Arabesque (7 page)

Armande responded to enthusiasm. She found herself liking Sheikh Wadiah, and felt a tinge of regret that their relationship was founded on insincerity. She had feared that her victim would be
distasteful to her, and deliberate fascination that much the harder; it was now evident that the obstacle to duty would not be his manners or appearance, but her own conscience.

“Will you teach me Arabic?” she asked.

“Willingly, Madame, if you stay here. But I do not think that in wartime you will remain long with us at Beit Chabab.”

Such a response to the invitation of her eyes was unexpected. Wadiah had warned her that she was not a child, and that he knew perfectly well she had come to his village for a definite object.
His reference to wartime, however, was comforting; it suggested that he had picked up whatever rumours had been laid out for him, and that he did not question her bona fides.

Sheikh Wadiah transferred his whole interest and attention from Mlle. Pitescu to Armande. This, she decided, was due to the romance of her reputation rather than her looks, for Floarea Pitescu
had a warm classical beauty with which, on the basis of sheer appeal to the senses, there could not be any competition. Floarea herself showed no jealousy; indeed she welcomed Armande’s
influence. She frankly admitted that she was under the temporary and most discreet protection of the Archimandrite of Tarsus and Philadelphia, chief drone of the local Orthodox monastery, and that
she had no desire to draw attention to herself by becoming involved with a prominent Lebanese.

“The Church,” explained Floarea apologetically, “is in no way exigent. He is very mild, my Archimandrite.”

“But—but too hairy,” Armande protested.

She was shocked at herself for taking anything but a passive part in so intimate a discussion; yet the Archimandrite’s hair and beard, ritually uncut, were of such an uninviting luxuriance
that they compelled remark.

“My dear, he takes a lot more care of it than we can.” Floarea shook back her auburn hair, which was badly in need of a wave and had returned to its original black at the roots.
“I tell him that he must lend me his monk.”

“He has a monk to do it?”

“I’m sure he has. He swears he does it all himself. But do you believe it? All those corkscrew curls down to his shoulders? He’s a dear Archimandrite, all the same,” said
Floarea sentimentally.

Armande found it hard to admit that any woman whom she liked—and she liked, was interested by, Floarea—could be indifferent to her paramour. Some reserve, even some self-deception,
might be demanded by good taste, but the emotions had to be involved. She saw the relationship between this glorious girl and an Arab ecclesiastic as tragedy. Since it could end neither in marriage
nor in any real companionship, it must lead to pain and frustration. Thus, being five years older than Floarea, Armande felt protective, and probed tactfully to see if there were a wound of any
depth.

“Will you be able to see him often when you leave Beit Chabab?” she asked.

“But he belongs here. And I—to the world,” answered Floarea wonderingly. “It’s most unlikely we shall ever meet again.”

Her tone completely excluded the possibility of any suffering.

“I want to be a great dancer, and I shall,” she went on, trying with her slow, lovely smile to thaw Armande’s frozen expression. “I
can
love, my dear, but Mama
says not yet.”

“Your mother—” began Armande severely.

“She is not my mother really. I just call her Mama. Romanova is my teacher. But for the public we are mother and daughter, and in our hearts.”

To Armande, Romanova was a rotten old woman—a retired dancer who gave herself all the airs of a former star of the Imperial Russian Ballet, but in fact was neither Russian nor had ever
risen higher in her profession than the cabarets of Balkan capitals. She was, on Floarea’s admission, nearly a procuress: at any rate she shared any funds her so-called daughter might
acquire. She was plastered with layers of dirty powder, and she gave the impression of spending all her leisure in an unmade bed. All that could be said in Romanova’s favour was that she
trained Floarea industriously and with faith. For three hours a day she hammered on the evilly resonant piano in Anton Ghoraib’s empty winter dining room and bullied her pupil until the pair
were mutually exasperated, the sweat shining on Floarea’s clear skin and forming a pale mud in Romanova’s wrinkles. To Armande dancing was a pure art which she loved and once had
practised with the jealousy of the amateur. The professionalism of cabaret seemed to her vulgarity. Romanova was developing Floarea into an acrobat, not a dancer—and all against the
girl’s natural instinct for smoothness and grace upon the points.

