“You have spoken with Joshua,” Mahmoud replied. “You know what I know, that trouble is coming; you know what Joshua thinks, that it is a planned trouble.”
“Do you agree with Joshua?” Allenby asked.
“Someone wants the country, yes.”
“Who?”
Mahmoud gave him that curious sideways movement of the head that is the Arabic equivalent of the French shrug, and did not answer.
“Who?” Allenby repeated, this time with the threat of command in his voice. Mahmoud’s back went suddenly straight.
“My general, you know better than I who it could be. I am a creature of the ground, and know only what moves on my own patch of earth, while you see all the land from Dan to Beersheva, and on into the Sinai. I sincerely hope that you know more than I, or we are all lost.”
Allenby seemed to waver on the brink of letting loose with a display of his famous temper, and I felt us all shrink within ourselves; then he relented. He even laughed. “Very well, Mr Hazr, from the point of view of a lowly ground dweller, who do you see coordinating these incidents?”
“A Turk,” Mahmoud answered promptly. “It stinks of Turkish methods.”
Plumbury’s sleek head nodded in agreement.
“Hoping to take back the country while our attention is elsewhere?” Allenby said, though it was not a question. “That would be the easiest time, when it was not expected.”
“And when the soldiers are weary of fighting and the English people sick unto death of war. This country is in a state of confusion, the ideal setting for a tyrant to take hold. Or a fanatic.”
“It would be nearly impossible to convince the British people to support a new war way out here, that is certain,” Allenby agreed. “Even Whitehall would be loath to make the move up from a military occupation to all-out war. Still, no matter who started it, or why, the situation is beginning to gain its own momentum, and our task is to nip it in the bud, to kill it now, in a tight operation, not in six months. Or in six years on another battlefield.” He sat forward, and my awareness of his size, which had lessened somewhat under the influence of porcelain cups and crustless sandwiches, flooded back. “This land has been fought over for thousands of years. A sea of blood has already gone into this soil. I do not intend,” he said forcefully, “to supervise another bloodletting. I believe we have the opportunity to create a new thing in Israel: a land where neighbours are brothers, not enemies. I believe that if Weizmann and Feisal can agree, that if we can make a fair beginning, Christian, Jew, and Arab can live together. What we must have, however, is that fair beginning, and someone, some group, looks to be attempting to kill it in the early stages.” A look of vague embarrassment flickered across his face and he subsided into his chair. He continued gruffly, “I can’t be everywhere, putting out fires. If some man is setting them, I need help to catch him. I don’t know that you, Mr Holmes, Miss Russell, can do much; I realise you’re here for a brief time. But you two,” he continued, turning his hard gaze first on Mahmoud, then on Ali, “are supposed to be good at finding things out. Joshua tells me you are his best. Prove it.
“In one month, on either the ninth or the sixteenth of February, I intend to act as host to a meeting of representatives of the major faiths in Jerusalem. We will visit the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then we will break bread together at Government House. I wish to have this problem cleared up by then. Do you understand me?” There was a gleam of threat in the general’s voice, and suddenly the tales I had heard, of grown men fainting or vomiting after a hard interview with the Bull, did not seem so fantastical after all. Ali turned three shades lighter, and the rocklike Mahmoud seemed to quiver slightly, as if the earth had shifted beneath his feet.
Allenby saw both reactions, and seemed satisfied. He nodded and stood up, saying, “You will want to look over the reports.” We obediently put down our cups and got to our feet. “Any questions? Fine. Good-bye, Miss Russell, Mr Holmes. I shall be leaving early for Tiberias, so I won’t see you again, and I’m afraid I have to send Plumbury down to Jerusalem, so you can’t even have his brain to pick. Still, let Arthurs know if you need anything during your stay.”
It was my first inkling that we were stopping the night in Haifa, but when I saw the accommodation, I did not question the decision: there was a bath. The room had high ceilings and once-proud imitation French plaster cornices and a gorgeous, deep feather bed with a canopy draped with mosquito netting, but most of all it had a bath, and the spigot ran hot when I turned it on. I had thought the dye on my skin was becoming darker as it aged, but it was only grime. The hard soap in the salt-rich sea had not actually cleansed.
We took our dinner in an upstairs drawing room, in what, according to Ali, had been the
“When General Allenby said something about picking Lieutenant Plumbury’s brain, was that a joke?”
Mahmoud gave a crooked smile, but Ali chuckled aloud. “The lieutenant is a typical Allenby possession. He looks about nineteen, does he not? What they call ‘wet behind the ears’ and about as effective as a string broom. In truth, he has double firsts from Cambridge in history and philosophy, he lived here for three years before the war, and he knows nearly as much as the general does about the country.”
The languid youth was another Allenby illusion, a sleight of hand equal to the fake horse lines on the banks of the Jordan. I nodded in appreciation, and wished I might have seen more of the great man before we left his country.
We took our coffee (English coffee, a pale and watery imitation of the stuff Mahmoud made) in an adjoining room, its table piled high with files and boxes. We read through reports of recent incidents, speeches and pamphlets and outbreaks of violence, until my head began to swim, although I could glean no pattern, or even a sense of a pattern, from them. At midnight I gave up and took myself to my feather bed. Which incidentally, after nearly a month of sleeping either on a ship’s bunk or on the ground, proved more luxury than I could bear: I ended the night comfortably on the floor, wrapped in the bedclothes.
Of the next day I remember little, and those memories left me are both sketchy and disconnected. I recollect emerging from my heap of bedclothes on the carpet and indulging in a luxurious second hot bath. I can recall breakfast vividly: devilled kidneys and kedgeree, boiled eggs, toast, and kippers, taken from hot plates on the sideboard and eaten at a long, gleaming mahogany table with a smattering of men, uniformed and not, all of whom were preoccupied and none of whom appeared to think that we were in the least out of the ordinary breakfast companions. There were newspapers, even, from Cairo, Paris, and London—some of them less than a week old.
I definitely remember getting into the motorcar that was to return us to Jericho. It was a Vauxhall this time, that looked the veteran of many a battle with the hard roads. Mahmoud sat in front; I was behind the driver on the right-hand side; Holmes on my left in the middle; Ali next to him on the outside.
After that I have only three brief recollections of the day. The first is telling Holmes about something I had dreamt the night before, children playing on a beach with buckets and spades, and a donkey ride in the background. Next comes the clear image of a bridge over a stream, and a child with three black goats that had immensely long ears, all of them looking up at us. Finally I retain the impression of the motorcar gearing down to climb a hill, and rocky cliffs, and a few sparse trees. After that, darkness.
THIRTEEN
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THE
