Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  “Not if you let Captain Wyne tell the Jerusalem section why I am there. We don’t like to have secrets in the family.”

  “Of course. And try not to look so sinister.”

  “Mislaid the bow and arrow, sir.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Look like Cupid.”

  “All right! All right! Come and see me tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll tell you anything I’ve been able to find out.”

  Chapter Five

  Up to Jerusalem

  Sergeant Prayle rode his motorcycle carefully out of the yard. Halfway round the corner he accelerated into the traffic stream of the coast road. A staff car missed him by inches and he fled to the middle of the highway, where he was instantly jammed between a six-ton lorry and a Free French hearse. Having bent his footrest and left the skin of his knuckles on the nose of a golden angel, Prayle wheeled his bike into a side street and sat down on the nearest garbage can. There he cursed all army transport, army drivers and especially the sergeant-major who had ordered him to take this vile, self-willed engine to Jerusalem.

  He pushed his motorcycle as far as the back yard of an obscure and friendly wineshop and left it in a shed, threatening the anxious proprietor with the loss of his licence if the machine should be discovered by civilians or military in quest of spare parts. Then he stood sulkily by the roadside to wait for a lift.

  He was in a resentful mood. It was all very well to see Armande again—he had every intention of seeing her again—but he would have preferred an occasion when he could be avuncular and helpful. What the devil had she been up to now that he had to go down and interview—not, for God’s sake, interrogate—that luminous, surprising little beast?

  Throughout his glum and puzzled thinking, Prayle kept an eye on the traffic. He let all uncomfortable vehicles pass, for he meant to travel in luxury. At last he hailed and stopped a fast fifteen-hundredweight truck with the seat alongside the driver unoccupied.

  “Where are you going, chum?”

  “Haifa. Any good?”

  Prayle climbed into the empty seat, and offered the cigarette of introduction.

  “What bunch are you, Sergeant?” asked the driver.

  “Intelligence Corps.”

  “Let’s see your A.B.64!”

  Prayle pulled out his army pay book which was supposed, by general and quite illogical belief, to prove his identity. The driver gave it a casual glance.

  “’S all right, Sergeant. One of your mates told us always to ask for it before we gave a lift. That’s all.”

  “And do you?” asked Prayle.

  “Ker-rist, no!” the driver exclaimed contemptuously. “If I can’t tell whether a mucker’s an honest mucker when he’s sitting in that muckin’ seat, a lot of muckin’ use an A.B.64 is!”

  “True,” said Prayle. “But some muckers aren’t so bright.”

  “That’s a fact,” replied the driver, overtaking a small convoy with a burst of careful speed. “Tell you what, chum. Sergeant, I mean. I often thinks, I thinks, if we weren’t all such a lot of bloody muckers, there wouldn’t have to be so many muckin’ rules.”

  “Army of the future,” said Prayle.

  “Just so, chum—if there is any army of the future.”

  The truck was swinging easily round great curves, through mile after mile of olive. Under the trees were camped the Australians, their tents and camouflage nets blending with the red earth and the sheltering green.

  “I was in Greece,” said the driver.

  “Lucky!” Prayle answered.

  “Well, I dunno about that. Ah! To be out of it, you mean,” the driver said, suddenly comprehending Prayle’s shorthand speech. “These blokes,” he went on, waving a thumb at the busy troops, “they must think the whole world outside Australia is made of olive trees. Camped under ’em, fought under ’em and hid under ’em. Cor! The times there’s been nothing but an olive tree between me and a Stuka! Well, ’ere we are!”

  They shot out of the cultivated land, and away along the sparkling edge of the Mediterranean. On the landward side the coastal plain narrowed to a strip of stony soil. Here and there were the neat rows of temporary crosses and the burned-out skeletons of vehicles left over from the Syrian campaign.

  Sergeant Prayle, no longer distracted by the skill with which his driver found a third traffic lane where there was only room for two, returned to his impatient thoughts of Armande. Cairo had made exhaustive inquiries, but no branch of Intelligence, from the very secret to the would-be secret, knew anything about Wadiah’s arms. He was thankful that Furney had sent him down instead of leaving Armande to some earnest soul in Jerusalem, who would either bluster or endeavour to extract information from her with provocative and professional tact.

  Personally he belived that Sheikh Wadiah’s precious receipt was a fake, mocked up to deceive the French, and that no arms whatever had been delivered to any British troops. But if it were a fake, who had put Wadiah up to it, and who had got hold of the right paper and stamp? If not Armande, then Armande must know. She was no fool, and she had been a month at Beit Chabab, tête-á-tête every day, they said, with that damned old wog.

