“There came before him, ya Abu Tisein, two mukhtars, one of a great village and one of a little, who had quarrelled over the rights to a threshing floor. The mukhtar of the great village was a man of power and cunning. By God, he was a true leader of his people, and for their sake he knew neither fear nor shame! And he lied boldly before the Pasha, swearing that the threshing floor was his.
“Then the other mukhtar was silent, for he said to himself: ‘If I lie the Pasha will believe me and if I tell the truth he will believe me, and who am I that I should know whether the truth or a lie is better for my village? Let justice be done to the stronger, that the courts of the Pasha be empty and the country be at peace’.”
Major Rains was startled at a certain frank and disrespectful tone in Wadiah’s voice as he told his obscure anecdote to Abu Tisein. Neither of them, however, showed any change in the expressions of interest and mild benevolence with which they regarded his desk.
When they had gone, he still puzzled over their motives and their relationship to each other. Had they quarrelled or had they not? And what on earth was the meaning of Wadiah’s parable? He went on puzzling in the mess, where, he feared, he was thought a dull fellow. But sound. He hoped they admitted he was sound.
Devotion to duty was so easy when it just meant spending long hours in the office; but outside the office he could not stop thinking and thinking and getting nowhere. The Middle East was so full of subtleties; nobody said what they meant, or meant what they said. And at the end of it all there wasn’t any clear truth to be found. That Pasha, if he ever existed, had saved himself a lot of trouble.
What was in the mind of Nachmias, of the Herne woman, of Montagne? One kept on putting down headings and subheadings to compel the case into some sort of order, but nothing happened.
He wondered whether the boastful old Wadiah could really tell whether a man was lying or not. Perhaps he could, at any rate with his fellow Lebanese. What a gift to be envied! Or was it? One might be wrong and disorganise the whole system for the sake of one’s personal flair. It was the system that mattered, not the man—the tried and tested system that carried the lame dog along.
Rains hoped that the Field Security report, when it came along, would make sense of this case. Guy Furney had suggested that they were likely to produce a convincing explanation, even if they had no proofs; but Guy had not known the full story. He had already left when Nachmias brought up his rumour against Montagne.
The Field Security report was delivered next day by Captain Wyne in person. Rains considered it most questionable. Without a single proof, on conjecture only, they had built up a case against David Nachmias. And Nachmias was a trusted agent of G.H.Q. That meant that he, Rains, was in duty bound to send the gist of the accusation to G.H.Q.—and what a rocket he would get back! It was poor comfort that he could pass the rocket on to Wyne. And there was Wyne, with his damned, lazy, heavy-lidded eyes, watching him read the report as if he knew just what was coming.
“A very clear piece of writing,” said Rains—it was a good army rule always to praise a subordinate when you could—“but you know, Wyne, the only new fact you have is that this Herne woman won’t say who employed her. Your sergeant believes she was working for Nachmias. Nachmias admits he employed her sometimes, and that he went to see her that Saturday when your sergeant says he did. But Nachmias seems pretty sure that at Beit Chabab she was working for Montagne. Now what is your own opinion of Montagne?”
“Maddeningly intolerant, of course, but honest as the day.”
“That is not what we have on record. How do you know?”
“Damn it, I lunch with him once a week!”
“But, my dear Wyne, that doesn’t prove anything. Do you realise he might be a communist agent?”
“So might I.”
“But you aren’t, you see.”
“How do you know?”
Rains was conscious of disliking this officer. It was very unusual, to say the least of it, to treat a superior with irony. One learned that as a subaltern. Brains were not everything.
“Have you your sergeant’s original report?”
“Yes, But it won’t do you any good, sir.”
“All the same, I prefer to see things in writing,” answered
Rains sharply.
Major Rains devoted himself to Prayle’s report, complete with coloured chalks and Appendix A. He gave it ten conscientious minutes while Wyne sat opposite to him idly glancing through files on his desk. Rains preferred—whatever Guy Furney might have allowed—that visiting security officers should ask for any files they needed. He rang for his clerk, and told him to remove the “out” basket.
“Your men should study the style of the military police,” said Rains at last.
“Yes, they used to at one time. We changed that,” Wyne replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“If I may say so, sir, it is not his report to me that matters, but mine to you. Prayle is a sergeant who can only give what he knows in converstaion. His written statements are extremely difficult to follow.”
“A lot of vague drivel about urra ovva and pang pang!” Rains snapped. “Clarity is the very first thing one demands in an N.C.O.’s reports.”
“No, sir!”
“What then? What then?”
“Intelligence—even if you have to dig for it.”
“I don’t think we’re getting any further, Wyne,” said Rains with deliberate patience. “Your theory about these arms is disquieting—and a little irresponsible, you know. Really, David Nachmias is beyond suspicion.”
“Why?”
“We have to accept authority, Wyne. Otherwise all work becomes impossible. David Nachmias is vouched for by people who know a great deal more of the over-all conduct of the war than we do.”
“Major Furney,” remarked Wyne, “used to say that the Zionists had two wars—one against the Germans and one against us.”
