Arabesque (5 page)

“It means Father of Two Buttocks. Arabic dual. Not two complete bottoms, you see, but both stout cheeks.”

Armande disliked the relish with which he gave her the translation, and made no comment. How lightly and amusingly any of her Franch friends could have explained these Arab subtleties of
anatomy! Sergeant Prayle’s deep voice sounded so vulgar.

Under a screen of polite thanks she drifted with Prayle back to the hotel lobby, hoping that she did not show her disapproval, wondering indeed why she bothered to disapprove. His blotched,
untidy face, his impossible clothes, were all so uninviting. It was no fault of his own, of course, but he was one of those people who simply had to stick to the rules in order to be tolerated.

Sergeant Prayle wished that he could express his thoughts to society, but was aware that he could not even express them to himself. He knew that he was by nature as inquisitive
as an old hen. Over religion, philosophy and all abstract exercises of the spirit he brooded quietly with no expectation of hatching more than ingenious fantasy; but at the fatness of human nature
he would peck eagerly, watching this way and that for the motive under the action, scratching up emotion to discover truth. In the presence of another person he could not be bored, but his
satisfaction was, he feared, entirely personal and therefore futile.

He had been transferred from the Yeomanry to Field Security because he spoke French. He spoke it fluently and grammatically, but as if its consonants and vowels were those of his own language.
This almost unintelligible accent, above all when employed in idiomatic profanity, greatly endeared him to the French, who considered him less suspiciously bilingual than his colleagues. His Field
Security Section had taken him to France, and his own ability to extract anything out of the masses, from chickens to a horse and cart, had taken the section out again through Dunkirk and had
advanced him to the rank of sergeant. Soon after his return he had been posted to the Middle East. His section spent an agitated winter up and down the Western Desert, and in the summer of 1941
were moved into the Lebanon to clean up after the campaign.

Sergeant Prayle was still hopelessly lost among the customs and political currents of the Middle East, and knew it; but he was stimulated by the freedom of his job. In England, Field Security
had been overborne by the easy stupidity of the military police and the heavy intelligence of the civil. In the Middle East, they knew themselves to be few and to be trusted. Between the sections,
the officers and N.C.O.s there was the unconscious confidence of a first-class club. Their mutual loyalty was far beyond that of a secret service; it was that of a secret society. Corps, divisional
and area commanders were divided between admiration of Field Security morale, and disgust that it in no way depended on their own orders and personalities.

Prayle’s section were housed in a billet of their own choosing, which stood, fifty yards from the coast road, at the end of the blind alley behind a grocer’s shop. It was a
convenient pull-in for the detachments of Field Security who passed up and down the road from Mersa Matruh to the control posts on the Turkish frontier. Little brown convoys of thirteen motorcycles
and a fifteen-hundredweight truck, piled high with the baggage of the N.C.O.s and the section officer, would often park in the yard, and the men, ruddy and fresh from England or brown and
disillusioned as the Arabs with whom they had long mixed, would stay a short night in the billet, full of carefully controlled excitement at their movement from one historic station to another.
Sometimes a lone sergeant roared importantly down the alley, himself and his motorcycle crusted with coastal dust or mountain mud, and emerged from his wrappings into the bar as a fairly
presentable young man; sometimes a shabby individual, dismounting from the nearest tramcar, carried his seedy suitcase through the yard, to be hailed by his nickname and asked whether he had yet
forgotten his English.

All these comings and goings spread before Prayle a banquet of curious motives and contradictory characters such as civil life could never provide. He had a sardonic dislike of pretentions,
which attracted him to human nature in the raw. Yet, in his own ideals, he was romantic. He tended to seek out and mother the disreputable, fascinated by the scrupulous honesty of those from whom
no honesty could be expected—for moral shabbiness, if they were to mix successfully with the dregs of the population, had to be in their very souls.

The sergeant was grossly overworked, and never more content in his life. He spent the mornings checking the arrivals of strangers at the Beirut hotels, their reasons for departure and their
reasons for remaining. His afternoons—since he was a competent shorthand writer in French and English—were devoted to taking notes of Captain Furney’s interrogations.