  She was self-sufficient, all right, and outwardly self-reliant. It might well be that she was the hand-picked employee of one of the army’s ultrasecret organisations. Furney himself had said that he did not rule out the possibility of Armande working for some branch of G.H.Q. which had never taken the trouble to let the security people know what they were doing. And then they raised hell when their agents were arrested!

  Ten miles away a great bare headland sprawled across the horizon, and dropped sheer into the sea—Palestine and Armande on the other side of it. Prayle dryly reflected that she would be completely at her ease, back in a nice, smug British civilisation. She was difficult enough when foot-loose in Beirut; now she would be calling on the High Commissioner’s wife, if he had a wife, and strongly resentful of interference by sergeants—the more so as she was involved with David Nachmias in some conceited idea of her own.

  He felt no guilt at suppressing Armande’s connection with Nachmias; until the connection was clearer, it was no business of Furney’s. To relate the mysterious behaviour of Armande to the general mystery of Jewish activities might be embarrassing for her. The security people saw Zionists under their beds; once Armande had appeared on the files as mixed up in their intrigues, the suspicion might remain for always.

  Was she herself a Jewess? He was sure that she was not. She had none of the characteristics—except, perhaps, that she was sometimes unnecessarily anxious to show that she was intelligent. As for David Nachmias, he was above suspicion. Prayle had checked his record, and it was clear. Abu Tisein had risked his life on one journey after another to Syria and the Balkans. He had served most gallantly the garrison of the Middle East.

  The truck bounded through the French Customs, waved on by an international committee of Lebanese gendarmes, of French douaniers, of British military police, and climbed the bare headland to the British post of Ras Naqura. While the documents of the queue of service vehicles were being checked, Prayle looked down, suspiciously, upon the unfamiliar world of Palestine.

  Beneath him lay the whole plain of Lower Galilee, closed in the south by Mount Carmel and the Nazareth hills. On the coast the Jewish settlement of Nahariya suggested a German seaside resort, transported, trees, neat gardens and gabled roofs, to an oasis among the sand hills. Beyond was graceful Acre, and at the end of the sands, twenty miles away, the port of Haifa, its tall buildings forming streaks of white, through the smoke of industry and the haze of the Mediterranean, against the dark green mass of Carmel. Gunfire rumbled across the bay as the A.A. defences and the warships in the harbour opened up on a practice shoot or perhaps an unidentified aircraft. East of the city the cooling towers and storage tanks of the great refinery thrust up their huge and unmistakable corpulence as proof of the inefficiency of Italian bombers or the excellence of the defences. It was a Jewish-British world that
Prayle looked down upon, foreign to the Mediterranean. Acre, a miniature city of towers and walls and minarets, was all that seemed to him to have sprung by a natural birth from the historic soil of Palestine.

  A security corporal strolled down the line of waiting vehicles and noticed Prayle’s cap badge.

  “On leave, Sergeant?”

  “No. Bound for Jerusalem on special deatchment. Is there anything going direct? This friend stops at Haifa.”

  “Can do. There’s a Palestine police truck leaving for Jerusalem after lunch. Come and have a bite at the canteen and I’ll fix you up.”

  Prayle said good-bye to the driver, and pressed him warmly to drop in on Field Security when he was next in Beirut. His crooked smile assured him of a welcome, yet showed that he understood how thirsty the driver would have to be before daring to set foot in such a den of striped tigers. The sergeant’s sympathetic curiosity led him to wish to see again everyone he met. He loved to settle down in the evening with one of his pickups, and listen to him stolidly endeavouring over a drink to explain the inexplicable.

  He ate a dish of eggs in the canteen, and then took his seat in the back of an open truck with three British constables of the Palestine police who were returning to Jerusalem from escort duty.

  Their conversation startled him. The contrast between these bitter mercenaries and his late companion in the fifteen-hundredweight was depressing. That driver believed in nothing, but hated nothing; he had the resignation, the inner discipline of the soldier, and an appreciation of vitality and comedy wherever they might be. The police loathed both their service and Palestine. Indeed, Prayle suspected, they would have loathed anywhere but the suburbs of a large town.

  His comments and questions could never elicit what they did appreciate, never once during the whole journey. When the road passed through Qiriat Mozkin, lined on both sides by Jewish light industries, there was not a word of interest in the passion that had made toothpaste and textiles grow in the desert, only stories of the gangsterism of Jewish labour. At Jenin, sore and scowling, they laughed in the faces of the passing Arabs. In lovely Nablus they told how the police had at last taught the army to put down the Arab rebellion by bothering no longer with the laws of evidence. Their windy epic of patrol, assassination and reprisal showed that at least they admired the desperate courage of their leaders. Over the hills where the Kings of Judah and Israel had carried on their private warfare, they cursed the fields, windswept and glorious to Prayle, because they were not green; and at the sight of Jerusalem, tip-tilted towards the traveller from the north so that the roofs and streets within the walls were defined as in a medieval map, they damned its opportunities and longed for the stews of Tel Aviv where in the tactful control of vice or traffic a man could make a bit of money.

