wife marching behind the donkey; but he would pass anywhere, so long as he did not talk too much, as a Moghreby who had settled down in the high borderland of Syria and Trans-Jordan.

Prayle waited for man and donkey to reappear round the last and most northerly bend in the road, where it passed through the edge of a plantation. They did not reappear. He consulted the map. There was nowhere Makrisi could go except a deserted camp site a few hundred yards from the road. Probably he had stopped to rest.

Then came Laurence Fairfather, swinging round the bends on a motorcycle and traveling much too fast. Prayle, watching like an anxious and impotent god what was about to happen to the mortals below him, observed that a civilian lorry on the wrong side of the road would reach the next corner at the same time as the motorcycle. He saw Fairfather take to the verge of the road in a cloud of dust, vanish behind the lorry, come out with a sickening wobble, and recover speed. That imperturbable Laurence always showed off to himself on a motorcycle.

Fairfather stopped at the top of the hill a hundred yards from the hidden Prayle. There he admired the view, sitting astride his bike. Prayle crawled towards the rendezvous under cover of sage and camel’s-thorn, and came within speaking distance.

“If it’s him on the donkey,” he said, “he has stopped on the road.”

Fairfather lit his pipe and continued to admire the view.

“I didn’t pass him,” he replied, without looking round.

“Have you the foggiest notion what you passed, bo?”

“Nothing at all but a lorry. I hope there are thorns in the soft underbelly.”

“There are, damn you! Then he’s turned off up the track to the old camp.”

“All right. I’ll get David. Let’s meet at that patch of eucalyptus just over the crest. There’s still plenty of light, and we should be able to see down into the camp from there.”

Laurence put his pipe in his pocket, jumped on the kick start, and vanished over the hill to Safad.

Dion Prayle had to walk. The section truck, which had dropped him near his present post, was five miles away at a road junction to the south. His route demanded careful planning, for a solitary British soldier on foot was a rare sight outside the camps and towns; his sudden appearance on road or hillside might arouse suspicion. He waited for the dust of a passing truck to conceal his movement, then slipped across the road at the next bend and over the embankment at the farther side. From there he could reach the crest.

When he reached the grove of eucalyptus, Fairfather and David Nachmias were already there. Nachmias had left his car in Safad and traveled the short distance, over a rocky track, on the pillion of the motorcycle. He was smiling as if he had enjoyed it.

“Commended for gallantry,” said Prayle. “At risk of death or permanent injury et cetera.”

“I do not mind a new experience,” replied Nachmias, “though I would prefer a horse. So much of my life is spent . . .” He made a slow, pacific gesture which seemed to imply long, patient hours of sitting in Arab tents and cafes, of waiting upon government officials and Agency politicians in leisurely Jerusalem. “I enjoy a day in the country.”

Prayle knew instantly what he meant. It was the sort of phrase he would have used himself. A day in the country covered those dangerous journeys beyond the frontiers of neutral Turkey, or the first night in a new settlement when the joyous, singing colonists put up their tents on a patch of sand that would soon be a tidy village among its orange groves, or all the pleasures of active intrigue in the open air between Bagdad and Damascus.

“Shall we start?” asked Nachmias. “I think, if I may advise, that the edge of the grove is better avoided. The trees are thin and movement could be seen against the going down of the sun. Let us follow that stone wall. We can stand among the thorn at the end, and our heads will be hidden.”

Without any sort of insistence David Nachmias quietly assumed command. Prayle was certain that if either he or Fairfather had shown the minutest sign of questioning Nachmias’s right he would, as quietly and imperceptibly, have relinquished it. His judgment of the ground was correct; from the wall, screened by bushes, they could see into the deserted camp. There were a few huts, all but one open to wind and weather. A civilian truck — that which had raised the dust for Prayle’s crossing of the road — was parked on a strip of cracked asphalt. Makrisi’s donkey, forelegs hobbled, browsed on a miniature forest of cabbage and carrot which had gone wild in the former mess garden.

“Are they likely to have put out sentries, David?” Fairfather asked.

“At the way in from the road. Not here. If we go quietly we shall reach the hut.”

