The Europe That Was (23 page)

He spoke into the machine on his back, asking his headquarters for a heavy steel net.

‘Keep your men here!' Père Arneguy recommended. ‘They can help me.'

‘Your farm, I assure you, is quite safe.'

The former cuirassier towered above him, pulling his moustache. Then he turned away and lumbered up to his cottage.

‘They are amazing, these old peasants!' said the engineer, and then shouted: ‘Ah, but here at last is Jean-Paul!'

Jean-Paul rolled through the shallows, a monstrous squat crane on six sets of caterpillar tracks. Jean-Paul turned, lowered the sixty-foot jib of his crane and roared straight for the island. He would be recovered when the flood went down. Meanwhile, if he could get far enough before the engine stopped …

Jean-Paul stopped and rolled slowly over on his side. His driver jumped for it and was dragged ashore. The monster continued to wallow in the river until the crane jib jammed on the bottom.

To the onlookers it was a relief, after that colossal fall, to see Papa Arneguy trotting down the slope of his land bareback upon the Shah, with his sword in his right hand and his great rake over his left shoulder. There was a ripple of nervous laughter.

‘He has forgotten his helmet.'

‘What's he going to do with his one horsepower?'

‘One would say, a Basque Quixote!'

He rode up to the engineer and delivered his orders. ‘You!' he roared, using the disrespectful second person singular of the old army. ‘Occupy yourself with a cigarette! For five minutes I command here. After that, do what you like!' His eyes crossed those of a grey-haired foreman who had volunteered for the amphibian and was still coughing the water out of his lungs.

‘You—second-in-command! On your feet, and take another glass! Lying down like that, you don't give the brandy a chance to mix with the water. Pick me the best of your men! A light line round the Shah here—pull him ashore if he's in trouble! The rope I take with me round my waist. Get your men to pay it out as soon as you see what is happening! Don't let them drag me back—understand? When I have the rope across, rig a loop to run on it and take your rubber boat over. It offers no resistance, that boat. One could do a Christopher Columbus with it. To work!'

‘It's not possible, Père Arneguy,' Dumont begged. ‘Don't get yourself killed for nothing! The helicopter will be here in a moment.'

Arneguy leaned over the Shah's withers and tapped him affectionately on the shoulder. ‘And then another moment while he comes down to borrow a spanner. You know where you can put your helicopter, Georges?'

He wrapped the end of the rope round his body and rode the Shah over the familiar field until the water was up to his thighs. As he approached the old bank of the river he turned the horse's head to the current and edged him sideways. The water swirled against the Shah's great chest. The foreman, quick to see what was needed, led his men into the shallows as far as they could safely go, and kept a strain on the line.

Père Arneguy reached down and began to rake the bottom far out to his left. Even Madame Ibarra did not see what he was up to. The racing surface of the water looked so permanent. It needed an effort of imagination to recover a memory of what the channel had been a quarter of an hour earlier.

At last he raked up the ferry cable. It was still far from obvious what use that was. Neither man nor rubber dinghy could cross by it. The sheer weight of slack, waterlogged rope would drag them under.

He clung to the cable and let his rake go. There was no holding it without a third hand. He shouted: ‘Tell the neighbours down stream! It is useful, my rake!'

Then he drew the full length of his sword twice across the cable, and twisted a severed strand round his left wrist. He slipped off the Shah's back and sliced at the cable a third time. It parted, and the current had him.

At last on land they understood. ‘Pay out! Let him go!'

Père Arneguy, clinging to the long end of the severed cable, was hurled down and across the stream in a quarter circle with the ringbolt on the island landing-stage as its centre. In twenty seconds the cable was taut, stretched parallel to the wall of the house and some six feet out from it. He pulled himself up river, yard by yard and hand over hand, until he was below the balcony.

The problem now was to pass up to Marie-Claire the end of the second rope which was round his waist. If she could haul it through the window and make it fast, the dinghy could, with luck, travel along the rope like the old punt.

But Marie-Claire was now, he saw, incapable with fear. These little ones! It took some time to make them understand the difference between what was real and the excitement of pictures they made for themselves. Useless to give her orders yet. If only she had been a man, a little army language would be just the thing to bring her to her senses.

‘Listen, Marie-Claire,' he said gently. ‘Have you a pair of sheets or table-cloths or even strong cord?'

