Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  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 England, Field Security had been overborne by the easy stupidity of the military police and the heavy intelligence of the civil. In the Middle East, they knew themselves to be few and to be trusted. Between the sections, the officers and N.C.O.s there was the unconscious confidence of a first-class club. Their mutual loyalty was far beyond that of a secret service; it was that of a secret society. Corps, divisional and area commanders were divided between admiration of Field Security morale, and disgust that it in no way depended on their own orders and personalities.

  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 thirteen motorcycles and a fifteen-hundredweight truck, piled high with the baggage of the N.C.O.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.

  All these comings and goings spread before Prayle a banquet of curious motives and contradictory characters such as civil life could never provide. He had a sardonic dislike of pretentions, which attracted him to human nature in the raw. Yet, in his own ideals, he was romantic. He tended to seek out and mother the disreputable, fascinated by the scrupulous honesty of those from whom no honesty could be expected—for moral shabbiness, if they were to mix successfully with the dregs of the population, had to be in their very souls.

  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, their reasons for departure and their reasons for remaining. His afternoons—since he was a competent shorthand writer in French and English—were devoted to taking notes of Captain Furney’s interrogations.

  In the world of peace Furney had been a don. Prayle, who from childhood had a contempt for the academic mind, was surprised to find him intelligent and, in his comments on their daily grind, irresponsibly amusing. Furney had a passion for minor originalities. His face was precise, and when he wore civilian clothes he looked—perhaps in personal protest against the general bagginess of his educational past—like a successful city accountant; when he wore uniform, it was with eccentric ornaments of his own. Instead of spectacles he bore upon his nose a pair of gold pince-nez retained by a khaki ribbon, and infuriated generals by stretching a gold watch chain from pocket to pocket of his open shirt.

  Sergeant Prayle and Captain Furney particularly enjoyed their evening sessions with Loujon. Major Loujon was not remaining till the last boat from choice. He was not, officially, under arrest, but his departure was delayed until he had been sucked dry of information. No sucking, indeed, had been necessary. Facts and opinions sometimes flowed from Loujon as fast as Prayle could sweep a full notebook on to the floor and start another. As a subject for interrogation Loujon was sympathetic. He considered the British the most entertaining of all barbarians and he hated the Boche as only a Frenchman could. Since for a short period he had worked at the same table with an officer of the Gestapo, he was an unmatched source of news from vanished Europe. He had a comforting contempt for the Gestapo; to be a successful security man, he pointed out, demanded tact and mature judgment—two qualities rare in human beings and especially rare in Germans.

  The interviews were awkward and unproductive when Captain Montagne of the Free French Forces was present. Montagne considered himself Loujon’s successor. The British had no doubt at all that Furney was Loujon’s successor. Nevertheless a reasonable courtesy had to be shown to the French, and Montagne had every right to attend, if he wished, at all interviews with the Vichy major. What might have been a friendly and productive chat, ranging over the personalities of the Middle East and refreshed by supplies from Furney’s row of bottles, then became a formal and acrimonious triangle.

  Loujon and Montagne never spoke to each other except in the presence of a British officer. Prayle watched their faces as they sat opposite to him, one at each corner of Furney’s blanket-covered trestle table. Civil war, he thought, gave the participants a sense of guilt unknown to national war; there was not between enemies even the formal code of military courtesy.

  In civil war was a man’s conscience, ever, wholly at ease? Loujon had obeyed the orders of his government as a good professional soldier, but he must feel bitterly doubtful whether his sense of duty was not cowardly and mistaken. Montagne had given up home and country to continue the fight with the Boche, yet, face to face with officers who had remained loyal to their legal government, he must sometimes wonder whether he was not a dishonourable outlaw.

  That evening Montagne was full of complaints. He made it clear to Furney that reasonable courtesy was not enough: that the political quality which the British called tact, the Free French called hypocrisy. His very appearance was a repudiation of all compromise. Like many of the gallant band who had made their way from West Africa to the Middle East, he had a habit of wearing field boots with his pale khaki shorts. In this odd rig, topped by a blue infantry kepi, he resembled a consumptive lion tamer, worn and embittered.

  “You English,” said Montagne with a pathetic earnestness that revealed his liking for Furney as much as his dislike for Furney’s government, “have always been impossible to your allies and too gentle to your enemies.”

  “Since for most of our history we were enemies, you shouldn’t complain of that,” Furney answered.

  Loujon laughed. He snapped and swallowed a jest like a hungry fish.

  Prayle, sitting at his table with poised pencil, could see that Furney was annoyed with himself. He had not avoided repartee, as a correct and neutral British officer should. Montagne, who had no sense of humour whatever, had been placed at a disadvantage.