“Orders, bo?” Prayle asked his senior, tapping the service .45 at his hip.

“I forget the precise and beautiful wording of the War Office, but, roughly speaking, if you plug a civilian before he plugs you, it’s murder. And you won’t be plugged. Am I right, David?”

“Yes,” answered Nachmias. “But I am not sure that, you will get Montagne.”

“Why not?”

“ You could never have followed him to this meeting unless you had known all his movements from t he start.”

“We certainly couldn’t!”

“Then what,” asked Nachmias, throwing open his arms as far as the surrounding thorn permitted, “will they think of Montagne?”

“I see. Then we’ll have to make the interview snappy,” said Fairfather. “Dion, it might — it might just be necessary to cover them to get Montagne away. But we’ll go in peaceably.”

Nachmias led them along the angle of two walls, bending low behind the roughly piled stones; they came out on a slope of sunburned, tussocky grass which led directly down into the camp, and gave silent and easy access to the closed hut on its windowless southern side.

32

DION PRAYLE felt more and more dislike for the whole business; it was too full of psychological intangibles. To surprise a bunch of potential assassins, in blind confidence that they meant, as yet, to avoid trouble with the army, was hazarding too much on being able to fix one’s exact position in the ever changing fog of Jewish politics. This expedition of three was all wrong. They should have called in a carload of police prepared to overwhelm all resistance — though in that case there would have been nobody to resist, for the police always managed to give ample warning of their coming.

They reached the door of the hut unseen and unchallenged. Laurence flung it open and went in. There were four men seated at a table talking to Montagne. They were dressed as Arab soldiers of the British Army. All had their Arab headcloth drawn lightly across the lower part of the face. On the table was a small, open attache case stuffed with bank notes, Egyptian and Palestinian. During the first two seconds of amazement and a third while hands moved down to pockets and up again with pistols, Nachmias was speaking quietly in Hebrew.

A man wearing a red and white checked headcloth, who sat next to Montagne, said in English, “Put your arms on the table.”

Facing four pistols at a range of two yards, there was no option. The leader unloaded the two service revolvers and handed them back again. Another man ran his hands over the three of them, looking for additional arms. Prayle’s still neutral opinion of David Nachmias changed to admiration on seeing that he carried no weapon at all.

“What do you want here?”

The leader spoke a cultured English with some trace of a Slav accent.

“Not you,” Fairfather answered in a friendly tone. “I’m not a policeman. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. My business is with Mr. Makrisi.”

“A rescue party. No, Captain Fairfather.”

“You know me, then?”

“ By sight and reputation. They say you are fond of j ustice.”

“I hope so.”

“Watch it!”

Mr. Makrisi was seated at his side, silent and uncaring. With a smooth, efficient, horribly merciful flow of hand and arm, the leader shot him through the back of the skull.

Dion Prayle felt his knees trembling and tried to control them, lie was no more afraid than one who sees a deadly accident in the street, but the shock of this cold-blooded execution surpassed anything his emotions could endure without some physical reaction, Montagne was sliding off his chair onto the floor and kicking when he got there. Kick. Twitch. Kick. Twitch. Impersonal as a clock.

“That is what will happen to your agents,” said the man in the red and white checks.

His voice carried no threat. It was a tone of regret, as if asking why they did not accept the inevitable.

“He was nobody’s agent but yours,” Prayle retorted fiercely.

“No? Not in Egypt?”

“Didn’t even know he was suspected! Isn’t that proof of it?” asked Prayle, pointing to the money on the table,

“It is proof of nothing.”

Nachmias let loose a flood of Hebrew, through which his sultry anger rumbled, courteous and incalculably dangerous. He stood square to the table, not tense as a European, but with all the muscles of his powerful body relaxed in the contempt of the stronger for the weaker.

“ I am sorry,” he said, turning to Prayle and Fairfather from the table he had so completely dominated. “I was telling them merely that they arc unworthy to be Jews.”

One of the four men called him by some insulting name; the voice was shrill and unsure, and Prayle gained the impression that the speaker was very young. It was hard to tell his age from the burning black eyes above the headcloth, but the slight figure, the clear, ivory forehead, suggested a boy of not more than fifteen. He was playing with his pistol. Prayle hated carelessness with arms.