‘No, no, no! Nothing!'

‘Go and look,
ma mignonne
! Go and look in the attic! There is plenty of time and no danger.'

While he waited he lay on his back. Like that he seemed to plane easily over the rush of water which no longer piled up against mouth and nostrils.

She came back with an old carriage rein. He expected to find it rotten, but never mind! Once started on activity, she could go off and find something else.

‘Good girl!' he said. ‘Take a turn round the balcony corner-post! At the bottom—that's right! Now throw me the end!'

The leather seemed solid enough. Madame Ibarra, years before, must have stored it away well greased.

‘There! I shall now tie this rope which is round my middle to the reins,' he announced in the tone of a village conjuror. ‘No deception! You see that I have only one hand free. Therefore the knot will be poor. Pull it in quickly and gently, and then tie the rope to a beam! Tie it well, for the lives of men depend on you.'

Marie-Claire at last smiled. She hauled in the rope and vanished through the window with the end of it. Père Arneguy could see the excitement on the bank. The grey-haired foreman was up to his waist in the shallows paying out the other end of the rope. Behind him were his men, rigging a block and pulley on the rubber dinghy.

But Marie-Claire returned, still with the rope's end.

‘I cannot reach the beam, M Arneguy.'

‘Stand on a chair,
ma mignonne
.'

‘There is no chair. All the furniture and the chests have gone. There is nothing.'

‘What is in the room with you?'

‘Only our crockery and our wine.'

Père Arneguy let go the streaming ferry cable, and tried to pull himself up to the balcony by the reins. He had not the strength. He looped the reins under his arms and rested. That, then, was the end of his plan.

‘Could we not wait for the helicopter?' she asked.

He could feel through the leather the shuddering of the house. While they talked, a stone quoin had fallen from the corner.

Ah well, the town band would have something to do after all. At sixty-three one couldn't feel cheated. And to rest when one was so tired—at the moment it was perfectly acceptable even if one had to rest for ever. All the same, Marie-Claire wouldn't agree at all. At twelve one hadn't nearly enough of one's own absurdities.

‘If the wine is there, you might as well pass me a bottle, Marie-Claire.'

‘Willingly, M Arneguy. But I have no corkscrew.'

‘Never forget, my child, that there are very few tools necessary to the life of men. A corkscrew and a good blade are among them. I have both together in my pocket.'

Marie-Claire showed no more sign of panic now that she had companionship. She lowered the bottle by means of a stick, her belt and a hair ribbon. Père Arneguy drew the cork and swallowed a quarter of the contents. He felt better. It seemed a pity not to let his last taste of wine rest on the palate. He drank a second quarter more slowly. His imagination revived.

‘They are perfectly right,' he informed Marie-Claire, ‘when they say that old men cannot change their plans in a hurry. I will return you to your mother in one-third of a minute.'

‘I will do what you tell me, M Arneguy.'

‘Have you the courage to slip down the reins into my arms?'

‘It doesn't need much to do that, M Arneguy.'

‘And then you must not struggle. Even if we are under water the whole way, we shall recover. They'll soon empty us out on the other side.'

‘I promise.'

‘Very well. Then since there is nothing in the house to which you can tie the rope and the posts of the balcony cannot be trusted, it shall go round my stomach again. How curious that neither of us has a waist! You are too young, and I am too old. So pass me the rope's end, if you please, Marie-Claire.'

Père Arneguy knotted the slack under his arms. He was now attached to the balcony by the reins and to the far bank by the rope. As
soon as he cut the reins he would cross the channel exactly as he had done before, sweeping down and across in a quarter circle with—this time—the foreman as its centre.

‘Down then, my little one!'

She hesitated. Only in a nightmare could mass move at the pace of those smooth tons of water. Even that kindly head and dripping moustache, like those of some zoo seal waiting for fish, could not take away the menace.

The balcony and its wall began a slow, hardly perceptible swaying. The moment had come to use the voice of the cuirassier. ‘Quick!' he roared. ‘Quick, will you,
Nom de Dieu
'!

Marie-Claire climbed over the balcony railings. Her hands slid down the leather held taut by Père Arneguy's weight. His knife notched the edge of the reins, and they ripped apart.