In the world of peace Furney had been a don. Prayle, who from childhood had a contempt for the academic mind, was surprised to find him intelligent and, in his comments on their daily grind,
irresponsibly amusing. Furney had a passion for minor originalities. His face was precise, and when he wore civilian clothes he looked—perhaps in personal protest against the general
bagginess of his educational past—like a successful city accountant; when he wore uniform, it was with eccentric ornaments of his own. Instead of spectacles he bore upon his nose a pair of
gold pince-nez retained by a khaki ribbon, and infuriated generals by stretching a gold watch chain from pocket to pocket of his open shirt.

Sergeant Prayle and Captain Furney particularly enjoyed their evening sessions with Loujon. Major Loujon was not remaining till the last boat from choice. He was not, officially, under arrest,
but his departure was delayed until he had been sucked dry of information. No sucking, indeed, had been necessary. Facts and opinions sometimes flowed from Loujon as fast as Prayle could sweep a
full notebook on to the floor and start another. As a subject for interrogation Loujon was sympathetic. He considered the British the most entertaining of all barbarians and he hated the Boche as
only a Frenchman could. Since for a short period he had worked at the same table with an officer of the Gestapo, he was an unmatched source of news from vanished Europe. He had a comforting
contempt for the Gestapo; to be a successful security man, he pointed out, demanded tact and mature judgment—two qualities rare in human beings and especially rare in Germans.

The interviews were awkward and unproductive when Captain Montagne of the Free French Forces was present. Montagne considered himself Loujon’s successor. The British had no doubt at all
that Furney was Loujon’s successor. Nevertheless a reasonable courtesy had to be shown to the French, and Montagne had every right to attend, if he wished, at all interviews with the Vichy
major. What might have been a friendly and productive chat, ranging over the personalities of the Middle East and refreshed by supplies from Furney’s row of bottles, then became a formal and
acrimonious triangle.

Loujon and Montagne never spoke to each other except in the presence of a British officer. Prayle watched their faces as they sat opposite to him, one at each corner of Furney’s
blanket-covered trestle table. Civil war, he thought, gave the participants a sense of guilt unknown to national war; there was not between enemies even the formal code of military courtesy.

In civil war was a man’s conscience, ever, wholly at ease? Loujon had obeyed the orders of his government as a good professional soldier, but he must feel bitterly doubtful whether his
sense of duty was not cowardly and mistaken. Montagne had given up home and country to continue the fight with the Boche, yet, face to face with officers who had remained loyal to their legal
government, he must sometimes wonder whether he was not a dishonourable outlaw.

That evening Montagne was full of complaints. He made it clear to Furney that reasonable courtesy was not enough: that the political quality which the British called tact, the Free French called
hypocrisy. His very appearance was a repudiation of all compromise. Like many of the gallant band who had made their way from West Africa to the Middle East, he had a habit of wearing field boots
with his pale khaki shorts. In this odd rig, topped by a blue infantry kepi, he resembled a consumptive lion tamer, worn and embittered.

“You English,” said Montagne with a pathetic earnestness that revealed his liking for Furney as much as his dislike for Furney’s government, “have always been impossible
to your allies and too gentle to your enemies.”

“Since for most of our history we were enemies, you shouldn’t complain of that,” Furney answered.

Loujon laughed. He snapped and swallowed a jest like a hungry fish.

Prayle, sitting at his table with poised pencil, could see that Furney was annoyed with himself. He had not avoided repartee, as a correct and neutral British officer should. Montagne, who had
no sense of humour whatever, had been placed at a disadvantage.

Both Prayle and Furney preferred the Vichy officers to the Free French, although, temperamentally, they were in sympathy with the latter. This worried the sergeant’s curiosity until he
found a surface explanation. The Vichy staff were efficient, wise and courteous. Though they had just fought a war against their former allies and lost it into the bargain, they had no feeling of
inferiority. The Free French, who had been on the winning side and now had the rich pickings of Syria and the Lebanon, were uncertain of their standing and aggressive.