“I wish you’d tell that boy to leave his gun alone,” he said.

“Afraid, Englishman?”

“Of course I am,” answered Prayle testily. “So would you be if you had any sense. He’s point ing it at you now.”

“Lunatics who fight with children!” scoffed Nachmias.

“Rak Ivrit!” ordered the leader.

“No! To you I will not speak Hebrew.”

“Ashamed, you spy?”

“Yes. Ashamed. I and my father and our fathers before us, they spoke Hebrew while you gargled in your Yiddish like —like sick sheep. I speak the language of these officers because they are guests in my country.”

“And because you take their money,” the man sneered.

“David Nachmias,” said Fairfather firmly, “has no more taken our money than you did — if any of you are really in the army.”

“I have no quarrel with you. I know that you do not wish to be here,” the leader declared, as if repeating a slogan of faith. “You would rather be at home.”

“As a matter of fact,” Fairfather replied, “I would rather be here than anywhere else. But I suppose that is hardly a shooting matter?”

The man seemed disconcerted by this reasonable reply.

“So long as you go when we require it,” he answered.

“Good God, bo!” Prayle exclaimed. “Can’t you see that attitude will bring more of us?”

“The worse for them!”

“And for you!”

“We accept that,” answered the man in the red checks proudly. “For us, in our fight for freedom, death is nothing.”

“Hell!” said Dion, exasperated. “So I see! But does it do any good?”

“Be quiet! I have not finished with your other spy yet.”

Prayle gave Nachmias a half smile, involuntarily expressing his sense of the absurdity of the charge. Spy David Nachmias had certainly been, except on his own people; but the word when applied to that hold, quadrangular figure was so small, so emptily dramatic.

33

THE leader again attacked in bitter Hebrew. David Nachmias calmly heard him out.

“Crawl to them?” he said reflectively. “Crawl to them? Is it crawling to speak a language that all can understand? Because our manners were too gracious when we were slaves, as you call us, is it a reason for having none in our own country?”

He was silent for a moment, then began to defend his courage, boastful yet dignified as an old Emir justifying his leadership to his followers.

“I have founded colonies. I have filled Eretz Israel with men and women, and arms for their defense. I have fought all my life against Turks, against Arabs, against British. And all of them were my friends. You — you have stolen our sword and refused our wisdom. You hide there in those British uniforms, and who taught you? I did! But I never put a man in their uniform to make war on them. When we fight, it shall be under our own flag and in our own uniform. And never— I tell you, never — whatever threats may be made, whatever words may fly in anger, never will we murder the British. What do you gain by your childishness? That man who lies there, whom you shot, I killed him long ago. I killed him by making a mistake. His blood is on my head, but what leader of men cannot say the same? It was only a crime against my brother. But also, for the sake of my people, I did not bear witness when I could have done so. And that is a crime against God.”

Nachmias grimly regarded Montague’s body, a shapeless mass on the floor of the darkening hut.

“Without law! Without law!” he cried, as if in a lament. Then with the first gesture of his whole speech he stabbed a finger towards the table. “You talk of freedom and democracy, but you do not know what they mean. The people can have no freedom if their will is not obeyed. Obey your government, your own Jewish Government. And if still you do not understand, then remember what you heard as children: You shall not separate yourselves from your people.”

“We do obey,” said the leader, impressed to the point of argument. “ But your methods are futile and useless. We only do for you what you dare not do for yourselves.”

“Dare not? And with ten thousand trained men instead of your handful of hysterical, suicidal . . . Bah! And with our own money! Where did that come from?” asked Nachmias, pointing to the case of bank notes.

“I do not care where it came from. 1 shall use it in our fight for freedom.”

“Your fight!” cried David Nachmias ironically. “Your little fight, when all the power of Jew and Gentile is strained to the limit against the greatest enemy our race ever had! What do you know? What do you care? For you Hitler and the British are all one. Have none of you lost parents, wives, children? Have none of you seen what I have seen?”

“And what have you seen, safe here in Palestine?” cried the boy. “My father was killed. My mother was killed. Taken away by police like these police!”

