Arabesque

by GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

THE Hôtel St. Georges in Beirut, though run by Greeks and staffed by Lebanese, remained tenaciously French. None of the guests who strolled from bar to bathing beach and terrace to restaurant appeared to have indigestion or to dislike the rest. Neither enjoyment nor activity nor smartness had necessarily any reality in 1941, but the hotel created a civilized environment in which anyone who wished could indulge, without effort, a sense of well-being.

Floating in the transparent solvent of French culture were guests of many nations. Casual British officers from the various missions leaned against the bar. Cheerful Australians from the camps under the olive trees ventured doubtfully upon unfamiliar menus. Sliding their round bodies between the tables with the grace of fish were the Greco-Egyptians from Cairo and Alexandria, overwhelmingly obliging in the drinks they were enchanted to stand and the contracts they were prepared to undertake. Christian politicians of the Lebanon presented to each other champagne and compliments, while the princes of Syria and Trans-Jordan, in robes of chocolate and gold, scowled with eternal dignity over little cups of coffee.

In and out through this invasion of males flitted a number of discreetly unattached women: young wives of the French Empire whose husbands, Free French or dubious, had parked them conveniently in Beirut; mistresses of Vichy staff officers who, enthusiastically as the office-cleaners and canteen proprietors, had embraced the Cross of Lorraine; unmarried daughters of the Lebanon, modeling their frocks on Hollywood and their conventions on provincial society of the nineties. There were the consorts of the Alexandrian businessmen, whose sad and ruminating eyes looked out from the mascara, patiently ignoring the discomfort of too many jewels and too tight a brassiere. All these flowery women spent their mornings in bed or on the beach, their afternoons at the crowded beauty parlors, their evenings at the Hôtel St. Georges.

Whatever she did, Armande Herne felt herself to be classed among them. Their eternal delicate presence forced her into an infuriating self-consciousness. She might as well be living, she thought, in a dance hall where a beauty competition was being judged. If you dressed with some spirit, you were immediately mistaken for a competitor; if you defied local convention and were deliberately dowdy, you snobbishly set yourself apart. The competitors’ relative degrees of virtue were unimportant; they were all so obviously out to catch the judges’ eyes.

This lack of privacy was exasperating; except in her room she had none. It was impossible to have a meal or a drink alone, and difficult to pay for them. It seemed to her that she must know all existing faces of the British Army — the kindly, the callow, the drunken, the weather-beaten and horsy, the strong-jawed and imperial, the scholarly with cleanshaven upper lip, the would-be military with neat mustache, the ultra-military with cat’s mustache. Their names eluded her, though she knew uncountable nicknames. A mumble on first acquaintance represented the surname, and never thereafter was it repeated.

Such a multitude of her own countrymen carried her out of the slothful life of waiting. A few of these officers she had met casually in London; others had known her husband or her mother. It was hard to explain why, like the women of the hotel, she was doing nothing, and what she was doing in Beirut at all. Romantic young officers, finding her account of herself quietly evasive, set her up as the heroine of a false and fantastic legend. From one to another they passed the word that Armande Herne had been a lovely and gallant agent of their army.

Evasiveness was her fault, and she knew it; but, after all, there was no need to tell so long and involved a story to the casual military. She was half French, and it was France that, in 1939, she had chosen to serve. She had come to Beirut as secretary to an aircraft manufacturer; when, after the fall of France, her employer reluctantly returned to Paris, she remained. She had a year’s salary in her pocket, and no heart to give herself to useless work in the defeated, disorientated world of a French colony. She waited, hoping and believing that the army would revolt from Vichy and join the British. It did not. It fought the British; and, for the duration of the short campaign, interned all British subjects including — politely and regretfully — Armande Horne.

2

ON this Sunday morning the hotel desk had just rung her room to announce that a gentleman wished to see her. As the manager was normally at some pains to protect those of his clients who had no desire for unknown callers, she could guess that the credentials of this visitor were beyond dispute; the guarded voice of the reception clerk, quite unlike the tone in which he announced a friend, an admirer, or a man of business, left her in no doubt that the caller was some kind — and, oh God, how many kinds there seemed to be! — of civil or military policeman.

She spoke to the gentleman on the telephone. His voice attracted her. It was deep, decisive, and with an odd musical rhythm of its own. He introduced himself as Sergeant Prayle of Field Security and said that he wished to talk to her. Armande was reluctant to be seen answering all the usual questions in a discreet corner of the hotel lounge. She told Sergeant Prayle to come up to her room in five minutes.

She used those minutes to arrange her black hair in the Madonna parting which had always impressed such callers with the purity of her motives and morals. Her large gray eyes looked back at her sedately from the mirror; then lit and twinkled at the passing thought that she dressed for security men very much as for a poetry reading in her Kensington flat. Armande felt a fraud, but since at the moment she had no doubt of her beauty, conscience was amused rather than reproachful.

Sergeant Prayle’s appearance belied his attractive voice. He was tall and well-made, but wearing flannel trousers that did not reach his ankles, and a sports coat that had never recovered from being packed into too small a space. His lips were thin; his witch’s nose was long and one eye was slightly larger than the other. His complexion, too fair to tan, was peeling from overexposure to the sun.

“Do sit down,” said Armande, offering him a comfortable chair near the window. “What is Field Security?”

“A racket,” answered Sergeant Prayle with relish.

“What sort of racket?”

“Unfair to the workers. I share this suit of civilian clothes with three lance corporals and the sergeant major.”

“But why not wear your uniform, then?”

“Avoids embarrassment. Too many brigadiers popping in and out of bedrooms.”

“I understand you want to talk to me,” Armande reminded him, primly ignoring his last remark. “But I really cannot imagine what about.”

“Softly, softly, catcha da monkey,” he murmured, and then added, seeing her bewilderment: “That means I really don’t know myself.”

There was charm in his crooked smile, but Armande had long ceased to have pity for mysterious males who wanted to ask her questions.

“If you are some sort of policeman,” she said sharply, “you ought to know. If you want all the details about me, they are in my dossier at the Sûreté Générate. ”

“I know they are,” he answered. “That’s why I only want to talk to you.”

“But conversation with you is so difficult,” said Armande, relenting. “It’s all bits and pieces. Surely that isn’t the best way to find out what you want?”