It was a worse journey than the first. For two there was no chance of keeping upon the surface of such a battering of water. His last conscious thought was that all the trout must have been carried away and pulped in the rapids. They were the last two. But caught. Held fast on the line by his second-in-command. A good type, that. He locked his fingers into Marie-Claire's hair.

It seemed to him that Mme Ibarra was trying to pry them loose. He held on tight. It was only when he felt without doubt Marie-Claire's smaller fingers among his own that he loosened his grip.

‘Incredible!' he heard someone say. ‘And to think he had the coolness to down a bottle while he waited! We are not the men our fathers were.'

‘I am ashamed of myself,' Georges Dumont confessed.

‘What's that? What's that rubbish?' murmured Père Arneguy in the ghost of a roar. ‘No reason to be! It's not that you lack courage, Georges. It's that you have too much faith in machines.'

CHAMPION ANTIOCHUS

Dear Desmond:

No, I will not sell Antiochus. Even if your man improves on his offer, as you think he might, I won't take it. It is not that I don't want him to go to Ireland, and it's not altogether that he is accustomed to being a personal friend, though of course that counts.

Because I brought him back from Syria and had something to do with sending him there in the first place, people like to say it was not the same bull. It was, and his papers prove it. But in a way they are right. We went through an odd experience together, which is the real reason why I will not part with him. After all your kindness, I can't in decency leave it mysterious. As a superstitious Celt you will have no difficulty in believing the facts, though, when it comes to my reasonable interpretation of them, you may say that I am—well, too down-to-earth.

In the autumn of 1954, I was in the Middle East—a last trip abroad for the firm. Because I spoke clumsy but intelligible Arabic, our exports of seeds, fertilizers and machinery were helping to make the Fertile Crescent a bit more fertile. While I was staying at Aleppo, a friend of mine in the Ministry of Agriculture advised me to go up and see Pierre de Valence. He had given his heart to Pierre in that frank, unarguable way of the Arabs, and considered him an adopted citizen of enormous value. I was assured that the Bukeia estate was more meticulous and scientific—on a small scale of course—than any of the Ministry's agricultural stations, and a place I ought to inspect. It was remote and almost without communications; but he would get in touch with the nearest police post and order up a gendarme with a message.

The car and driver which de Valence promptly sent down to fetch me were both efficient without being smart—the sort of pair which might have belonged to some cheerful and irregular military unit. We crossed the Orontes and started climbing into the Alaouite Mountains by a narrow metalled track built by the French between the wars to serve a small holiday resort which never came to anything. We bounced off that on to a solid dirt road, which was just as narrow but more purposeful. Where the top dressing had been swept away by spring rains I saw flagstones, still showing the ruts of chariot wheels
between the skid marks of de Valence's trucks.

This Roman road led us over a pass into Bukeia. It was more of a bowl than a valley, surrounded by low crags on the south and west and rising on the east to the even round breast of a hill. I was at once impressed. The arable, now brown and lifeless, was here and there divided by white stakes, indicating experimental seeding. Water was plentiful. A small blue reservoir lay under the shade of the southern cliffs. The driver told me that there was also a powerful artesian well. Paddocks between irrigation channels held some fine cattle and still finer horses. The house was flanked on one side by an Arab hamlet, all straightened up and re-roofed, and on the other by orchards with the pomegranates showing red.

I expected to find Pierre de Valence the sharp-featured, emphatic type of go-ahead Frenchman. Something of that he was, but with an unusual dreaminess about him. His lined face was rather still, his eyes far-sighted. I don't mean that he looked over the person or animal he happened to be talking to. Far from it. But he often gave me the impression that his tall figure was brooding over all the valley, not just the object which occupied his attention. The place was an organic unity to him, and he was always conscious of the whole to which the individual cells were contributing.

He received me with a touch of the effusive formality of the Syrian which fell away as soon as he began to feel that we were fellow Europeans with a common interest. He could be equally genial in either part. I rode all over the estate with him, stayed the night and let him talk.

Pierre's was an eccentric life, which must have been lonely in spite of the fact that he was obviously loved and trusted by his employees. Two irresistible young Alaouite girls served at meals. They were very discreet, and their duties were no business of mine. There was also a library from which I could guess that my host had had a university education of such French thoroughness that he still read Latin and Greek for pleasure. Agriculture, genetics and history were well represented, too. I was surprised to see nothing on field sports. One would have expected this expatriate of eighteenth-century flavour to shoot his game or run a pack of hounds as decorative as his other beasts.