“Very clever!” answered Rains disparagingly.
“On the other hand your point of view may be cleverer still.”
“And what do you think my point of view is?”
“That David Nachmias is far too useful to our bosses to be broken on mere suspicion of obeying his other bosses.”
Major Rains saw in a flash that this was the thought which had been hovering around the back of his mind for the last twenty-four hours. Captain Wyne could evidently be a very valuable officer to anyone who knew how to handle him.
“But of course you see the implications of that, sir? Montagne is for the high jump, if you let Abu Tisein get away with it.”
Rains wriggled.
“I wouldn’t like the French interfering with my officers, you know.”
“And Mrs. Herne?”
“Well, there we do have clear consciences,” said Rains with relief. “She seems to have worked for one of them, and from our point of view it doesn’t matter which.”
“It would be interesting to find out. Shall we pick her up for interrogation?”
That was a suggestion which Major Rains had been dreading. The possible repercussions might be troublesome to everyone.
“You can’t go bullying Englishwomen, you know,” he said. “Why, there might even be a question asked in the House about it. Leave her alone. We’ll just see that she desn’t have any more opportunities to give trouble. Whomever she worked for, hers was quite a minor part.”
“We could ask her unofficially over all the proper drinks.”
“You have asked her already, and she wouldn’t talk. I think we’ll leave the matter to higher authority.”
“They’ll just pass it back to us again.”
“They won’t, Wynne, they won’t. They’ll decide there isn’t enough evidence either way, and forget about it. We don’t want to go setting ourselves up against G.H.Q., do we? That isn’t the way to promotion.”
Chapter Ten
Burnt Offering
Rain, week after week, danced upon the tarmac of the an
cient highway that ran from camp to melancholy camp along the Syrian shore. The red mud of Lebanon, the sands of Palestine, choked the culverts and sucked at the wounds of the road where the wheels and tracks of divisions, relieving one another between Tobruk and the Euphrates, had worn away the level and lovely route of peace. The men, huddled in their gas capes, ploughing through the mud under the olive trees, cursing the water that found its way through infinitesimal meandering into petrol cans and pumps, longed for the cleanliness of the desert. Then came the snow, lying deep upon Jerusalem and the hills, even weighing down for a day the great leaves of the banana groves until it splashed on to the semitropical sand of Beirut Bay.
Armande’s lonely mood harmonised with, indeed was in part created by, that of the great garrison of the Middle East. She was doubly an alien, being a woman on sufferance among these soldiers who themselves were utterly alien to their surroundings. In her work there was neither gaiety nor excitement; nor, after the bitter use that had been made of her, did she seek either. She was checking stores in two languages. The fact that some of the stores were confidential made the job no more interesting. She was checking stores, and probably would continue to check until the war ended.
Communication with home was worse than ever. For Armande there was little comfort in the exchange of letters with her husband. Letters from England answered those that she herself had written four months earlier. Her own words were lost in the passing of time. She had forgotten what on earth the correspondent was replying to, so that the response was either stale or meaningless. Much of marriage, she now thought, depended on the little daily intimacies; those lost, a husband and wife had no live subjects to talk about in letters.
What, she wondered, had really happened to the great lovers of fiction and history when they were years absent from one another? Surely their longing must have been so desperate that longing alone created a bond? Each, deprived of half a soul, lived in darkness, and of the darkness wrote. Longing she had, but it was for the life she had lost—not so much for John as for John coming home from the office, John opposite to her at the dinner table, John fussing about the oddness of her friends. Longing for John as a lover—but of that she did not think. It was inconvenient, difficult and led to disloyalty of thought. Observing the emotional follies of these exiled men and women with no conventional outlet for their capacity to love, she could not believe that she had a passionate temperament, or that hers was a passionate marriage.
Her mother’s letters she disliked; they were too full of patriotism and complaint. The hotel seemed to have become an expensive rest home for Free French, and Maman exulted over her dear boys and her profits in successive sentences. At least one page of any letter of hers was abuse of rationing and of a hardhearted food controller who could not accept the morale of her guests as an excuse for breaking the law. Dear boys or not, Maman had been twice before the magistrates—once for killing her own pigs and once for some complicated deal in eggs that Armande could not understand. So many references in letters from England were obscure. Her friends seemed to accept and be perfectly familiar with a hundred restrictions on their liberty that to her were foreign and unpredictable as the laws of China.
One evening early in Frebruary, Armande was called to an interview with her colonel. He was alone in his office, a small, bleak shed furnished only with a map, a security poster and the two trestle tables belonging to him and his adjutant. It had the usual smell of a staff office in winter, compounded of stale ashtrays, wet battledress and the fumes of a small, overworked paraffin stove.
Armande recognised in his eyes a well-known look of yearning, which meant that he had an unpleasant administrative job in hand and was longing for the open-air life he had enjoyed as a subaltern, or, alternatively, a tent at Advanced Headquarters in the Western Desert where he might occasionally hear a bang. Longing for his wife and children produced a different expression, of sultry ill temper, when the sergeant clerks stuck firmly to the main office and only Armande and the typists could approach him at all.