“Well, you know, afterwards, when one thinks about what the other person said, there’s something that sticks in the loaf.”

Armande relaxed, and curled herself more gracefully into her chair. Her small head resting on one hand, she watched him with her individual and unconscious intensity of gaze. She was, by this time, beginning to be a fair judge of security men, though her experience thus far had been wholly of the French. This sergeant, she thought, could surely not be typical of the British service? Where were the keen eye and the professional leading question? Where indeed was anything at all save a puzzled soul with some originality of expression? He looked a little like a commercial traveler in misfit clothes. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to come to the point. She felt discomfort and pity as if a blind man were groping to touch her; she wanted to make the interview as easy for him as possible.

“What was it you really wanted to know?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“But, you must have come with some idea?”

“I did.”

“What are you honestly thinking of now?" she asked invitingly.

“You know.”

Casually, abominably he waved his hand in a gesture that included her room, her bed, herself, as if the disposal of the lot were a mere convenience.

Such coarseness produced, always, a cold anger in Armande. Her normal reaction was to shut up and be conscious of good breeding. She might lose a shade of color, but indifference, untouchability, were as obvious to the offender as to her. She was therefore horrified to feel herself blushing. She rose. “Tell your commanding officer,” she said, “that I shall be very pleased to give him any information he wants.”

When Sergeant Prayle had left, Armande settled her aching head on the pillows and lay still, staring at the ceiling. She was exhausted by Prayle and the military in general. These men all gave her a sense of being on the defensive, morally and sexually. Yet what on earth had she done? She stayed in Beirut when she should have left. That was all. The Vichy French had thought she was a British agent, and interned her. Prayle thought — God knew what he thought! This ridiculous Prayle did not think at all. He jumped from one intuition to another.

All right then, she was mysterious to these idiots. All right, she was alone and passably good-looking and what, she supposed, they would call fair game. It all boiled down to this damned hotel. One lived in this glass tank of a hotel like a fish for the goggleeyed public.

It was certainly time to do something. But what? She had two offers from senior officers at GHQ who wanted personal private secretaries. When she pointed out that she knew no shorthand and was a two-finger typist, they didn’t seem to think it mattered. Secretaries in Cairo were evidently very personal and private.

In his letters John was always asking her why she did not join one of the women’s services. There seemed to be any amount of them at home. In the Middle East they did not exist. Englishwomen, in fact, were not supposed to be in the fortress at all. The wives and daughters who had managed to avoid evacuation were all passably efficient secretaries, or running indispensable canteens and funds.

Was there, she wondered, any sort of amateur Intelligence work that she could do? Everyone assumed that she was fitted for it, though their opinions as to who might employ her apparently varied. She remembered a hint thrown out by David Nachmias. He had made a casual remark to the effect that there were interesting jobs around if one looked for them, but he was not conversational without a purpose. Nachmias was a Jew, born and bred in Palestine. Upon his broad and muscular stern, a firm base for operations wherever he set it down, he sat peacefully in the hotel listening to his excitable wife. When she disappeared, always in a flurry of smart scarves and feminine business, he sat on listening, equally peacefully, to Moslem and Christian Arabs. His quiet manners, his quality of outward simplicity, appealed to Armande. What David Nachmias was doing in Beirut so soon after the occupation by the British she had no idea. It was pretty evident that the British approved of him. He was said to be one of the Arab experts of the Jewish Agency, and a mine of information on the politics and personalities of Syria.

3

THAT afternoon she went down to the terrace of the hotel, sure of finding Nachmias. The crowded tables along the balustrade formed a semicircle between the sea and a dance floor. A band played hopefully, but it was too soon after the hour of the beauty parlor for the women of Beirut to risk their complexions in the sticky heat. An Australian officer and a nurse, snatching a moment of civilization after months of disciplined discomfort, were laughing gaily and dancing stiffly, alone on the floor, completely indifferent to the flashy foreigners who watched.

David Nachmias had chosen a table as far as possible from the band. He was moodily drinking coffee, while his wife’s plump hands fussed over the tea, the slices of lemon, the cakes and ice cream. It was hard to guess their nationality or religion. Madame, tightly corseted in body and soul, outwardly expansive, was French to eye and ear. Nachmias, with his short hawk nose, clipped mustache, and powerful head, looked like a bored and prosperous Spanish manufacturer.

Armande went over to them, and was almost immediately served by a rushed waiter with a gin fizz. Tea was inadequate to deal with her odd combination of lightheartedness and a headache. She approved of David Nachmias. He never appeared to give an order, and he never howled for the maître d’hôtel. While you were engaged with Madame or looking at the sea or criticizing the Assyrian curls of Lebanese women, miniature gestures of thumb and forefinger played between Nachmias and the nearest waiter, and what you wanted appeared.

“How do you manage it?” she asked him.

She had never waited less than quarter of an hour for a drink when sitting with anyone else.

“I am a Turk,” he said solidly. “I understand them.”

“Mais, chéri!“ screeched Madame. “He is mad, my husband! He is no more a Turk than I am.”

“But everyone knows you were educated in France, my dear,” replied David Nachmias with lazy irony — whether true or not, Madame took good care that it should be known. “Whereas I am a child of the Ottoman Empire.”

Armande was affectionately amused by Mme. Nachmias’s excellent imitation of a Parisian lady who had been dragged to the Middle East against her will and only longed to return to Europe; it might even have deceived her if she had not heard Madame deal with an offending chambermaid in a screaming flow of invective which left no doubt that Arabic was her mother tongue. Her husband’s wide Palestinian culture did not appeal at all to his wife. It smelled too much of humble origins.

“David!” Madame protested. “One would think you passed your life in chewing melon seeds or smoking a narghile!”

“I like to do both,” he murmured.

“He is impossible, Mme. Herne! Do not believe a word he says! Everyone knows that the Jewish Agency could not exist a moment without my husband. And to say that he would not mind being ruled by Arabs! That, David, when you saw what the Arabs did in Safad!”

She tore the white, spotted scarf from her head with a sweep of the arm that expressed tragic exasperation, and fanned herself impatiently.

“Dear Mme. Herne, it was horrible! I, I who am speaking to you, I was nearly violated!”

