Free Arabesque by Geoffrey Household

she murmured.
    “They do not understand enough French. If we do not raise our voices, there is no better place to talk. Tell me—what do you want from me?”
    “Your friendship.”
    “Answered like a princess of Damascus! You have it, and my devotion. What use can I be to you?”
    “Will you serve my country?”
    Sheikh Wadiah forgetfully raised his voice in reply, and the retainers looked up at the ring of pride and command, familiar though in a foreign speech.
    “Madame, I have fifty men who will obey me absolutely, and each of them will bring ten more. Say the word, and I will lead my Ghoraibs against the Germans. They shall learn to drive and
fight in tanks. By the Glory of God, but they shall learn!”
    “Men we do not need,” Armande answered, and added tactfully: “Not yet, at any rate.”
    “What then?”
    “Arms.”
    The word crashed into the pool of romance and shattered its fair surface. Wadiah did not move, did not show his distaste for the forbidden and mercenary subject, but she felt his spirit walked
away from her, lonely and disillusioned, into the companionable lanes of Beit Chabab.
    “Arms? Madame, believe me, we have none that matter. Our few old rifles—what are they to the great British Empire?”
    Armande turned to the light and to him, eyes and body materialising from the dusk in one appeal to listen and to restore their intimacy.
    “I have not been there, but I have talked to so many who were in the desert,” she said. “I know what they need. Remember that we are besieged, we are in a fortress, even you
and I. And there are no arsenals. Every weapon has to be brought from England, round the Cape and up again to Suez. Every weapon costs the lives of seamen who bring it and soldiers who wait for it.
Even—even a dozen machine guns make a difference, now, in the desert.”
    “So few?”
    “So few—really.”
    The ring of passion in her voice almost persuaded her that her words were true.
    “Then … but I thought there were thousands of tanks, that battles were fought in monsters I cannot imagine,” he said. “For the fighting man, is war much much as
always?”
    “As always, so they tell me. We are attacked on all sides, and they fight for us with what they can.”
    “If I had arms, if I had any arms,” cried Wadiah enthusiastically. “I would do what you ask.”
    Armande was silent. In his voice too was a note of truth, although unduly masculine and rhetorical. But David Nachmias had been very sure; and to her, knowing Wadiah’s vanities as she did,
it seemed unlikely that he could not arm his men at need, and arm them well.
    During this disapproving pause, Wadiah paid some attention to his moustache.
    “Is it true you will give us independence after the war?” he asked at last.
    “So far as I know, yes. But I thought you wanted to be a colony.”
    “That was a compliment, Madame, and perfectly sincere. All the same, we know that you will keep your word, and give us independence.”
    “The promise might be a compliment, too,” said Armande mischievously.
    Sheikh Wadiah chuckled.
    “Really, Madame! Sometimes you make me think I am dealing with an old Turk. You paint a beard upon your lovely chin, as a little boy defaces an advertisement.”
    “And with no more skill,” said Armande, holding out her hand as if to show its inefficiency.
    Sheikh Wadiah bent and kissed it. How perfectly, she thought, he managed every gesture! The touch of the moustache was firm and positive, utterly different from the conventional flick of the
French officer, or a passing passion that spent itself upon her hand.
    “You will keep your word, Madame,” he repeated. “And for a generation we shall regret it. But independence is the way of the world, and must be taken. And then? Then we shall
be robbed by our own politicians instead of by the French, and just as ever we shall revolt. Revolt will end in war between Christian and Moslem, because it always does. War will mean alliance