  Both Prayle and Furney preferred the Vichy officers to the Free French, although, temperamentally, they were in sympathy with the latter. This worried the sergeant’s curiosity until he found a surface explanation. The Vichy staff were efficient, wise and courteous. Though they had just fought a war against their former allies and lost it into the bargain, they had no feeling of inferiority. The Free French, who had been on the winning side and now had the rich pickings of Syria and the Lebanon, were uncertain of their standing and aggressive.

  “This officer,” Montagne stormed, “locked up all the Front Populaire. Yet you put faith in his list of suspects!”

  “He was a little hard on all the pro-British. I admit it,” replied Furney with a twinkle in his eyes which either Frenchman could take for himself. “But what else could he do?”

  “Get on with the war—the right war.”

  “Of course. Major Loujon knows that I think his attitude was mistaken. But all the same his lists may be of value.”

  “I don’t believe a word of them,” said Montagne bluntly.

  Loujon leaned back in his chair and threw out his hands in a gesture of patronising geniality which was intended to be and was exasperating to Montagne.

  “But why not? Major Loujon has collaborated perfectly.”

  “He is at least accustomed to it,” Montagne retorted.

  “If,” Loujon remarked quietly, “I treated the Armistice Commission correctly, it was to save my country from
the disasters that a pack of worthless adventurers will bring upon her for the sake of their own ambitions.”

  “You describe my general as a worthless adventurer?” asked Montagne, jumping up.

  Sergeant Prayle with a pretended start at Montagne’s vehemence swept half Furney’s papers on to the floor. With incoherent excuses for his clumsiness he scrambled for them under the table, joined immediately by Loujon and, after hesitation, by Montagne.

  “Herring, sir. Red,” gabbled Prayle, without interrupting his apologies.

  Vichy and Free France resumed their seats and glared at Sergeant Prayle. In his ill-fitting civilian clothes he looked both sinister and raffish—the sort of hanger-on one might see in the vestibule of any secret police office.

  “Major Loujon’s lists. Yes, Major Loujon’s lists,” murmured Furney, as if trying to remember what they had been talking about, and thereby depriving the lists of all importance, or at least of enough importance for the loss of tempers. “Well, some of his suspects are Axis sympathisers whom he had to release after July 1940. He advises us to pick them up again, and we will. Some are just ladies and gentlemen who are likely to be a nuisance. I see he has included, with admirable neutrality, all White Russians and all communists.”

  “And with reason!” declared Loujon stoutly. “If there were no Russians, a security officer would have time to amuse himself.”

  “Fascist!” hissed Montagne.

  Loujon shrugged his shoulders and smiled patiently to imply that nothing whatever could be done with such people.

  “And some,” Furney went on, “are just persons whose source of income is unknown.”

  “Since when is it a crime to be poor in the French Empire?” asked Montagne.

  “Voyons! Show a little intelligence! These are all people living comfortably,” replied Loujon, addressing Montagne directly for the first time. “In some of the cases,” he added delicately, “perhaps Captain Furney will be able to explain the source of income.”

  “For example?” asked Furney, smiling.

  “For example, Armande Herne.”

  “No. I don’t think she ever worked for us. In fact I thought she had Vichy sympathies. She’s a perfectly respectable citizen of London who came out here as secretary to Calinot. What does she look like?”

  “You must have seen her at the hotel. An elegant young woman with big eyes in a small face.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Exquisite rather than pretty,” said Loujon, warming to the congenial task of finding the right words to describe Armande. “I know her well, since it was my regrettable duty to intern her. There are, you know, women who do not flower till thirty. I think, my dear Captain, she is one of them, for she is not yet a whole person. She has intensity of soul, and with it—detachment. I have known such a combination in Orientals; men, of course. But in a desirable young woman the combination is incongruous. I do not doubt that her intensity is real. I therefore think that her detachment is assumed. And since one can have no delicacy in this disgusting trade, I seek a reason. It may be that she is lost, directionless, and standing still while the world goes by her.”

  Sergeant Prayle agreed with this description, but found it unnecessarily complex. Intensity, yes. In any moment of interest and excitement, Armande seemed to flash out of the frame; then the black and white of her little head, the nervous outline of her body, were sheer loveliness. The frame? She always had a frame. She had a mothlike quality of merging into her background, especially in a half-light. Her gestures and movements were so swift and quiet.

  For more than a month he had watched her in the hotel, at first with mild professional curiosity, then with fascinated interest. He imagined for her a character capable of passionate loyalty and love—though she certainly had no outlet for either in Beirut. On the other hand, if he rejected (which he didn’t) his own romantic insight and judged her on her behaviour at their first interview and several casual meetings since, there wasn’t any fire in her at all. In fact she was too bloody well brought up. Or, as Loujon more prettily put it, she was standing still while the world went by her.