  Much of their talk Prayle discounted—after all, a first sight of Jerusalem would soon cease to be any more enthralling than a sight of Manchester—but he was weary of their hatred of the Jews, the more remarkable since all three of them appeared to have Jewish mistresses, and of their contemptuous liking for the Arabs. Lord! And the whole world was open to the humble!

  The police dropped Sergeant Prayle in Allenby Square, and directed him to the Field Security Office. The sun had gone down behind the tall, stone houses. The pale and very distant sky, ringed with clouds on the horizon, seemed to give out a soft wind that blew from no definite quarter. His first impression of Jerusalem was that the English, shamed by the Holy City into thinking, had been inspired to control and design beauty of architecture that they had not produced in their own country for a hundred years. His second impression was that he felt remarkably well. That, he reflected, might be the cause of a few thousand years of trouble. Too many people had felt too full of beans.

  Prayle entered the billet. The was a light in the section officer’s room. In the main office there was no one but a Scots sergeant sitting in front of a typewriter and fighting with a ferocious black kitten. Prayle introduced himself and asked for the sergeant-major.

  “The sergeant-major is in Tel Aviv, and we are careful not to disturb him in his meditations,” said the sergeant sardonically. “It’s myself and the skipper do the work.”

  “His nibs very busy too?” asked Prayle, nodding to the kitten.

  “His nibs is providing me with diversion while I wait for the skipper to complete his weekly report,” said the sergeant. “As nothing whatever has happened, he will be thinking up a few dir-rty cracks for the amusement of a headquarters that verra strongly appreciates us both.”

  Sergeant MacKinnon rose majestically from his typewriter, deposited the kitten in the waste-paper basket and put his head through the officer’s door.

  “Will ye hold the for-rt, sir, while I take the man Prayle to the canteen?”

  “Duty clerk, too, am I?” protested a voice from the office. “All right. And I’d like to see him when he’s cleaned up and had a drink.”

  “A verra good skipper!” said the sergeant. “But he canna see that a man wants his rations at six o’clock and not at the godless hours when he eats himself. Drink, says he! Well, I gie ye a drink, but it’s food ye’re wanting.”

  He injected a swift and powerful whisky into Prayle, and then led him round the back of the building into the Y.M.C.A. canteen.

  When Prayle returned to the billet, he found three weary N.C.O.’s sitting around and talking shop. MacKinnon was hammering on his typewriter and joining in the conversation. The kitten was tearing to pieces a dog-sized joint of beef. The stove was lit and there was a proper army fug, for Jerusalem evenings were cold to those who had come up from the coast or the Dead Sea. Prayle recognised the authentic, tense and easy atmosphere of his service.

  The sergeant entered the C.O.’s office and gave him a cracking regimental salute. It was always best to be on the safe side with unknown officers. Captain Fairfather 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—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 Prayle. There’s more than a touch of Mayfair in her. Do you remember,” he added dreamily, “the legs one used to see in Bond Street between midday and lunch? The feet, of course, enormous, so that one felt that shade of pity which is so dangerous when combined with admiration. And those faces of studied melancholy. But I suppose, after all, that most of them came from Kensington. We must not abuse Kensington.”

  “No hawkers or circulars,” Prayle explained bitterly.

  “Nonsense! Really, you don’t understand her a bit. You’re impatient with her just because she cultivates the society of colonels. Some of them are quite intelligent, and they like to be reminded of those quiet squares of Kensington. 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 I see why you find something artificial in her—” 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—that you know her better than any of us and want to ask her some questions about missing arms. Funny word—missing. Down here we either steal arms or buy ’em. Which did she do?”

  “Just among those present.”

  “Well, go easy on her. It’s quite preposterous to think of her being mixed up in a sordid arms racket. If she’s up to anything at all, it’s bigger than that. And she isn’t, you know, a snob—though I don’t think you quite meant that. Bloomsbury would be a better word of abuse than Kensington—except that for Bloomsbury she is too fashionable. I knew her husband slightly in London. A dull fish, but restful. He’d be very shocked to hear out conversation, Sergeant. Have my chaps made you comfortable?”

  “Four blankets underneath, sir.”

  “Yes, that’s where you want them on these damned stone floors. Well, tell me what happens, will you? And keep it all in the family. We don’t want them to start fussing higher up as yet.”

  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—and he liked her, though his appreciation seemed to be unnecessarily carnal.

  “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? Day-to-day admininstration—that’s what we all do in Palestine.”

  “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.”