Even dislike of this Romanova was, however, positive. Armande had lived a year without caring enough to dislike anyone. The mountain air after the sticky heat of Beirut, the sense of useful
adventure, the society of two such original characters as Sheikh Wadiah Ghoraib and Floarea Pitescu, snatched her in a week out of the miasma of depression. From mere watching and
waiting—which might be virtue for Abu Tisein’s casual Orientals, but for her was shameful—she had returned to the enthusiastic activity of the European. The grapevine of rumour
had it that she was recuperating from the agony of internment. In a sense that was true.

Sheikh Wadiah was continually and delightfully gallant, but showed no signs of falling in love. She suspected that he was explaining both her and himself in terms of the novels of the Second
Empire which he had read in youth. He considered her, as indeed she liked to be considered, a brilliantly intellectual woman, and evidently felt himself to be at last the intimate of a creature of
salons, of international society, of discreet political power. Fascinated he certainly was, but by a romance and a legend that he himself had supplied.

Day after day she talked politics with Wadiah, or rode or lunched with him—when he had gathered together enough Christian notables of the district to do honour to them, to her and to his
house. She dreaded these lunches beforehand, found them an interminable effort for the first half hour and ended by enjoying herself.

Wadiah’s house was an old, untidy building on the main street, presenting, like the inn, a massive and windowless lower story to the road, within which were the stables and storehouses. On
the first floor was a tiled entrance hall, thirty feet square, empty except for a long upholstered bench, like that of a theatre foyer, across the far end and half a dozen plain chairs just inside
the front door; on these was seated, under the command of a gloriously sashed and trousered Fouad, an ever-changing group of Wadiah’s humbler retainers, whose only duty was to rise at the
approach of a guest and exclaim their welcome and compliments.

Wadiah met her at the foot of the steps, and ushered her past the gesticulating retainers into the summer sitting-room. There would be gathered some eight or ten of his rivals, friends or
relations with their wives and daughters. The men were intolerably polite; the women drearily arch, all pretty, all badly and heavily painted. They sat on furniture of the eighties, covered with
red plush and cushioned in imitation leopard skin. Tinted photographs of Sheikh Wadiah’s parents and uncles stared from the wall in blank disapproval whenever a sentiment was expressed or a
response returned which might not be in accord with books of etiquette. Armande, replying brightly to the conventional questions of the women and the tiresome gallantry of the men, felt, to her
furious annoyance, like a lady of fashion who had been asked to tea by her former cook.

The chatter lasted half an hour: a desert of time wherein only coffee was served. Then Sheikh Wadiah would give his moustaches a purposeful twist and lead his party across the hall for lunch.
The appearance of the table was enough to raise Armande’s spirits. The only vice that remained with her, conscious and admitted, from early days was greed. She could and, in London, often did
make do with a diet suited to her soulful eyes and ethereal body, but the Frenchwoman in her frankly liked its lunch.

Sheikh Wadiah’s table was always decorated with a vast cold fish at one end, and a variety of Oriental creams and salds at the other. When those had been eaten, the main dishes were all
placed on the table simultaneously: chickens, pigeons, crisp
Koubb
é
made of meat and pine cones, a whole sucking pig or lamb. The men and their wives sipped araq, their
daughters, water; but for Armande and himself and any guest who was interested Sheikh Wadiah produced a specially selected local wine. This he would set on the table with a small speech of
introduction, deprecating its quality in comparison with the wines of France, but giving the history of the vineyard or shop or family where he had discovered it.

Under the influence of Sheikh Wadiah’s beaming face and of the pleasures his table offered to eye and palate, society manners began to fall away. Men and women forgot to speak their
stilted French and settled to the laughing, exaggerated Arabic. Even their daughters occasionally squeaked what they thought rather than what they ought to think. Questioning of Armande became
outrageously personal, but merry and sincere. She felt that she was liked and that approval of the lone European woman was no longer merely the admiration accorded to some new arrival at the
zoo.