  Then why should he feel such overwhelming pity for her? Why, instead of resenting her patronising airs, should he so long to bring her to life? Loujon, with his French genius for destroying a thing understood by trying to put it into words, had merely deepened mystery. And she wasn’t mysterious in any policeman’s sense of the word. She was nobody’s agent. She was simply the hell of a long way from home like the rest of them, with no one to look after her and nothing much but her own pride to take the place of a commanding officer.

  Prayle chuckled aloud, and earned a gratified glance from the Vichy major. But the cause of his amusement was no subtlety of Loujon’s. He had suddenly realised that if Mr. Prayle had been a civilian in Beirut his character would assuredly have made him highly suspect to security men.

  “Have you anything against Mrs. Herne, except that she was British?” Furney asked Loujon.

  “Nothing. But such a woman is dangerous in war. She knows too much. Every young officer confides in her. And then she stayed on here for no reason.”

  “There was no charming Frenchman?”

  “No. Her reputation is depressingly good. Sentimental friendship, but nothing more.”

  “I know her well,” said Montagne positively. “A woman like that is sufficiently stimulated by sentiment. She is decadent.”

  “Decadent,” murmured Loujon. “All our glorious eighteenth century condemned in a word!”

  “What the devil has she to do with the eighteenth century?” Montagne asked almost cordially, forgetting his enmity in the excitement of the chase for definition.

  “It was the age of the sentimental friendship,” said Loujon. “But accept my excuses. I forgot that for the Free French our history begins with Karl Marx.”

  “Ah, ca! As if you did not know that our Movement is lousy with clericals and monarchists!”

  “True? Well, we shall see. Meanwhile I permit myself to observe to my interrogators that it is the hour of the aperitif.”

  Sergeant Prayle hastened to provide whisky and soda. He had noticed that in English company all Frenchmen looked forward to whisky. They drank it with a rapturous sense of adventure, as if it were some exotic toddy from palm or cactus, and were politely astonished at its excellence; it was to them a traveller’s wonder of the world that a northern nation, so far from the civilising influence of the grape, should have taken the trouble to mature its alcohol.

  Loujon mellowed more rapidly than in calmer days when he had not been living on his nerves in tactfully concealed detention.

  “And now,” he exclaimed with his second glass, “vive l’Angleterre, the greatest enemy and greatest ally of the French!”

  “But never again your enemy,” Furney protested.

  “Now and eternally our dear enemy! Without France and England there can be no Europe. And since they are complementary to each other, they must never think alike. They are passionate lovers, my captain, who do not understand each other. In the clear light of day they quarrel, but when night comes down on Europe they cling together. You must be gentle to the English,” he added directly to Montagne.

  “And if they are not gentle to me?”

  “My dear young revolutionary, I knew them when still you wetted your red pants. They are sensitive. They are tortured by conscience. They have never got used to their empire, for they have no tradition of Rome. In their hearts they consider empire as immorality. So when you ask me what to do if the English are not gentle, I remind you that you always hold a trump—and that is to threaten a situation where they may have to shoot some natives. Well, you say, they will shoot them, and so what? No! The English will do anything rather than shoot natives. They will perform the most amazing gyrations of policy. Be frank with them, my little Jacobin, but take care to have the means of troubling their conscience.”

  “They have no conscience,” said Montagne calmly, changing the burned-out s
tub of his cigarette from one corner of his lip to the other. “What of the money paid to our politicians?”

  “Speaking as an old security officer with a passion for reading the dossiers of politicians,” answered Loujon, “I doubt if they have paid a centime in the last fifty years. It is curious, but the English are the last people left in Europe who believe that a politician has a sense of honour.”

  “Hope,” said Prayle, admitted to equality by the whisky in front of him. “Not belief.”

  “My sergeant, with you it is the same. That is why you win wars. I do not think you can win this one, and if you do you will be finished as a nation. But you, you will die slowly.”

  There was the finality of unanswerable truth in Loujon’s words. They seemed to invoke a vision of the natural, gradual decay of every individual in the exhausted state. No one replied. Prayle, before he could cast the prophecy out of his mind, had the sensation, as in action, of nerving himself against all manner of unpleasantness.

  “What will you do after the war, mon commandant?” Furney inquired.

  “If you win it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask Captain Montagne.”

  Montagne looked at his boots, and did not reply.

  “Death? Or ten years in a fortress? Or will they perhaps forget me if I retire and cultivate my garden? I have only been important here, and they will have much else to think of. But it is certain you will hear no more of Loujon. He is the end of an epoch. He obeyed his government without bothering about its colour. God knows to what the rest of you will be loyal.”