“But. you were not,” said David Nachmias peaceably, “for one recognized you in time. No, Mme. Herne, do not misunderstand me. As things are, we must trust the Arabs to the Jews, rather than the Jews to the Arabs. We are excitable, I admit, but we do not cut women and children into little pieces.

I am a Jew and I live and work for a Jewish Palestine — but I permit myself to regret the days when my country was not full of Poles and Germans, and the Arabs were more friendly. Like a good civil servant in England, I do what I am told but I do not always approve of it.”

4

MME. NACHMIAS, implying her opinion that the conversation had become impolitely deep for the presence of two fashionable women, began to prattle trivialities. A French officer invited Armande to dance; when she refused on the grounds of heat and headache, he showed a tendency to hang about the table in the hope of being invited to sit down. To Armande’s annoyance, Nachmias welcomed him and Madame sparkled with conversation, playing the witty Frenchwoman of uncertain age.

As soon as Madame and the officer had, inevitably, reached the dance floor, David Nachmias said, “I suppose that you will be going to Cairo soon?”

This was an obvious invitation to talk of her plans. Armande realized that she had watched unsuspectingly one of Madame’s disappearing acts, by which, without any collusion between husband and wife, David Nachmias was left alone with the person to whom he wanted to speak.

“Yes, I may — though I don’t know what use I shall be whien I get there.”

“You puzzle us all, you know.”

“But there isn’t any mystery about me.”

“Not to you, perhaps,” he said. “But to the — what shall I say? — uninformed, you are a mysterious character. If you are ambitious, if you want to be used, that is the quality to be used.”

“I do want to be used.”

“Even if distasteful? You are charmingly fastidious, Madame.”

“Even if distasteful.”

“Do you think you could fascinate a very distinguished old gentleman? No more. Just fascinate.”

“Is he married?”

“No. He is wildly romantic, but most unwilling to permit any interference with his liberty. A wife would destroy too much of him. He is wise enough to know it.”

The music stopped. Mme. Nachmias did not return to the table. She led her officer to the bar.

“Is he very old? ”

“Verging on sixty, I think. I call him old from respect and affection. He is always young in heart. You will like him. Of course what I am going to tell you is in the strictest confidence.”

Armande nodded, without protesting her discretion. She knew that if David Nachmias chose to add himself to the number of people who talked to her unwisely, he was already sure of her.

“In the Lebanon there are a few families,” he began, “who are the hereditary leaders of the Christians. They were the protectors of their people against the Moslem. They still take their responsibilities seriously. The heads of these families are not rich, not politicians — just chieftains of clans, as you would say. None of them can put more than a hundred men into the field, but that is quite enough to deal — in their own mountains — with an old-fashioned party of Moslem raiders.

“Sheikh Wadiah Ghoraib is one of these chieftains. He foresees trouble after the war — who does not? — and he has brought his armaments up to date. This little campaign against the Vichy French was a godsend to him. His clansmen are strong in the hills above the coast road, where the fighting was hardest. They were crawling about the battlefields after dark, collecting weapons.

“Wadiah has been buying, too. When fighting is over, soldiers must relax,” said David Nachmias with patient understanding. “They have reached the limit of endurance. They become careless of their arms. So there are plenty in the market. I have known an Arab enter a tent of tired men and steal eight rifles from under their blankets without waking one of them.

“Sheikh Wadiah has not been content with rifles. He has acquired a number of Hotchkiss machine guns and Brens. They cannot be left with him, Mme. Herne. When an Arab has machine guns — even if he is a Christian and educated in Paris — his one idea is to use them.

“We cannot force Wadiah to give them up. He will just swear that he has no arms, that it’s all a malicious rumor. But I think they might be obtained, quite unofficially — so long, that is, as he got his money back. To put it bluntly, he might sell them. Not to Moslem or French or Jew, but to the British, yes — if the right person approached him.”

David Nachmias paused.

“But why am I the right person?” asked Armande.

“Because he will know of your reputation. Everyone does. Weren’t you interned by the Vichy French as a British agent? He is strongly proBritish and chivalrous. He will consider your arrival in Beit Chabab a most delicate attention to him. No moral lectures. No violent methods. Just a charming, mysterious operator with a business offer. I know Sheikh Wadiah. If you cannot succeed, nobody can.”

“I’ll try, if you think I should be any use,” said Armande doubtfully. “But buying and selling arms seems to be the most awful crime. All these military lower their voices when they talk about it — just as if arms trading were something supernatural. Won’t Sheikh Wadiah think I am just being used to trap him?”

“He will, at first. But when you have his confidence you can assure him, if you like, that the money will be paid by a British officer in uniform and that British soldiers will collect the arms. That cannot be a crime.”

David Nachmias spoke with a casual air of authority that was convincing. Armande saw that it was stupidity to ask him for his credentials. What would they be? And how in the world would she recognize them?

It was, when you came to think of it, obvious that a new civilian recruit for any form of Intelligence must be picked up very much as she had been — watched, tested in many little conversations, and then told the minimum it was essential to know for the job in hand. The relationship was, in essence, intuitive and aesthetic. Character spoke to character. Vague, certainly — but, after all, the way in which real confidence between two human beings, and especially between a man and a woman, was offered, was accepted and grew.

Nevertheless it seemed an elementary precaution to ask whether rumor was fact and David Nachmias was indeed trusted by the British. She suspected that of her hotel acquaintances Sergeant Prayle was the most likely to give her an honest answer.

For two days Armande failed to find him haunting, as was his custom, the hotel desk and vestibule. She discovered him one morning when, leaning far out over her balcony to see what had happened to a pair of stockings hung out to dry and carried off by the wind, she caught sight of a corner of the service entrance. Sergeant Prayle was sitting on the steps, teaching the tiniest of the Lebanese page-boys how to make a catapult.

She went down, and walked around the lower terrace of the hotel. Screams of orders, of protest, and of conversation issued from the kitchens, together with a powerful but appetizing smell of onions melting in a casserole. Sergeant Prayle and the pageboy were discussing the treatment and use of elastic from the inside of an old golf ball. They spoke in soldier’s Arabic and Sergeant Prayle’s French, and appeared to understand one another perfectly.