It shocked her that all Sheikh Wadiah’s circle should hate the French. They sensed the French contempt for them, and they responded. They were like the Indians, she supposed. (Oh Lord,
those arguments with John in Kensington!) The British had given to India justice, the principles of democracy and the means of independence, yet they were hated as a ruling and superior race. In
Syria and the Lebanon the same gifts had been dutifully delivered by the French, with rather less of justice and a deal more of the arts of living, yet hardly was there a Lebanese who did not
accuse them of selfishness and chicanery. The Christians were all loud in praises of the British, even of British rule in Palestine. They laid their hands upon their hearts, and desired Armande to
accept the Lebanon as a crown colony.

Since she was a person of supposed importance, Wadiah’s friends pestered her with small requests—a job for a nephew, a box of sporting cartridges, a minor army contract, even a
witness of standing to swear in the Beirut courts that a smuggling Ghoraib had been somewhere where he was not. These importunate demands, confidentially and with much earnest gesticulation brought
to her notice at a first meeting with some fawning Lebanese, would have disgusted had not David Nachmias warned her that the granting of minor boons was the very warp and woof of Eastern life, and
that she should always, as a matter of politeness, promise to do her best for the applicant; if she really attempted to fulfil one in five of her promises, he said, her credit would stand high.
Apologetically she passed on the requests to Nachmias, and was amazed to hear from the gratified suppliants that some had been granted with Western promptitude. The nephew got a job in the customs.
The Ghoraib’s case was dropped before it ever came to court. Beit Chabab was at her feet.

Wadiah himself asked nothing—possibly arranging through his guests and clients, so that his own dignity remained unimpaired, for the small change of Ghoraib requirements. He stayed within
his part of benevolent aristocrat, ready to confer any favour in his domain. Indeed it was more than a part; it was an ideal to which, within the limitations of unavoidable intrigue, he tried to
live. Armande waited for her moment, not without impatience, knowing that sooner or later it would arrive.

Sheikh Wadiah was a frequent visitor at the inn, calling to keep an eye upon Anton’s activities and menus, or sitting for a while with Armande whenever he fetched her or brought her home.
On these visits he never moved from the terrace, so that the inhabitants of Beit Chabab, whatever cheerful lies they might invent, should have no open evidence for scandal. Once Armande formally
invited him to lunch, and after long consultation with Anton produced a meal that was a marvel of delicacy in its marriage of French and Arab cooking; but at the end of the week no bill was
presented to her. Wadiah had unobtrusively settled the reckoning.

It was disappointing to take so much trouble, and then to find that as a weak woman she was not allowed to pay. The following week she circumvented the hospitable plots of the Ghoraibs by
ordering French champagne and sweetmeats from Beirut, and leaving only the insignificant sandwiches to Anton. To her party, as ever on the terrace, she invited Wadiah and a picturesque bachelor
cousin who was a captain of Levant irregulars. Floarea Pitescu, her Archimandrite and the Romanova.

The September dusk in Beit Chabab was still warm as an exceptional English summer evening, and silent save for the murmur of voices in the street and the rushing of the stream through its gorge
a thousand feet below. In such a setting she knew that she need no longer accept Floarea as simply
hors concours
, and could use her as a foil for her own beauty. What quality it was in her
which moved men to poetry in the dusk she could not analyse; certainly, as she could observe in any half-lit mirror, her eyes, like those of some night-loving animal, seemed to give out a light of
their own. Whatever her enchantment of glow and shadow, Floarea could not compete with it. Floarea was always slap in the centre of the stage, her beauty protesting against any darkness which would
not let it blaze.

For a remote mountain village the party had an air of distinction. Wadiah was wearing native costume, and in most courtly mood; he looked as if he were riding on his way to argue the case of the
Christians with the Caliph. The Archimandrite of Tarsus and Philadelphia was exquisitely Byzantine. His curls, lustrous as a Jewess’s ringlets, fell from his brimless, chimneypot hat to his
shoulders, whence his great beard carried on the formidable cascade of hair, black even against the blackness of his robe. Over his champagne, his sandwiches and Floarea he made little hieratical
gestures with beautiful hands, dedicating the fleshy pleasures in the spirit of a poet rather than a priest.