He gave me this side of his character over dinner, telling me that there was a leopard in the district which had a preference for the crags above the reservoir. It was twenty years since the last had been reported. He wouldn't have it interfered with, and paid compensation when it killed the odd sheep or goat. It never raided Bukeia, he said, just as if it had accepted a gentleman's agreement. He became indignant and romantic as he described how the poor devil must have trekked five hundred miles from the headwaters of the Tigris with every man's hand against it.

He talked just as familiarly of all his beasts. His hobby—I wouldn't call it a business though he probably broke even—was racing his Arabs and half-bloods in Damascus and Beirut. He was so unreasonably successful that the public never got anything like the fair odds from the tote.

Over the brandy—distilled from his own grapes and very drinkable—he asked me if there were any white cattle in England. I mentioned the famous Chillingham herd, but explained that they were a curiosity for zoos and parks, possibly unobtainable. Then, of course there was the Old English Dairy Shorthorn sometimes pure white, but bred primarily for milk yield.

‘So nobody would keep a bull just for its colour?' he asked.

I replied that it was unlikely. The only reason for raising a bull was the gallons-per-year record of his female ancestors for two or three generations. If they were not outstanding for milk yield, the bull calf would go for veal or perhaps be fattened as a beef steer.

‘When you are at home, would you try to get me a white bull with no markings at all?'

His request seemed to me to be in character. After all, our figures for yield could not be approached on his sun-baked grass, marvellous though it was for Syria. So there was nothing out of the ordinary in buying a bull of good breeding just for its looks. It would do quite as well as some wildly expensive beast and produce a very handsome herd.

We had taken to each other unreservedly, so when I got home I went to some trouble for him, though I didn't suppose I should ever see him again. His bull was hard to find, for a calf was seldom raised unless it had the makings of a champion. Then I came across a go-ahead fellow in Northamptonshire who was experimenting with the new craze for bull beef. Among other breeds he had Old English Dairy, and there I found Antiochus. He was nine months old, entire, and fortunately had no ring in his nose. De Valence had insisted that he should not be mutilated in any way.

He hadn't even a name then. He was just Buttercup's No 5 or Daisy's 3, or something undistinguished of that sort. His mother was only in the 700 gallon class. But pure white he was, with a forelock which curled like a ram's. A really lovely little beast! Thirty years ago no small breeder would ever have cut him or sold him. In these days, however, when a dairy farmer sends round to the Ministry's station for a phial of whatever qualities he wants, he was worthless as a sire. He was not at all fond of human beings then. Bouncy rather than vicious. I remember you protesting that I go in and out of the bull pen as if I were sharing an armchair with a favourite cat. So I do. But at our first meeting I would have betted that he would grow up to be a treacherous old devil.

I sent a wire to de Valence who replied at once that he wanted him and would I have him flown out by freighter? He had some pull with the government air line. At any rate it was not nearly so expensive as you would think, and ensured his arrival in the pink of condition.

That winter I found a good man to replace me in the firm, and was free at last to enjoy every acre of the six hundred my father had left me. When I gave up the pace of doing two jobs at once, I fell ill. It's a very common occurrence—as if a man were fated to it, but could hold off fate so long as he was busy enough. And the damned thing had not been brewing in me all the time. It was the devastating result of a long thorn broken off in the upper arm. Infection spread to the lung, and I was three weeks in bed being drained and hacked about and stuffed with injections. The doctors told me to get out of England for the rest of the winter if I could afford it.

The obvious choice was Syria where I was well known and would not be confined to some sleek hotel with a lot of rich old women playing bridge. Unlike the bull I went all the way by sea, and by the time I reached Beirut I was feeling so well and impatient that I wished I had never left England at all. I spent a week between Damascus and Aleppo and then drove up to Bukeia to see how Pierre de Valence was getting on.

He would not let me go. The perfect hospitality. A self-contained flat at my disposal, absolute freedom and horses to ride. He hoped I would be kind enough to give him the pleasure of my company every day at dinner and any other time I chose. He insisted that he needed my help. I took that a mere courtesy; but, as you will see, from his point of view I had dropped on him from heaven—or the moon, let us say.