The page-boy fled through the service entrance and was swallowed up by the chaos within. Sergeant Prayle remained seated on the greasy top step. With a wave of his hand he offered the remaining length of it to Armande. She compromised by leaning against the balustrade where her head was level with his.

“You’ll get him sacked,” said Armande.

“Poor little devil!” he answered with a note of real pity and indignation in his voice. Then, “Whom are you looking for, Mrs. Herne, me or the page-boy?”

“You.”

“Any trouble?” he asked.

“I want some information. On a person — if you are allowed to give it to me.”

“We’ll stretch a point, anyway. Whom do you want to know about?”

“David Nachmias.”

“Why?”

“Is he really working for you?”

“For us? Good Lord, no!” he exclaimed. “We don’t deal in big bugs like him. But he has certainly worked for other departments. During the campaign he used to go in and out of Syria just as he liked, and bring home the bacon every time. He’s trusted, and no secret about it. But — be careful, won’t you?”

“It’s just that he offered me some letters of introduction to Arabs,” Armande prevaricated.

“Then you’re in luck. They respect him. Let me know what you’re up to.”

“I will of course,” Armande answered conventionally.

5

BEIT CHABAB was outside the range and interest of troops — a tribute to the peace of the mountains under French rule. On the top of the ridge, among scattered pines, tiny single-storied stone villas were set wherever a pocket of soil among the rocks lent itself to the creation of orchard and vineyard. The village itself straggled for half a mile along the side of the ridge, flanked by a few houses of great age, by shops of rough timber and corrugated iron, by Roman buttresses and foundations which continued to support whatever ramshackle buildings succeeded one another through the centuries.

In time of peace the inn had been the favorite summer resort of a few French families, attracted by its silence and its cheapness. Even in 1941 Armande’s primitive room and three good meals cost her only some five shillings a day. Nothing was clean but the red tiles which covered the floors of rooms and terrace alike, and were proudly scrubbed every morning by a Lebanese Cinderella, twelve years old and already mature beneath her rags. Beds, wardrobes, and chests of drawers held deep pockets of black dust in their old-fashioned curves and moldings.

Armande’s aversion was overcome by her sense of adventure. An occasional bug could not be allowed to interfere with the equanimity of a secret agent. If sleep was too soon ended, she stood at the great window of her room and watched the sunrise come raiding over the high passes from Damascus and scatter through the valleys to the luminous sea.

When insect life and her initial horror had somewhat abated, she was extremely comfortable. The only other visitors at the inn were a Rumanian cabaret girl and her mother who lived quietly and cautiously in the hope that no one would think it worth while to intern them. The innkeeper, Anton Ghoraib, a humble member of Sheikh Wadiah’s clan, treated all three of his guests with generous hospitality. Armande doubted if he could possibly be making a profit, and determined to ask David Nachmias whether Anton would be reimbursed by Sheikh Wadiah (for whose honor she was being overfed) or whether she herself should give him a lordly and Oriental present.

Sheikh Wadiah Ghoraib paid a formal call at the inn the day after Armande’s arrival, driven in the village car — an immense Renault which was used for weddings, funerals, and the more important movements of the chieftain. A rider followed the car, his mount, his tarbush and his Turkish breeches of neat gray cloth showing him to be a retainer of consequence. He was Fouad, Wadiah’s majordomo. Two humbler retainers, with black scarves round their heads and dusty black cotton trousers, detached themselves from a near-by café and squatted against the wall of the inn as soon as Wadiah had entered. The car and its owner-driver, the horse and its rider, the two poor relations, remained at the foot of the steps in dignified idleness, supporting by the mere fact of their presence the prestige of Sheikh Wadiah in Beit Chabab.

As Wadiah Ghoraib mounted the steps to the terrace, Armande had no doubt who he was; there could be no other person of such distinction in the neighborhood. He was decently dressed in black, like any comfortable French bourgeois, with a resplendent watch chain across his sleek waistcoat. His face was round and of a healthy red. His blue eyes twinkled between the waxed points of a fair and lusty handle-bar mustache. Except for the red tarbush which seldom left his head he might have been a prosperous East Anglian auctioneer. So must have looked his Crusader ancestors, she thought, when they retired from carving up Mohammedans and settled down beside the ex-enemy as landowners and boon companions.

Wadiah introduced himself in perfect French and, after Armande’s conventional responses, launched himself upon a flowery address in which he expressed the loyalty of himself, of all his people, and indeed of all the Christian Lebanon to the great British Empire.

“When I heard from our friend, M. Nachmias, that you were coming,” he added, “I wished to place at your disposal a house of your own with women to wait on you. But would that, I wonder, be convenable? You must forgive us, Madame, if in our mountains we have forgotten the finer points of European delicacy. So, till I hear your wishes, I have ordered my good Anton Ghoraib to look after you. If you do not care for Lebanese dishes he will give you French, and if you do not care for French he will give you English. Anton!” he called. “Were you not taught to make an English plum pudding?”

“Yes, Sheikh Wadiah,” said Anton, appearing instantly upon his terrace.

“Then you will give Madame a plum pudding every day. And whiskey. You will give her all the whiskey she requires.”

Armande did not like to seem boorish by limiting the quantity of plum puddings — that could be done later in private conversation with Anton — but she felt compelled to enter a mild protest against whiskey.

“I am half French, you know, Sheikh Wadiah,” she said. “I drink a little wine, and that is all.”

“Anton,” Wadiah ordered, “you will obtain some of the Archimandrite’s wine from Mile. Pitescu. And, Anton, Mile. Pitescu must move elsewhere.”

“Oh, no!” Armande entreated. “She is such a lovely thing. I like to look at her.”

“That, Madame, is truly Parisian! You have a delicacy of thought which one misses in our women of the Lebanon. I must admit that I also like to look at her — as an old man, with benevolent interest, may observe the moon even in the presence of the midday sun.”

“When a man is beyond doubt a man,” replied Armande, plunging boldly into the Arabian Nights, “even a — a heavenly body forgets his age.”

“Charming, Madame!” Sheikh Wadiah chuckled, giving a gallant twist to the ends of his mustache. “Charming! That does not belong to Europe at all. Do you not speak Arabic?”

“Not a word, I am afraid.”

“You must learn. Arabic is the language for a witty woman.”