In a voice that he was obviously striving to keep clear of any note of criticism, indeed of any implication whatever, he told her that her employment was at an end.
“But why?” asked Armande, smiling.
She had never been sacked before. The experience was incredible. In her surprise she answered the colonel as if he had been talking of someone else and asking her advice.
“Uniformly satisfactory. Excellent character,” grunted the colonel uncomfortably.
“I know,” Armande laughed—after all, the man wasn’t writing a testimonial for his batman. “If it’s just because I can’t type fast yet, I’ll go away and learn.”
“Good Lord, no, Mrs. Herne! I say, do sit down! This is quite informal.”
Armande sat down. The poor old colonel seemed to call for a more intimate touch than could be supplied while standing opposite to him. Poor old? It was just the effect, she supposed, of being a colonel and sitting important (though reluctant) in an office. He was still in his early forties.
As soon as she sat down, he got up and began to dance round the room, his hands thrust deep into trousers pockets, like an embarrassed schoolboy.
“You—you have to take it,” he told her. “Army orders, you know. Very unjust. Often very unjust indeed. The same for all of us. It will all come right in the end, Mrs. Herne. It always does. But you have to obey.”
“Haven’t I?”
“Oh, yes. Delightful. And all this discipline is so silly for a person like you. Sportsman I always thought you were. Are, I mean. You take everything so—so sportingly. Oh, damn this!”
“But do tell me in what way I’ve been a nuisance,” begged Armande.
“Not a nuisance. Lovely to see you here. And you’ve been so very kind to me. And you could do is standing on your head, all we’ve given you to do. In your place I should ask for a court-martial, Mrs. Herne. Fairest court on earth!”
“But I can’t ask for a court-martial,” Armande replied, smiling at his incoherence.
“No. No, I suppose not. You’re a civilian employee. No, you can’t, of course. Dirty shame. I call it!” answered the colonel, wriggling off round the room. “But—but you have to go.”
“If you won’t tell me what the matter is, shall I ask the adjutant?”
“No, no! No, no! He couldn’t tell you any more than I.”
“But you must see I can’t let it go like that,” said Armande reasonably. “If you won’t tell me, who am I to ask?”
“Oh Lord, it’s difficult! Damn these people! I don’t know what I ought to tell you. Look here, Mrs. Herne, you have an awful lot of friends in Jerusalem, much more than I have.”
“No, I have very few friends in Jerusalem.”
“Yes, of course. Expressed myself badly. I mean, there’s any amount of people you know.”
“To speak to, yes.”
“Oh, more than that! Oh Lord, Mrs. Herne, don’t tell me that a lovely—well, I don’t know. Yes, I suppose nobody knows you really well. That makes it all the worse. Gosh, what a mess! What I was going to say was—well, don’t you know any of the intelligence wallahs?”
“What have they got to do with it?” asked Armande, with the clear ring in her voice of an angry but well-bred Englishwoman.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” said the colonel hastily. “I just thought that …”
He anchored himself boldly to a corner of the table, and put his head to the threatening blast.
“Look here—you go and see one of them. You take my advice. I expect some of them are quite decent fellows really. Don’t you know any of them?”
“I know a Captain Fairfather very slightly,” said Armande with disdain.
“Just the man! I don’t know what he does. Sort of policeman, I think. Always running people in for wearing their regimental badges, and that sort of thing. I don’t know—may be a very nice chap personally. We had a censor in the mess once. Always snooping in people’s letters home
. But quite a decent chap when you got to know him. You go and see Captain Fairfather. Just a personal call, if you see what I mean. I should be so glad to see you back. We all would.”
“Then why let me go?”
“Oh gosh, I’ve told you all about it, Mrs. Herne! You mustn’t be so persistent.”
Armande left without good-byes, as if she were to return to the office next morning. She was dull with anger at the stupidity of—well, not the colonel, but the army. Somewhere, somehow, this was one of the army’s maddening, collective stupidities. It was so futile to be sacked and to be unable to give any reason.
On the plea of a headache she cancelled a dinner invitation of no importance. At least it seemed of no importance now. She felt it impossible to listen to army chatter without some of her indignation escaping, and this was not a matter to be confided to anyone until she understood it herself. She knew the mess some combative male would make, when charging for her sake into a delicate situation. Why, oh why, when they were chivalrous, were they almost always clumsy?
The colonel’s advice was sound. Laurence Fairfather was the right man to see before she or anyone on her behalf could be permitted to challenge the military. She did not like him, but at least he was reasonable. Too intellectual, John said. But he wasn’t intellectual at all; he used to lay down the law without having read anything that he ought. He was essentially a coarse man—coarseness seemed to be unfortunately common among his brand of policeman—whom John had completely misunderstood. Laurence Fairfather, it was true, had never attempted to make love to her, but he made it so casually and revoltingly plain that if she felt the inclination he would be delighted to oblige. The man was a nihilist, morally and politically.
She called him up the next morning, and was immediately invited to lunch. Armande replied coldly that she was engaged for lunch, and then, as was her way, relented.
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