“Then let us tell you how to take revenge. Revenge is not this way. Look, boy! There is that money, and you are told not to care where it has come from. Can you not see that you are mad not to listen to us who know? That money — it could be from the teeth of your mother.”

The boy jumped up. He was shorter and slighter than he had seemed at the table. He waved his pistol, pointing it wildly at himself, at enemies imaginary, real; shouting defiance and misery in the raucous Hebrew of his half-broken voice. His rancor seemed to find its outlet in the compassionate face of David Nachmias. He gesticulated towards him with wild reproaches, the pistol in his hand a power, a talisman against further hurt and further pity. It went off.

Prayle and Fairfather jumped forward to catch Nachmias’s body, and were stopped short by guns jammed hard into their stomachs. The boy looked at the blood with timid curiosity; then raised his eyes, flashing. They could see him forcing pride into his eyes. The leader took away his pistol and wiped it carefully; he closed Nachmias’s hand around the butt and placed his limp finger within the trigger guard.

Dion Prayle assumed that he and Fairfather would be the next. With his hands up he stood there, to his astonishment, thinking. Prayle, observer, watched events happening to Prayle, alien body. The pair of eyes that faced him were completely expressionless, neither hard, nor fanatical, nor pitying. No British soldier had eyes like those. The man was an automaton, obeying, and sacrificing all his emotions for the satisfact ion of obedience. The best chance for Prayle, body, was to stand still.

The red and white headcloth gave out its orders. Prayle strained his intelligence to guess the meaning of the Hebrew from its faint resemblance to Arabic. Then the man spoke in English.

“Captain Fairfather, I shall lock you both in this hut while we go. I hope you will realize that we too can be merciful to our enemies, and that you will be grateful.”

“If you think I’m not going to try to bring you to justice for these bloody murders—” stormed Fairfather.

“Captain, I am sure you will try. But I am now going to cover you myself, while my friends take away the bodies. One against two — so if you make the slightest movement I shall shoot.”

His three companions picked up the body of Nachmias, carefully resting on his chest the hand that held the pistol, and carried it out. Then they returned for Montague.

“Keep looking straight to your front,” ordered the leader. “I am now going to the door, but I can kill you just as easily from behind. When you hear the door shut and locked, you may move. Try the windows, if you like, but they are steel and rusted up.”

He closed the attache case, picked it up, and passed out of their field of vision. They heard the clicks of latch and lock. The engine of the lorry roared.

Prayle put down his hands, and felt in his pocket.

“Cigarette?” he said, offering his case to Fairfather.

“Thank you, Dion.”

They lit up.

“That’s better,” said Fairfather. “I was feeling slightly sick.”

“So did I when they shot Montagne. After that — well, it was all a solid piece.”

“Poor David! Poor, dear David!”

“Do you think the little bastard meant to shoot him?”

“Dion, I don’t know. God, how David let ‘em have it! ”

“Not a man to be angry.”

“Never saw him angry before.”

“I’ve got the number of the lorry.”

“It’s quite certainly a different one now,” said Laurence.

“ Yes. Efficiency on the scale of modern industry. Shall we have a bang at the door, bo? I think he was right about those windows.”

“Let’s swing the table at it, and save my aged shoulder.”

The door gave at their second charge. They were outside in the cool darkness of the Galilee hills. There were no sounds but the evening breeze stirring the scrub, and the munching of Montagne’s donkey in the deserted garden.

34

“I am leaving Field Security,” Armande read. “Open for business shortly at GHQ.”

It meant months of Dion — no more fantastic, unexpected evenings splitting the bearable continuity of life into meaningless sections of before and after; no more separations to be followed by those damnable days when Armande felt that he had vanished, when she was convinced that his life or health was in danger, when she was terrified by the sudden mobility of his army life. Her obsession was that he might be posted to India. She feared India for its distance, for his possible infidelities. There were so many women who could love and read her Dion better — no, none better, but they might make him think so. Be was just the sort of man to fall for some delicious and misunderstood Oriental who could persuade him that she cared for nothing but reality — in his sense, of course.