Armande found herself liking Sheikh Wadiah, and felt a tinge of regret that their relationship was founded on insincerity. She had feared that her victim would be distasteful to her, and deliberate fascination that much the harder; it was now evident that the obstacle to duty would not be his manners or appearance but her own conscience.

“Will you teach me Arabic?” she asked.

“Willingly, Madame, if you stay here. But I do not think that in wartime you will remain long with us in Beit Chabab.”

Such a response to the invitation of her eyes was unexpected. Wadiah had warned her that he was not a child, that he knew perfectly well she had come to his village for a definite object. His reference to wartime, however, was comforting; it suggested that he had picked up whatever rumors had been laid out for him, and that he did not question her bona fides.

Sheikh Wadiah then transferred his whole interest and attention from Mlle. Pitescu to Armande. This, she decided, was due to the romance of her reputation rather than her looks, for Floarea Pitescu had a warm classical beauty with which, on the basis of sheer appeal to the senses, there could not be any competition.

Floarea herself showed no jealousy; indeed she had welcomed Armande’s influence. She frankly admitted that she was under the temporary and most discreet protection of the Archimandrite of Tarsus and Philadelphia, chief drone of the local Orthodox monastery, and that she had no desire to draw attention to herself by becoming involved with a prominent Lebanese.

“The Church,” explained Floarea apologetically, “is in no way exigent. He is very mild, my Archimandrite.”

“But — but too hairy,” Armande protested.

She was shocked at herself for taking anything but a passive part in so intimate a discussion; yet the Archimandrite’s hair and board, ritually uncut, were of such an uninviting luxuriance that they compelled remark.

“My dear, he takes a lot more care of it than we can.” Floarea shook back her auburn hair, which was badly in need of a wave and had returned to its original black at the roots. “I tell him that he must lend me his monk.”

“He has a monk to do it?”

“I’m sure he has. He swears he does it all himself. But do you believe it? All those corkscrew curls down to his shoulders? He’s a dear Archimandrite, all the same,” said Floarea sentimentally.

“Will you be able to see him often when you leave Beit Chabab?” Armande asked.

“But he belongs here. And I — to the world,” answered Floarea wonderingly. “It’s most unlikely we shall ever meet again.”

Her tone completely excluded the possibility of any suffering.

“I want to be a great dancer, and I shall,” she went on, trying with her slow, lovely smile to thaw Armande’s frozen expression. “I can love, my dear, but Mama says not yet.”

“Your mother —” began Armande severely.

“She is not my mother really. I just call her Mama. Romanova is my teacher. But for the public we are mother and daughter, and in our hearts.”

To Armande, Romanova was a rotten old woman — a retired dancer who gave herself all the airs of a former star of the Imperial Russian Ballet, but in fact was neither Russian nor had ever risen higher in her profession than the cabarets of Balkan capitals. She was plastered with layers of dirty powder, and she gave the impression of spending all her leisure in an unmade bed. All that could be said in Romanova’s favor was that she trained Floarea industriously and with faith. For three hours a day she hammered on the evilly resonant piano in Anton Ghoraib’s empty winter dining room and bullied her pupil, until the pair were mutually exasperated, the sweat shining on Floarea’s clear skin and forming a pale mud in Romanova’s wrinkles.

6

THE mountain air after the sticky heat of Beirut, the sense of useful adventure, the society of two such original characters as Sheikh Wadiah Ghoraib and Floarea Pitescu, snatched Armande in a week out of the miasma of depression.

Sheikh Wadiah was continually and delightfully gallant, but showed no signs of falling in love. Day after day Armande talked politics with him, or rode or lunched with him.

Wadiah’s house was an old, untidy building on the main street, presenting, like the inn, a massive and windowless lower story to the road, within which were the stables and storehouses. On the first floor was a tiled entrance hall, thirty feet square. Wadiah would meet her at the foot of the steps, and usher her past the gesticulating retainers into the summer sitting room. There would be gathered some eight or ten of his rivals, friends, or relations with their wives and daughters. The men were intolerably polite; the women drearily arch, all pretty, all badly and heavily painted. They sat on furniture of the eighties, covered with red plush and cushioned in imitation leopard skin. The chatter lasted half an hour: a desert of time wherein only coffee was served. Then Sheikh Wadiah would give his mustaches a purposeful twist and lead his party across the hall for lunch.

The table was always decorated with a vast cold fish at one end, and a variety of Oriental creams and salads at the other. When those had been eaten, the main dishes were all placed on the table simultaneously: chickens, pigeons, crisp Koubbé made of meat and pine cones, a whole suckling pig or lamb. The men and their wives sipped araq, their daughters water; but for Armande and himself and any guest who was interested Sheikh Wadiah produced a specially selected local wine. This he would set on the table with a small speech of introduction, deprecating its quality in comparison with the wines of France, but giving the history of the vineyard or shop or family where he had discovered it.

Under the influence of Sheikh Wadiah’s beaming face and of the pleasures his table offered to eye and palate, society manners began to fall away. Men and women forgot, to speak their stilted French and settled to the laughing, exaggerated Arabic. Questioning of Armande became outrageously personal but merry and sincere. She felt that she was liked.

Since she was a person of supposed importance, Wadiah’s friends pestered her with small requests — a job for a nephew, a box of sporting cartridges, a minor army contract, even a witness of standing to swear in the Beirut courts that a smuggling Ghoraib had been somewhere where he was not.

Apologetically she passed on the requests to Nachmias and was amazed to hear from the gratified suppliants that they had been granted with Western promptitude. The nephew got a job in the Customs. The Ghoraib’s case was dropped before it ever came to court. Beit Chabab was at her feet. She waited for her moment, not without impatience, knowing that sooner or later it would arrive.

Sheikh Wadiah was a frequent visitor at the inn, calling to keep an eye on Anton’s activities and menus, or sitting for a while with Armande whenever he fetched her or brought her home. On these visits he never moved from the terrace, so that the inhabitants of Beit Chabab, whatever cheerful lies they might invent, should have no open evidence for scandal.

7

IN HER turn, Armande formally invited Sheikh Wadiah to lunch, and after long consultation with Anton planned a meal that was to be a marvel of delicacy in its marriage of French and Arab cooking. To her party, as ever on the terrace, she invited Wadiah and a picturesque bachelor cousin who was a captain of Levant irregulars, Floarea Pitescu, her Archimandrite, and the Romanova.