At that time of year when the spring rains were just ending, the beasts were in magnificent condition. The white bull was running free in a well fenced meadow below the eastern hill, sheltered from the rest of the estate by a belt of eucalyptus. It was Pierre who named him Antiochus. He visited him daily to clean out his private spring and give him something pleasant to crunch. I recommended that, if he wouldn't hear of a ring in Antiochus' nose, at least the bull ought to have a headstall. But Pierre saw no need. His animals were all a part of that organic whole, and he expected them to know it and to behave as reasonably as playful children. Mukhtar, his Arab stallion, used to follow him around licking the back of his neck. I have never seen so consciously proud a horse. He was generous with his strength, whether he was obliging his master or his mares.

That was the prevailing mood of Pierre de Valence. And animals in close contact always reflect the character of the human friend. He was an immensely appreciative man—of his life, his estate and his abiding luck. He didn't like to talk about it. Who does? But one morning when
we were gazing down on Bukeia from the upland stream which fed the reservoir he did go so far as to say: ‘Looking after Bukeia—there must be something.'

I was encouraged by sun and scented distances and wind from the sea—all far away from the gropings in darkness which worry and get us nowhere—to ask him what sort of something he believed in.

‘I do not know,' he answered frankly. ‘But in this country the unseen is always present.'

That was true enough. There are seventeen separate religions between the Taurus and Jerusalem. The One, the Merciful, with whom a Mohammedan is content to be alone in the desert, is not enough for the fullness of the Syrian shore.

He dismounted from Mukhtar, and I from Lys. She was a big, eight-year-old brood mare from Turkestan with a will of her own. Mukhtar stayed close to his master, listening for whatever important event had caused him to take to the ground.

‘Sometimes I want to worship,' he told me. ‘Just to say “thank you”. That's all. Not asking for this, that and the other! Not bothering powers which, if they exist, don't want to be bothered!'

We had been to visit the Greek Orthodox monastery in the next valley. Pierre had bought part of his land from them and frequently sent the monks casual gifts of the season. They struck me as a lot of dirty, greedy old men; but they were warm and grateful, and their chanting was marvellous. I suggested that Pierre could say his ‘thank you' very well within the conventional limits of Christianity.

‘I can't accept those monks as intermediaries between me and the divine,' he said. ‘They are just creatures of habit. They have been at it so long that all the goodness has gone out. And I—I am a revivalist, if I'm anything.'

It was a queer word to use, yet it pointed his meaning. A revivalist brings the fresh, emotional content back to any religion, often with spectacular results—which you, as a good Catholic, very rightly distrust.

‘I always felt you would understand,' he went on. ‘That's why I wanted to talk to you about it. Let's go!'

I thought he was about to ride down to the house. Instead, he led me round the edge of the bowl towards the bare hill which closed his valley on the east. It was higher than I thought. From the top the view was limitless, all the dust of the air washed out by rain. I could see the golden flash of the Orontes at a bend, and if the earth had been flat I could have seen the Euphrates too. To the north-west, through a gap, was a broad arrow of Mediterranean around Antioch.

Just over the brow of the hill was the marble pavement of a small temple, the stones of its precinct and the drums of slender columns scattered over the turf. I asked Pierre if anything was known of it—a
stupid question in our Europe which treasures its remains of the classical period, but a reasonable one in the Syrian hills where there are so many exquisite little sacred sites never mentioned in the literature of the time and still awaiting the spade to identify them. What was exceptional about this ruin was that the altar still stood: a block of stone indestructible, though cracked, weathered and tilting.

‘Yes, a little,' he replied. ‘It's a shrine of Artemis. They used to ride up here after sacrificing to Zeus Casios on the Jebel Aqra above Seleucia. You can see the heaps of ash and bones on it to this day—' he pointed out the peak to me, forming part of the slope which framed the wedge of sea ‘—I feel I know why they came. For a sort of spiritual picnic. No holocaust of victims. Just a single sacrifice for the more fastidious. There may have been another reason, too. Artemis was much more like a living woman than other goddesses—jealous, very easily offended, very fussy about her sacrifices. And there all day long was the smoke rising from the Jebel Aqra, and nobody paying any particular attention to her!'