At GHQ. All his free hours for her. She longed for him so, for again loneliness threatened her in this world of men. The government flat would be hers for another month, and then the present job was over. Guy Furney’s manner had been abrupt. Ite told her that Montagne had disappeared and was presumed dead. He seemed to feel his death most bitterly, and to hold it against her, as if resenting the efficiency with which his orders had been carried out. Or was it that he, too, found her dangerous, that he blamed her for the whole trouble?

She put the precious letter in her bag and went out, idly and happily, into the streets of Cairo. In the shops the display of intimate garments and summer frocks was alluring, though too expensive for any but Egyptians. She needed nothing and reminded herself, when she hesitated before an occasional temptation, that she was only wondering what Dion would think of her choice. He seemed to like — and she suspected that most men agreed with him — a demure formality outside and extreme vulgarity underneath. At last she could resist no longer, and merrily bought for his delight.

She wandered into that garden café where she had taken her decision to dance with Floarea. Over strawberries and cream she considered and tried to plan the months ahead with Dion.

No longer could this affair be passed off to conscience as a lovely and unreal ecstasy, of no importance to any but the two dreamers. It had to be preserved. That necessity involved, at once, all the threads that bound her as a woman to everyone she thought about, loved, or tolerated. Threads binding Dion existed too, though he was pleased to believe that they did not. Yet it was Dion who insisted that John should be told. His motives were absurd, but of course scrupulous as himself; they seemed to be a mixture of inhuman love for absolute truth and loyalty to an unknown companion-inarms: they were quite different from her own desire, to her simple and practical, that Dion and she should become an easier part of their environment.

John need not exactly be told in so many words; she would just indicate that she was worried whether the profounder motives for their union were any longer valid, and leave him to read between the lines. The hint, without alarming him into despair, would start him wondering if after the war their marriage should continue, hoping that it could, and slowly realizing that it could not.

In the afternoon she composed an evasive letter which would reveal to John her disturbed emotions. There were certain phrases that she knew he would take as danger signals; in the forgotten days of 1040, when she wrote from Paris and Beirut, those phrases, which then implied nothing more than temporary depression, had never failed to arouse his anxiety. She determined to keep the letter a day or two for cool revision. Two hours later, in a panic lest she should tear it up, she posted it by air mail.

A week passed slowly for she was always expecting Dion. Correspondence from the military to a civilian, within the Middle East, traveled by devious routes of its own and remained in pigeonholes under the disapproving eyes of censors or sorting clerks. Whatever warning Dion gave her of his arrival, he had always come and spent the precious hours with her and gone before his letter arrived. For the whole week she left her front door open when she was out, and hurried home, with exasperated excitement, in case he should be waiting.

When at last he appeared, it was at a reasonable hour, after lunch, in the heat of the day. He was neat, polished, and cool as if he had been on his way to an interview with a general. She would have preferred him to show his longing by bursting in on her dusty and unshaven from the road, but her beloved was still sensitive about his personal appearance. As if it. mattered!

She said, “What really has brought you down to Egypt?”

“Shipped down river for promotion,” he answered.

“But how splendid! A major?”

“A genuine phony major.”

“My clever love! How did you do it?'*

“Got the sack.”

“Darling, don’t be discreet. Tell me!”

“Just usual army practice. Alan embarrasses us. Must be a clever chap to do that, but don’t want him hero. How shall we get rid of him? Well, sir, why not promote the bastard?”

“Dion!”

“Best racket in the British Army, my soul. It supplies just as many good officers as bad ones. Can’t say that of any other system.”

“Talk to me properly. Tell me!”

35

HE BEGAN to tell the story. Armande sat opposite him, her love of his mouth and of every twisted phrase overwhelming her interest. She even resented that she had to listen so long to something so impersonal, something that belonged to one and not to both of them. Then, as he dealt in his obscure understatements with events in the hut, fear for him stabbed her imagination as agonizingly as if she had been present.

At the death of Nachmias she exclaimed in pity, but it was a moment before preoccupation with the fate of Dion would let her remember; then she had nothing but sorrow for the end of such robust vitality. She thought of him as he was in Beirut, with Madame. That poor woman! It might so easily have been Dion and not David Nachmias, Poor, broken woman! She must write.