The September dusk in Beit Chabab was still warm as an exceptional English summer evening, and silent except for the murmur of voices in the street and the rushing of the stream through its gorge a thousand feet below. Wadiah was wearing native costume, and in most courtly mood; he looked as if he were riding on his way to argue the case of the Christians with the Caliph. The Archimandrite of Tarsus and Philadelphia was exquisitely Byzantine. His curls, lustrous as a Jewess’s ringlets, fell from his brimless, chimney-pot hat to his shoulders, whence his great beard carried on the formidable cascade of hair, black even against the blackness of his robe. Over his champagne, his sandwiches, and Floarea he made little hieratical gestures with beautiful hands, dedicating the fleshly pleasures in the spirit of a poet rather than a priest.

Floarea herself was demurely dressed, but quite obviously wearing nothing of importance underneath. Whenever she passed in front of a lamp — which she did more often than was needful — the Archimandrite approved the revelation with a paternal smile, and the captain of Levant, irregulars looked wildly and in desperation to the Romanova, who listened, with the professional patience of one who had passed her life as a receptacle for champagne and men’s idiotic confidences, to a long and incoherent story about his horse.

Armande and Wadiah drifted to the edge of the terrace, and Armande leaned against the parapet, her face in shadow. Wadiah, who lounged only upon cushions intended for the purpose, stood bolt upright at her side. Solid and in the flower of his age, he grew upwards from the level tiles, tarbush and mustaches pointing to heaven.

“How can I serve you, Madame?” he asked gently. “I feel that you are here for a purpose and that you are ready to tell me. I too can be direct as a European if it is expected of me.”

Armande looked down at four of Wadiah’s dusty retainers, who were clustered at the foot of the steps drinking the coffee and araq she had sent to them.

“We are not very private,” she murmured.

“They do not understand enough French. If we do not raise our voices, there is no better place to talk. Tell me — what do you want from me?”

“Your friendship.”

“Answered like a princess of Damascus! You have it, and my devotion. What use can I be to you?”

“Will you serve my country?”

Sheikh Wadiah forgetfully raised his voice in reply and the retainers looked up at the ring of pride and command, familiar though in a foreign speech.

“Madame, I have fifty men who will obey me absolutely, and each of them will bring ten more. Say the word, and I will lead my Ghoraibs against the Germans. They shall learn to drive and fight in tanks. By the Glory of God, but they shall learn”

“Men we do not need,” Armande answered, and added tactfully, “not yet, at any rate.”

“What then?”

“Arms.”

The word crashed into the pool of romance and shattered its fair surface. Wadiah did not move, did not show his distaste for the forbidden and mercenary subject, but she felt his spirit walk away from her, lonely and disillusioned, into the companionable lanes of Beit Chabab.

“Arms? Madame, believe me, we have none that matter. Our few old rifles — what are they to the great British Empire?”

Armande turned to the light and to him, eyes and body materializing from the dusk in one appeal to listen and to restore their intimacy.

“I have not been there, but I have talked to so many who were in the desert,” she said. “I know what they need. Remember that we are besieged, we are in a fortress, even you and I. And there are no arsenals. Every weapon has to be brought from England, round the Cape and up again to Suez. Every weapon costs the lives of seamen who bring it and soldiers who wait for it. Even — even a dozen machine guns make a difference, now, in the desert.”

“So few?”

“So few — really.”

The ring of passion in her voice almost persuaded her that her words were true.

“Then — but I thought there were thousands of tanks, that battles were fought in monsters I cannot imagine,” he said. “For the fighting man, is war much as always?”

“As always, so they tell me. We are attacked on all sides, and they fight for us with what they can.”

“If I had arms, if I had any arms,” cried Wadiah enthusiastically, “I would do what you ask.”

Armande was silent. In his voice too was a note of truth, although unduly masculine and rhetorical. But David Nachmias had been very sure; and to her, knowing Wadiah’s vanities as she did, it seemed unlikely that he could not arm his men at need, and arm them well.

During this disapproving pause, Wadiah paid some attention to his mustache.

“Is it true you will give us independence after the war?” he asked at last.

“So far as I know, yes. But I thought you wanted to be a colony?”

“That was a compliment, Madame, and perfectly sincere. All the same, we know that you will keep your word, and give us independence.”

“The promise might be a compliment, too,” said Armande mischievously.

Sheikh Wadiah chuckled.

“Really, Madame! Sometimes you make me think I am dealing with an old Turk. You paint a beard upon your lovely chin, as a little boy defaces an advertisement.”

“And with no more skill,” said Armande, holding out her hand as if to show its inefficiency.

Sheikh Wadiah bent and kissed it. How perfectly, she thought, he managed every gesture! The touch of the mustache was firm and positive, utterly different from the conventional flick of the French officer, or a passing passion that spent itself upon her hand.

“You will keep your word, Madame,” he repeated. “And for a generation we shall regret it. But independence is the way of the world, and must be taken. And then? Then we shall be robbed by our own politicians instead of by the French. We are mad to want independence; but since we do want it we need arms.”

“All that may be true,” said Armande boldly, “but you are like the French. You think too far ahead. The other wars may never happen. Help your fellow Christians. We will pay you for any arms you surrender now.”

Her cheeks flushed with excitement. She felt no longer a prim young nuisance to an older man. Sheikh Wadiah rested his eyes on her with delight.

“Pay? Never!” he declaimed. “Madame, am I a Jew or a Moslem that I should haggle with arms? I am a Christian chief. What has been taken from Christians shall be returned to them. Let us ride to Jerusalem with my arms and lay them before General Wilson himself!”

“Shall we? Is it possible?” asked Armande, catching his enthusiasm.

“In these days? You think so?” Wadiah hesitated, and then sighed. “Ah, Madame, it was the Crusader in me who spoke. I forgot a lifetime’s experience of public officials. We should spend a year in jail before the police admitted the purity of our motives. No, Madame! I will deliver what you require discreetly, but only into sure hands and against an official receipt. What do you suggest?”

“I think a British officer should take them over,” answered Armande.

“You are right. In uniform and of the rank of major at least. With his own men and his own transport,”

“I can do that.”

