Arabesque (6 page)

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 stub 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.”

Beit Chabab was outside the range and interest of troops. The track, which zigzagged up for a thousand feet, through scrub and dwarf oaks, from the bottom of a gorge, led to
the village and nowhere else. Beit Chabab lay along the crest of a ridge that pointed seawards from the watershed bluff on which stood the white church and squat tower of the Maronites. At the
eastern end of the ridge was a Greek Orthodox monastery, its two domes just showing above powerful walls. Wall of Catholic and wall of Greek were joined together by a line of low cliffs, overhung
by the rough, wooded balconies of houses. To the traveller gazing upwards from the gorge, so much rock and masonry gave the impression of a medieval town compactly built for defence.

Beit Chabab, however, was anything but compact—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 street 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.

The only house in the street which appeared to have been built at one period and from a single source of material was the inn. It was a simple, one-storied block, set around three sides of a
red-tiled terrace, high above the road and approached by a flight of steps. Tall, arched windows gave it a commodious and solid demeanour. The massive platform held it firmly in the mountain air,
safe from the chickens, pigs and children who fed and scrambled on the dusty cobbles of the street.

In time of peace the inn had been the favourite summer resort of a few French families, attracted by 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 mouldings.

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 were 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 honour 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 tarboosh and his Turkish breeches of neat grey cloth showing him to be a retainer of consequence. He was Fouad,
Wadiah’s major-domo. Two humbler retainers, with black scarves round their heads and dusty black cotton trousers, detached themselves from a nearby 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 neighbourhood. 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 handlebar moustache. Except for the red tarboosh 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.

Anton Ghoraib strode up to the head of his clan with a more manly and independent approach than he ever allowed himself towards his guests, and then, with a surprising gesture, bent to catch and
kiss Sheikh Wadiah’s hand. Wadiah swiftly and gracefully prevented him, his face expressing protest and astonishment. Armande assumed that the innkeeper’s greeting must be quite
exceptional; it turned out, however, to be normal. Sheikh Wadiah’s little feudal tableaux never lost their air of spontaneity.

Wadiah introduced himself in perfect French, and, after Armande’s conventional responses, launched himself upon a flowery address which nicely balanced the compliments due to an attractive
woman and the habitual tributes due to an inscrutable and possibly dangerous visiting pasha. To the limit of informal eloquence 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 Eastern 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 whisky. You will give her all the whisky 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 whisky.

“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 Mlle. Pitescu. And, Anton, Mlle. 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 moustache. “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. I was educated in France and I speak French, they tell me, like a Frenchman; yet I assure you there is no language to compare
with Arabic. You can express a shade of meaning so tenuous”—he held up finger and thumb before his eye as if they contained a miscroscopic gem—“or beat your phrases with a
hammer out of molten thought. Arabic! I adore my language! The Moslem, Madame, does not understand the richness of his own tongue. It is too free for his narrow mind. He is limited by his religion.
To speak Arabic one must be a Christian. For the generous spirit that enters a man with good wine. Madame, there is only Arabic—for the verse, the eloquence, the flowers of speech which
spring into his head. It is the language of the arrow that pierces the target, and the arrow that flies towards the sun. And believe me, Madame, the sententious arrows that the Moslem launches from
his cups of water fly very little way.”