Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  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. These importunate demands, confidentially and with much earnest gesticulation brought to her notice at a first meeting with some fawning Lebanese, would have disgusted had not David Nachmias warned her that the granting of minor boons was the very warp and woof of Eastern life, and that she should always, as a matter of politeness, promise to do her best for the applicant; if she really attempted to fulfil one in five of her promises, he said, her credit would stand high. Apologetically she passed on the requests to Nachmias, and was amazed to hear from the gratified suppliants that some 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.

  Wadiah himself asked nothing—possibly arranging through his guests and clients, so that his own dignity remained unimpaired, for the small change of Ghoraib requirements. He stayed within his part of benevolent aristocrat, ready to confer any favour in his domain. Indeed it was more than a part; it was an ideal to which, within the limitations of unavoidable intrigue, he tried to live. Armande 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 upon 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. Once Armande formally invited him to lunch, and after long consultation with Anton produced a meal that was a marvel of delicacy in its marriage of French and Arab cooking; but at the end of the week no bill was presented to her. Wadiah had unobtrusively settled the reckoning.

  It was disappointing to take so much trouble, and then to find that as a weak woman she was not allowed to pay. The following week she circumvented the hospitable plots of the Ghoraibs by ordering French champagne and sweetmeats from Beirut, and leaving only the insignificant sandwiches to Anton. 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 save for the murmur of voices in the street and the rushing of the stream through its gorge a thousand feet below. In such a setting she knew that she need no longer accept Floarea as simply hors concours, and could use her as a foil for her own beauty. What quality it was in her which moved men to poetry in the dusk she could not analyse; certainly, as she could observe in any half-lit mirror, her eyes, like those of some night-loving animal, seemed to give out a light of their own. Whatever her enchantment of glow and shadow, Floarea could not compete with it. Floarea was always slap in the centre of the stage, her beauty protesting against any darkness which would not let it blaze.

  For a remote mountain village the party had an air of distinction. 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, chimneypot 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 fleshy 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 from Floarea to Armande, like an untutored Phoenician peasant caught on a mountaintop between Lilith and Astarte. In desperation he clung to the Romanova, who listened, with the professional patience of one who had passed her life as a recep table for champagne and men’s idiotic confidences, to a long and incoherent story about his horse.

  Wherever she moved, Armande felt Wadiah’s eyes upon her, they were not desirous, but almost tearful in their tenderness. So young and so unworldly, yet with so much on her shoulders—that, she knew, as sentimentally as it could be expressed in Arabic, was what the old boy was thinking. On the whole, after trying her own champagne, she agreed with his opinion.

  They 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, tarboosh and moustaches 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. Well, you are right to delay. There is a coarseness in approaching the desire of the heart too hastily, and your courtesy is greater than mine. But remember I was educated in France. 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 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 walked 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 materialising 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 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 s
ilent. 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 moustache.

  “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 moustache 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, and just as ever we shall revolt. Revolt will end in war between Christian and Moslem, because it always does. War will mean alliance with the Jews against the Moslem—and the Jews, because they are worse fanatics than either, will be the only gainers. 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 now.”

  “Madame, is this truly a Crusade?’ Wadiah asked thoughtfully.

  “The Archimandrite says that Hitler is Antichrist.”

  Sheikh Wadiah glanced at him. Unfortunately the Archimandrite was permitting Floarea to examine his ring. Both displayed a reasonable degree of piety, but their curls were touching.

  “The Archimandrite can say what he pleases,” answered Wadiah with dignity. “He is Orthodox, and therefore superstitious. But we, the Maronites, Madame, are not children. We are of the body of the Catholic Church except that we appoint our own Patriarch and use Syriac instead of Latin.”

  Sheikh Wadiah, letting himself drift upon a convenient tide of indignation, began to lecture on the history of his ancient church. Armande knew well that he was avoiding any further mention of arms. Negotiations had been broken off smoothly, and without a trace of discourtesy.

  Armande re-entered the general conversation of her party. Then she removed Floarea’s ecclesiastic and, from both pique and curiosity, monopolised him. Wadiah, wearying at last of light cabaret chat with his cousin and the two Rumanians, delivered a flowery speech of thanks and farewell, and clapped his hands. Instantly Fouad clattered up with the horses out of the night, and escorted his chieftain home.