Dion said, “There was nothing on earth wc could have done to save Nachmias. Then GHQ began to give Palestine hell. And here we are together in the dream city by the Nile. Gin, horse dung, and the idle military.”

“Tell me, darling,” she said, ignoring his lightheartedness, “am I to blame for all this? Am I?”

“You? Why? Most of it falls on Nachmias. Some on me. A bit for Furney. Not much left for you, my soul.”

“I’ll never get mixed up in it again,” she said with a shiver of her shoulders. ^

“ Cheer up, my sweet. There’s a fortnight’s leave ahead.”

Armande cluni^ to him, and shook ofi the past by a long silence in his arms.

“You’ll stay here,” she said. “All the fortnight.”

“Here?” asked Dion, heaven in one eye and doubt in the other. “Wouldn’t His Majesty object?” „

“ I’m his representative till the end of the month.

“Scandal?”

“I’m below scandal, darling.”

“I wish,” he said, “ that you had written to your husband.”

“I have. So there!”

“Good girl! What did you say?”

“This and that. Enough.”

“An Armande letter, I suppose.”

“What’s that?”

“Beautiful feelings. No facts.”

“They weren’t at all beautiful,” she said, distressed.

Dion Prayle moved his valise and suitcase into the flat. Armande had determined not only to lose herself in love, but to guide it towards permanence. Within a week she had forgotten tact and management, since she had no occasion for either. -There was only ease. Her Dion was gentle, even at his most eccentric, and never a bore. As spectators of the world, they saw the same; as participants their minor tastes differed. He would not learn to dance. He avoided the fashionable. In compensation, ho could extract from t he simplicity of man or woman, of restaurant or public place, riches of amusement for both. TII

They had lived together for ten days when John s answer arrived. Armande opened it in privacy. She found herself in such a turmoil of annoyance and modesty that she said nothing.

She drank two stiff Martinis before lunch and sulked.

“Planning Committee still hard at it?” asked Dion, having given his mixture time to work.

“Yes.”

“Top Secret or just Confidential?”

“Neither,” Armande snapped. “ I’ve heard from John.”

“Ah! Got a girl, I suppose?”

“Yes. How on earth did you know? I think he might have tried to be faithful. I did.”

“That little loaf,” he said, “is stuffed so full of hypocrisy that—”

“Hypocrisy? Me?” she asked indignantly. “Read it, Dion!”

She handed him the letter. Dion composed his face into a serious expression, fixed it, and read.

John was glad that she had given him an opening. It was, he said, just like her. John hoped she would not be hurt. He had wanted to tell her long ago, but felt that while she was serving her country in the Middle East it was his duty not to let her be upset. He was in love. An American girl in their naval service. He was sure that Armande would adore her. There had never been anyone quite like her. . . .

“Well, well!” said Dion cautiously.

“But you don’t understand,” Armande insisted. “A little American isn’t at, all the right woman for John. She’d be exasperated by him in a week.”

“I can just imagine John,” he said, “if he knew you were going to marry a primitive soldier with vulgar tastes.”

“Marriage, Dion? For us?”

“You know. It’s in the prayer book. For the satisfaction of lust and the procreat ion of children. Or I may have got it wrong somewhere. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it?”

“Yes, I have,” she admitted. “All day and all night when you were not here. Dion darling, yes, I think so — but can’t wc go on as wc are till the war ends?”

“We’ll have to — considering the queue for the divorce courts.”

“And then? Oh Dion, I should love life with you! But what sort of life?”

“What we can make for ourselves. We don’t know. 1944. 1945. Victory, they say. But we don’t know what it will be like. We shall be out, on our feet, and the other fellow on the slab. Then wc get handed back to the politicians. Cutting here and patching there. You and I — two living, unimportant cells. Chuck us in the hospital ash can? Use us to make a bit of healthy tissue? We shan’t know. We can’t choose. But at least there will be two of us.''

With this installment toe bring to a conclusion our abridgment of Mr. Household 5 novel The narrative in its entiretg has been recently published as an Atlantic-Little, Brown book. In July we shall begin our serialization of Sir Osbert Sitwell’s new volume, Laughter in the Next Room.