The Brides of Solomon (7 page)

It was impossible to guess the position of the rest. If the men of Ferjeyn wished to capture me before I collected my basket of food, they would be under cover on the eastern slope; if they
wanted the gendarmes to take all responsibility, they would be in the trees between the glade and my house, ready to pick up my body or intercept me if I escaped. In either case they would not be
on the pastures.

As in all attempts to predict the behaviour of opponents, my reasoning was neither right nor wrong. There were, in fact, a few men on the top; but they kept to the east, well away from the
gendarmes’ preserves. The pasture was by no means an open alp. It was the rugged top of a mountain, sown with rocks and bushes, where the grass grew in hundreds of little patches rather than
a continuous meadow. Well, with the half moon showing every bush as a movement and every shadow as inhabited, the men of Ferjeyn were nervous. They were smoking, and whispering to keep up their
courage. They were not much use as soldiers. The cattle were in more danger than I.

Without difficulty I reached the little cliff which overlooked our glade. The basket was half concealed under a bush. Since I knew where to look for it, I could just distinguish the white cloth.
The two gendarmes I could not see, but I knew exactly where they were—flat on their rumbling bellies under the overhang of the cliff with their carbines trained on the basket.

Their horses were tethered on the pasture, behind a rock. As soon as I found them I saw my opportunity. Good Lord, how right I had been to feel sceptical of my plans for returning to the Jebel
Sinjar!

I inserted a prickly burr under the tail of one of those patient animals. He did not like that at all. You would have said, a charging elephant! One gendarme came up to see what was wrong. He
was so much occupied with the horse that I was able to measure my blow. It was enough to leave him breathing quietly on the ground.

He could not answer enquiries himself and I did not know him well enough to imitate his voice, so I only had time to change into half his uniform when the other gendarme, alarmed at the silence,
advanced to see what had happened. He caught me at a disadvantage. I had his comrade’s breeches round my ankles. I should have shot quickly. But, M. le Consul, I did not wish to become, like
John Douaihy, frightened of myself. I pretended to be demoralised, to beg for mercy. And he, thinking of the boasting he could enjoy if he took Nadim Nassar single-handed, came too close to use his
arms. Since he struck me twice across the face, I was not so gentle with him as with the other.

I left them well tied up with the spare reins and halter, confident that they would not be found till morning. And there! I had a horse to ride, another to lead, two carbines and two pistols as
well as my own rifle. I trotted across the pasture and down the track, past the picket, past my house and through the streets of Ferjeyn. On my head I carried the spare saddle to conceal my face. I
gave the impression of an extremely angry gendarme in a hurry, and answered questions only with muttered curses.

There were neither telephone nor telegraph in Ferjeyn. By riding hard due north across the Duck’s Bill, I reckoned to be over the Turkish frontier before the alarm had gone out. They were
two fresh horses and I did not spare them. In the morning, galloping through Moslem villages where they tried to stop me to hear why I was riding so fast, I may have aroused some suspicion. But
once near the frontier I had no more trouble. It cannot have been an uncommon sight—a silent gendarme in a hurry, leading the horse of his dead comrade.

And then I made a circuit through the Turkish hills—not so easy, M. le Consul, that it can be dismissed in a sentence, but I am conscious that I may have kept you too long from more
important work—and I descended cautiously upon the camp of Merjan.

It is a refuge, that country, and beautiful, but miserably poor. Three rifles, two pistols, their ammunition and two horses was a considerable capital. Merjan decided that he and his brother and
I could live more freely than as timber-cutters and middlemen for smugglers. With a Russian deserter, a Turk and a Persian—of true officer material, but having felt it his duty to assassinate
a political—we formed a band. I should not like you to think that we are criminals on a European scale. In the first place there is practically nothing here worth stealing. But we can go
where we wish without interference, and we are on good terms with the tribes. In return for food, we give them protection from police and bandits. And if they do not wish for protection we make it
desirable. Sometimes, too, we act as escort for smugglers. In fact one does what one can. But it is not a life for a man who loves to be in his own town.

M. le Consul, for myself I have no right to ask more than what I have. I live, and when I die there will be no fuss—unless Merjan and his brother devoutly say a prayer for me to the devil.
But for my boys I beg your patronage and, through you, that of the Republic. I have no address, and Damascus is very far. Perhaps in the spring I shall be able to send another messenger to call on
you. Perhaps he will bring back to me a word of comfort.

Awaiting your reply, I beg you to accept, M. le Consul, the assurance of my highest consideration.

I
T
is an odd thought—at this date unworldly rather than disturbing—that I am responsible for all the disasters of the last forty years, for
1914/18, for the Russian Revolution, for Hitler. No martian arriving from outer space could have changed the quietly running world into so devastatingly wrong and fast a gear. And, as in a
cautionary tale for children, it all came about through disobedience.

My father had a dear friend named von Lech who was an under-secretary in the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Education. They had really little in common except the self-confident liberalism of
their time and a passionate interest in the art of teaching. Both of them believed that when all Europeans—the rest of the world could follow later—attended secondary school Utopia
would have arrived. That did not seem so comical a creed in 1914 as it does now. It was a bond of idealism strong enough for them to visit each other, and even for their wives to be polite to each
other.