  The next morning, while she lay in bed and let the cool air of the mountain dawn drift across the pillow. Armande considered that on the whole her opening move had been successful. Though without experience, she had a sure intuition that to extract ill-gotten arms from Christian, Moslem and, probably, Jew was the most difficult assignment in the Middle East. The subject, however, had been mentioned, and no damage done. True, she expected more frankness from Wadiah. A definite no would have been more easy to handle than his Oriental diplomacy. Yet there had been indications of the way to Wadiah’s heart—by chivalry, Christianity or a mixture of both.

  At their next meetings she treated him with a new coldness; not deliberately, but because it seemed impossible to recover their formal intimacy. This was evidently the right policy. Sheikh Wadiah showed himself hurt, and a little worried.

  He made several attempts to fish for what Armande and the military would do if he did not give up his supposed arms. As she had not the least idea what threats were likely to be believed, she was unresponsive. She implied that nothing whatever would be done, that the hierarchy of the army was indifferent to yet another neutral—Wadiah’s prestige would merely be a little less. She reminded herself of a schoolmistress dealing with a problem child. No punishment, my dear, because you are not important enough.

  Wadiah’s first appeal for forgiveness came in an impetuous assertion that he had consulted the leaders of his church—which Armande doubted, having seen in Beit Chabab no Maronite ecclesiastics but the parish priest—and that indeed Hitler might be held to be inspired by the devil. Armande again dropped the word “Crusade,” and left it to work.

  The end came, quite unexpectedly, one afternoon upon the terrace when Wadiah had led the conversation to the war and asked how long it would go on.

  The first wind of autumn wailed up from Beirut between the crags.

  “I think for years yet,” she answered, “lost, interminable years.”

  Sheikh Wadiah patted her hand in sympathy.

  “Your husband will be proud of you when you return.”

  “Perhaps.”

  It was not a thought that had inspired her. John was always proud of her for such odd things: for courage that one could not help, for action that was quite obvious—never for patience, or ability to suffer bores or breaking one’s own mood at will. Certainly, she agreed, he would be madly proud of what she was doing. And that—that suggested it was all some masculine folly, and nothing to be proud of at all.

  “And you will remember. Man and woman alike, we have need of memories when we grow old.”

  “I shall be old,” said Armande bitterly, “and there will still be war. The whole world will be flooded with men and arms and misery before it is over.”

  She had spoken without any thought of her task; but Wadiah, at his old and beloved game of watching the lightest word of the visiting pasha, answered dreamily:

  “And there will be arms to give away.”

  Armande was shot abruptly out of visions of Kensington and an obscure apocalypse.

  “No,” she said. “That I cannot promise.”

  Then she boldly plunged.

  “But we will pay you for any you surrender now.”

  Armande’s cheeks flushed with excitement. Her eagerness restored the old generosity of their friendship. 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.”

  Chapter Four

  Security

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

  He poised a bottle over the specially generous spirit measure which the section used for visiting officers who might be helpful. The Field Security bar was hospitable. Sergeant Prayle, in his daily round of the hotels, managed to supplement the liquor ration by economical buying.

  Major Guy Furney—since the French had made Montagne
a major, he too had been hastily promoted—was spending the evening with the F.S. Section. This very English Gestapo, with its picked men and a degree of good taste in all ranks, had evolved a social code of its own for the bar. Officers were unhesitantly allowed the convential 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.

  “Yes, but look here! Do let me do a round!” Furney protested.

  Field Security was not under his command. He arranged, as it were, their hunting, but he did not own the hounds—directing them only when he needed their aid in clearing his own political coverts, or when they crashed into those tangled thickets hot on their own line.

  “Shall we make him an honorary member of the bar, Sergeant-Major?” suggested Captain Wyne, the section officer.

  “Not looking after us properly,” answered the sergeant-major, shaking his head in pretended disapproval.

  “Forks,” Prayle explained, as he poured Furney his favourite gin and Dubonnet.

  “Wanted for the bar?”

  “No, sir. For motorcycles,” said the sergeant-major firmly. “Four of our bikes have had it, doing your road checks in the blackout, and Sergeant Prayle has written off another all by himself.”

  “Accidents, avoidance of,” said Prayle. “When a collision with a tramcar is inevitable, the experienced motorcyclist will see that he is in the tramcar.”

  “Going to have a quiet chat with Armande,” retorted the sergeant-major, “and calling it civil security.”

  “How is the Armande?” Furney asked.

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

  “But seriously, sir, if you could help with the motorcycles—” began the sergeant-major.