8

SERGEANT PRAYLE knew that he was by nature as inquisitive as an old hen. At the fatness of human nature he would peck eagerly, watching this way and that for the motive under the action, scratching up emotion to discover truth. He had been transferred from the Yeomanry to Field Security because he spoke French. He spoke it fluently and grammatically, but as if its consonants and vowels were those of his own language. This almost unintelligible accent, above all when employed in idiomatic profanity, greatly endeared him to the French, who considered him less suspiciously bilingual than his colleagues. His Field Security Section had taken him to France, and his own ability to extract anything out of the masses, from chickens to a horse and cart, had taken the section out again through Dunkirk and had advanced him to the rank of sergeant. Soon after his return he had been posted to the Middle East. His section spent an agitated winter up and down the Western Desert, and in the summer of 1941 were moved into the Lebanon to clean up after the campaign.

Sergeant Prayle was still hopelessly lost among the customs and political currents of the Middle East, and knew it; but he was stimulated by the freedom of his job.

In the Middle East, Field Security knew themselves to be few and to be trusted. Prayle’s section were housed in a billet of their own choosing, which stood, fifty yards from the coast road, at the end of the blind alley behind a grocer’s shop. It was a convenient pull-in for the detachments of Field Security who passed up and down the road from Mersa Matruh to the control posts on the Turkish frontier. Little brown convoys of motorcycles and a truck, piled high with the baggage of the NCO’s and the section officer, would often park in the yard, and the men, ruddy and fresh from England or brown and disillusioned as the Arabs with whom they had long mixed, would stay a short night in the billet, full of carefully controlled excitement at their movement from one historic station to another. Sometimes a lone sergeant roared importantly down the alley, himself and his motorcycle crusted with coastal dust or mountain mud, and emerged from his wrappings into the bar as a fairly presentable young man; sometimes a shabby individual, dismounting from the nearest tramcar, carried his seedy suitcase through the yard, to be hailed by his nickname and asked whether he had yet forgotten his English.

The Sergeant was grossly overworked, and never more content in his life. He spent the mornings checking the arrivals of strangers at the Beirut hotels and on other assignments; his afternoons — since he was a competent shorthand writer in French and English — were devoted to Major Guy Furney, onetime don of Cambridge University.

“Your glass, sir, is empty,” said Sergeant Prayle reproachfully. “Say when.”

He poised a bottle over the specially generous spirit-measure which the section used for visiting officers.

Major Furney was spending the evening with the section. This very English Gestapo, with its picked men, had evolved a social code of its own for the bar. Officers were unhesitatingly allowed the conventional address of “sir” and were treated with deference just in so far as awkward subjects were avoided; rank, otherwise, did not exist, and mixing was so effortless that guests, whether majors or privates, could conform easily to the standards which they found in force.

“When! When!” said the Major. “Thanks. Incidentally, how is the Armande?”

“Went to Jerusalem a month ago,” Prayle replied. “Took her little suitcase and got a lift from a major general.”

“Guy,” interrupted Captain Wyne, the section officer, “your duty clerk is on the telephone, and says it’s urgent. I’m awfully sorry.”

“Oh, damn duty clerks!”

Furney dropped his neat and unmilitary pincenez to the end of his nose, grimaced and went out to the section office.

On his return Furney’s step was jaunty.

“Anybody know where Beit Chabab is?” he asked.

“At the back of beyond, off the Damascus road,” Wyne answered.

“Have you got a detachment anywhere near?”

“No.”

“Little Doings was there in September,” Prayle remarked. “Holiday with an old wog.”

“Little Doings being —?”

“Armande Herne.”

“And the wog?”

“Wadiah Ghoraib.”

“Well, you’d better come along. Are we reasonably sober, Sergeant?”

“Duke of Wellington, sir.”

“What stage is that?”

“Sober enough to beat the enemy.”

“May I take him with me, Bill?” Furney asked. “Montagne is at my office in a rage — a flap rampant.”

9

THEY found Major Montagne of the Free French waiting in Furney’s office and watched suspiciously by his duty clerk. Prayle gave him a sinister nod as from one conspirator to another, for he rejoiced in Montagne. Those preposterous boots, the bushshirt, the very short (and somewhat ragged) shorts, were so entirely right; if Montagne’s gaunt figure had to be clothed in uniform, though built for the shabby tie and jacket of the agitator, then the uniform was just right.

Montagne detached from his lower lip a yellow scrap of paper, and helped himself to another cigarette from the box which Furney offered.

“Guy, I have come with a very serious complaint.”

“Official?”

“Not yet.”

“Thank God! Well, let’s have it.”

“I tell you, it is serious,” said Montagne severely. “Was it not agreed that the French should collect all the arms in the Lebanon?”

“That was the arrangement,” Furney admitted. “We don’t like your methods, but it’s your funeral.”

“Bah! These Arabs only understand force. What I want to know is: why the devil are you collecting arms yourselves?”

“We are not,” Furney replied positively. “Have our Australians been up to something?”

“Nothing! They are brave children, your Australians, and more honest than you.” Montagne drew a sheet of typed paper from his wallet. “No, look here.”

Montagne handed him the sheet. It read: —

This is to certify that Sheikh WADIAH GHORAIB of BEIT CHABAB has delivered to me for surrender to the proper authorities: —

12 Hotchkiss M/G

20 charged belts

4 Thompson S.M.G.

French Army Marks

8 magazines

15 Bren L.M.G.

15 magazines

Furney passed the receipt over to Prayle.

It was signed by a major with the usual illegible and fairly uncultured scrawl. The orderly room stamp was genuine. The paper, in size and texture, was a Stationery issue; the typewriter, an army Oliver. The descriptions of the arms did not seem to have quite the professional exactitude of the Ordnance at leisure, but then the whole transaction was unprofessional.

“Stage property,” said Prayle.

“Why?”

Sergeant Prayle hated to take the sense out of his own remarks by explanations.

“Just a guess.”

“How did you make Sheikh Wadiah give up this receipt?” Furney asked Montagne.

“He replaced it in his pocket a little carelessly.”

“But who on earth and . . . how much was he paid?”

“He said that a detachment of British soldiers took the arms away in a truck and that the British Secret Service knew all about it,” answered Montagne primly.