Von Lech was a hard-working administrator who kept two servants, but no car or carriage. That was just the position of my father. Both of them could live comfortably and precisely in that state
to which Emperor and King had called them, but holidays were always a minor problem and illness a major one.

Thus it was natural that when von Lech discovered a very cheap and hospitable hotel at Ilidze, an unknown summer resort in Austrian Bosnia, he should write to my father about it. He knew that my
father was convalescing after a long illness and had been ordered by his doctor to go abroad for a rest. Frau von Lech also wrote to my mother in formal, diplomatic French. I think it was the use
of French rather than German or English which overcame her mistrust. Ilidze was made to sound fashionable, which it wasn’t, and romantic, which it was.

Neither of my parents knew anything whatever about Bosnia. My father, however, always accepted authority. Von Lech, it was plain, counted Bosnia a normal province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Provinces of the Empire were civilised and disciplined. It would therefore be an unwarranted misuse of the imagination to consider a visit to Ilidze at all adventurous. They decided to start in the
middle of June. They would not hear of me travelling out by myself at the end of term—rightly, for at thirteen I was absurdly helpless—so I was let out of school six weeks early, and
accompanied them by train to Trieste and by boat down the Adriatic.

Ilidze was intensely excited by the coming visit of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his pretty wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. I cannot remember if she was really pretty. Even to a
sophisticated eye all feminine royalty is dazzling. But I can see the Archduke now. I was immensely impressed by him. Not only was he going to become Emperor, but he reminded me of a taller,
fiercer and unsmiling edition of my headmaster.

The pair of them stayed at Ilidze for three nights while the Archduke attended the manœuvres. On June 28 they were to make a state visit to the neighbouring town of Sarajevo; and the von
Lechs, who highly approved of the solid glimmerings of liberalism in the Archduke, loyally determined to go over and cheer. Of course we went with them.

We watched from a first-floor balcony on the Appel Quay. The house was some fifty yards from the cross-roads formed by Franz Joseph Street and the Latin Bridge, and belonged to some hotel
acquaintance of the von Lechs—an old lady in black who entertained us with little cakes, and wine in coloured glasses. I think she must have been of rather lower social status, perhaps a
native Bosnian, but I remember little about her except the coloured glasses.

The Appel Quay was a long, straight road, bordered on one side by houses and on the other by the river. It was Sunday, and so there was a thick hedge of public on each side of the route. In the
distance, to the right of our balcony, the procession was coming up the Quay towards us when we heard a sharp explosion. The cars stopped. Hedges wavered inwards and were held back.

The women of our party screamed that it was a bomb. My mother watched Frau von Lech to see whether it would be proper to faint. Frau von Lech, however, decided that my mother would show the
famous English phlegm, and determined to imitate her. The old lady prayed, and fascinated me by the complicated gestures with which she crossed herself.

The men exerted their common-sense influence. Von Lech, who was still unused to cars, suggested that the noise had been due to a burst tyre or petrol tank. My father said that the public should
not be allowed to purchase fireworks. The bomb as a political weapon was inconceivable to such believers in Progress; they easily assumed that—except in Russia—it was inconceivable to
everyone else.

I myself, with the superiority of a sound preparatory school, accepted their unimaginative confidence that the incident was trivial. The melancholy procession—now of three cars instead of
four—restarted and passed hurriedly below our decorated balcony. The cheering was so thin that you could distinguish individual voices. I was disappointed. It seemed hardly worth the short
journey from Ilidze for so small and dull an affair. My only comparable experience had been a visit of Edward VII to Gloucester. There had been lots of yeomanry in gorgeous uniforms. The genial,
top-hatted figure in the open landau had created, by the mere force of his expansive masculinity, an air of festival.

But now that the Archduke had passed, we could see the missing fourth car drawn into the side of the road. A crowd, at a respectful distance, was round it. Another and more active crowd, led by
police, was running up the dry bed of the river. We saw an indistinguishable limp puppet caught and arrested.

Von Lech, allowing a decent interval for the stopped clock of civilisation to start again, leaned over the balcony and made enquiries. Yes, it had been a bomb; a colonel in the last car had been
wounded; some Bosnian students were, it was believed, responsible. Von Lech and my father took this awkward hurdle in their stride. Secondary education, they admitted, was bound to have its
teething troubles.

I was silent with a new disappointment. One read of Bombs in the newspapers. Anarchists with Bombs occasionally blew themselves up (but no one else) in the
Boys Own Paper.
And now a
bomb had been thrown practically in front of my eyes, and I hadn’t even seen it.

The party returned inside for refreshments. The women were exclamatory. My father and von Lech discussed Bombs with philosophic detachment. Nobody paid any attention to me. I made myself a
nuisance, and was told that I could go into the garden and look at the goldfish until the Archduke’s procession returned along the Quay, but that on no account was I to leave the house.