“This officer,” Montagne stormed, “locked up all the Front Populaire. Yet you put faith in his list of suspects!”

“He was a little hard on all the pro-British. I admit it,” replied Furney with a twinkle in his eyes which either Frenchman could take for himself. “But what else could he
do?”

“Get on with the war—the right war.”

“Of course. Major Loujon knows that I think his attitude was mistaken. But all the same his lists may be of value.”

“I don’t believe a word of them,” said Montagne bluntly.

Loujon leaned back in his chair and threw out his hands in a gesture of patronising geniality which was intended to be and was exasperating to Montagne.

“But why not? Major Loujon has collaborated perfectly.”

“He is at least accustomed to it,” Montagne retorted.

“If,” Loujon remarked quietly, “I treated the Armistice Commission correctly, it was to save my country from the disasters that a pack of worthless adventurers will bring upon
her for the sake of their own ambitions.”

“You describe my general as a worthless adventurer?” asked Montagne, jumping up.

Sergeant Prayle with a pretended start at Montagne’s vehemence swept half Furney’s papers on to the floor. With incoherent excuses for his clumsiness he scrambled for them under the
table, joined immediately by Loujon and, after hesitation, by Montagne.

“Herring, sir. Red,” gabbled Prayle, without interrupting his apologies.

Vichy and Free France resumed their seats and glared at Sergeant Prayle. In his ill-fitting civilian clothes he looked both sinister and raffish—the sort of hanger-on one might see in the
vestibule of any secret police office.

“Major Loujon’s lists. Yes, Major Loujon’s lists,” murmured Furney, as if trying to remember what they had been talking about, and thereby depriving the lists of all
importance, or at least of enough importance for the loss of tempers. “Well, some of his suspects are Axis sympathisers whom he had to release after July 1940. He advises us to pick them up
again, and we will. Some are just ladies and gentlemen who are likely to be a nuisance. I see he has included, with admirable neutrality, all White Russians and all communists.”

“And with reason!” declared Loujon stoutly. “If there were no Russians, a security officer would have time to amuse himself.”

“Fascist!” hissed Montagne.

Loujon shrugged his shoulders and smiled patiently to imply that nothing whatever could be done with such people.

“And some,” Furney went on, “are just persons whose source of income is unknown.”

“Since when is it a crime to be poor in the French Empire?” asked Montagne.

“Voyons! Show a little intelligence! These are all people living comfortably,” replied Loujon, addressing Montagne directly for the first time. “In some of the cases,” he
added delicately, “perhaps Captain Furney will be able to explain the source of income.”

“For example?” asked Furney, smiling.

“For example, Armande Herne.”

“No. I don’t think she ever worked for us. In fact I thought she had Vichy sympathies. She’s a perfectly respectable citizen of London who came out here as secretary to
Calinot. What does she look like?”

“You must have seen her at the hotel. An elegant young woman with big eyes in a small face.”

“Pretty?”

“Exquisite rather than pretty,” said Loujon, warming to the congenial task of finding the right words to describe Armande. “I know her well, since it was my regrettable duty to
intern her. There are, you know, women who do not flower till thirty. I think, my dear Captain, she is one of them, for she is not yet a whole person. She has intensity of soul, and with
it—detachment. I have known such a combination in Orientals; men, of course. But in a desirable young woman the combination is incongruous. I do not doubt that her intensity is real. I
therefore think that her detachment is assumed. And since one can have no delicacy in this disgusting trade, I seek a reason. It may be that she is lost, directionless, and standing still while the
world goes by her.”

Sergeant Prayle agreed with this description, but found it unnecessarily complex. Intensity, yes. In any moment of interest and excitement, Armande seemed to flash out of the frame; then the
black and white of her little head, the nervous outline of her body, were sheer loveliness. The frame? She always had a frame. She had a mothlike quality of merging into her background, especially
in a half-light. Her gestures and movements were so swift and quiet.