“How many times shall I have the honor to point out to you, mon vieux,” asked Furney, exasperated, “that there is no such thing? There are various departments of Intelligence with various jobs to do, just as in your army.”

“Mon cher,” Montagne interrupted, “you are not now lecturing little bourgeois in your damned school. I have been up to see that old fraud, Wadiah. I assessed him at a hundred rifles and told him they must be delivered. I made no threats. He has heard how we collected arms in the south. He knows I would billet twenty men and horses on him and make him feed them until he coughed up his arms. Well, I should have accepted fifty rifles. And to think he had all that merchandise.”

Furney laughed, seeing that further argument was hopeless. “But what did Sheikh Wadiah say?”

“Well, he gave me an excellent lunch, and after swearing all day that he had no arms at all, he told me at last to go and ask the British. I was not too polite about my allies. I told him that it was with France he had to deal, as always. And then he had the insolence to exchange some remarks with me. When I thought he was about to spit in my face, he produced this paper. There are times, you know, when Albion is really perfidious.”

“There are times,” Furney retorted, “when some damned idiot in Albion thinks he’s being clever.”

“Any bad characters been in Beit Chabab?” asked Prayle innocently.

“There are two harmless Rumanians. We know all about them.”

Wadiah, then, had not mentioned Armande’s visit. That fact was in itself suspicious. Prayle stored it away to be worried later.

“I simply cannot imagine who authorized this,” said Furney. “The only people it could possibly be arc some of those new commando lads who take their orders direct from Cairo. I promise you I will get on to Jerusalem in the morning and find out.”

“My dear Guy,” Montagne exclaimed with a sudden rush of emotion, “it is extraordinary how I trust you. You know, there is not another person in Beirut whom I trust. Well, you will not forget to let me know soon about Sheikh Wadiah?”

“And now, Sergeant Prayle,” said Furney, after the Frenchman had left, “will you kindly have the blasted goodness to tell me what you meant by stage property.”

“Just that,” Prayle answered. “You know.”

“I do not know. Explain.”

“It smells.”

“What of?”

“Little Doings winning the war with a nice, new brassiere and a tray of poppycock.”

“If necessary,” said Furney thoughtfully, “could you go to Jerusalem and interview Little Doings, as you call her? It’s out of our territory, but I suppose no one would object.”

10

SERGEANT PRAYLE entered the CO’s office in Jerusalem and gave him a cracking regimental salute. It was always best to be on the safe side with unknown officers. Captain Fairfathcr looked up and grinned appreciatively, faint amusement in his eyes suggesting that he accepted this tribute from one amateur soldier to another at its full worth as evidence of good manners. He was middle-aged, bald, with a spare face, deeply lined. He would have given the impression of a lean regular officer if it had not been for an air of being continuously entertained at finding himself an officer at all.

“Pull up a chair, Sergeant,” he said, “and tell me all about it. How did you get here?”

“A lift to Ras Naqura, sir, and then on with the Palestine Police.”

“Ah! So you know some of our problems already.”

Prayle smiled in silence, not knowing whether he was intended to take this remark in the sense he preferred.

“Well, now suppose we compare notes about this Armande Herne. A soldier’s dream, Sergeant. I don’t say for all of us, but — it’s a long way from home, and we’ve been here a long time. And when you get an Englishwoman of undoubted charm — undoubted! Though perhaps a little self-conscious. What do you think?”

“Kensington, sir. She can’t get over it.”

“With long legs like that? You’re unjust, Sergeant. She dances beautifully, too. She should with those legs.”

Prayle did not reply. He resented conversation about Armande’s legs.

“Her face,” said Captain Fairfather, “is altogether too spiritual for me. Very hard to live up to. Hard for herself, too, perhaps. Yes, now perhaps I see why you —” He leaned forward, and his eyes, though they did not cease to twinkle amiably, lit with a hard interest. “Sergeant, if that young woman isn’t straight, she’s dangerous. She’s just exactly what we all miss.”

“Isn’t she straight, sir?”

“I thought so. But I only have what Captain Wyne told me in his letter. Well, go easy on her. It’s quite preposterous to think of her being mixed up in a sordid arms racket. I knew her husband slightly in London. A dull fish, but restful. Have my chaps made you comfortable?”

“Yes, sir.”

Prayle suddenly felt that he would be safe in asking for advice. This was not a man to condemn Armande merely because she was potentially dangerous. “What do you think, sir, down here,” he asked, “of David Nachmias?”

“He’s a very good friend of mine. Down here? Well, down here we’re all much too afraid to think. If we lose the war in the Middle East, the Arabs will revolt, and if we win it, the Jews will revolt. What’s the use of thinking?”

“Has Mrs. Herne seen him?”

“Not much. And, by the merest accident, I know he is not anxious to be with her. I asked the Nachmiases to a meal with Armande, and Madame accepted with delight. She knew Armande in Beirut, I gathered. And then David turned the invitation down on a flimsy excuse.”

“What’s your reading of it?”

“The merest conjecture. Armande has contracted an attack of Zionism. Now, Zionism with ignorance is a nuisance — embarrassing to a man like David Nachmias. He’s a most able politician. He has no patience with patriotism without technique. He doesn’t think in terms of America and Poland; he thinks in terms of Arabs. A dozen of his sort could make a Jewish Palestine.”

“Whom does he really work for?” asked Prayle.

“The Jewish Agency first, foremost, and all the time. But their interests are often ours. And you mustn’t think the Agency is some sort of sinister secret society. Jews — Zionist Jews, that is — all over the world elect their representatives, and the representatives elect an executive to administer the National Home. That executive is the Jewish Agency. Its constitution is democratic; its methods are — well, I’ve never decided who does the most harm, the Agency orators or the Palestine Government. Our people, you see, have no patience with hysteria. We show our distaste. We don’t even like having them to lunch in case they make speeches at us. That’s all wrong. Treat a Jew as if he were the Messiah (it’s amazing how often he thinks in his own heart that he is) and he’ll eat out of your hand. Where does Nachmias come into your problem?”

“Back door, sir, if at all. Shall I talk to him first?”

“God forbid!” Captain Fairfather exclaimed. “If it comes to interrogating Nachmias, we’ll have to have it done on the highest level.”

(To be continued)