despite his kindness and charm, i could not like abdullah or his camp: perhaps because i was not sociable, and these people had no personal solitude: perhaps because their good humour showed me the futility of my more than palomides’ pains, not merely to seem better than myself, but to make others better. whereas nothing was futile in the atmosphere of higher thinking and responsibility which ruled at feisal’s. abdulla passed his merry day in the big cool tent accessible only to friends, limiting suppliants or new adherents or the hearing of disputes to one public session in the afternoon. for the rest he read the papers, ate carefully, slept. especially he played games, either chess with his staff or practical jokes with mohammed hassan. mohammed, nominally muedhdhin, was really court fool. a tiresome old fool i found him, as my illness left me less even than usual in jesting mood.
abdullah and his friends, shakir, fauzan, and the two sons of hamza among the sherifs, with sultan el abbud and hoshan, from the ateiba, and ibn mesfer, the guest-master, would spend much of the day and all the evening hours tormenting mohammed hassan. they stabbed him with thorns, stoned him, dropped sun-heated pebbles down his back, set him on fire. sometimes the jest would be elaborate, as when they laid a powder trail under the rugs, and lured mohammed hassan to sit on its end. once abdullah shot a coffee-pot off his head thrice from twenty yards, and then rewarded his long-suffering servility with three months’ pay.
abdullah would sometimes ride a little, or shoot a little, and return exhausted to his tent for massage; and afterwards reciters would be introduced to soothe his aching head. he was fond of arabic verses and exceptionally well read. the local poets found him a profitable audience. he was also interested in history and letters, and would have grammatical disputations in his tent and adjudge money prizes.
he affected to have no care for the hejaz situation, regarding the autonomy of the arabs as assured by the promises of great britain to his father, and leaning at ease against this prop. i longed to tell him that the half-witted old man had obtained from us no concrete or unqualified undertaking of any sort, and that their ship might founder on the bar of his political stupidity; but that would have been to give away my english masters, and the mental tug of war between honesty and loyalty, after swaying a while, settled again expediently into deadlock.
abdulla professed great interest in the war in europe, and studied it closely in the press. he was also acquainted with western politics, and had learned by rote the courts and ministries of europe, even to the name of the swiss president. i remarked again how much the comfortable circumstance that we still had a king made for the reputation of england in this world of asia. ancient and artificial societies like this of the sherifs and feudal chieftains of arabia found a sense of honourable security when dealing with us in such proof that the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.
time slowly depressed my first, favourable, opinion of abdulla’s character. his constant ailments, which once aroused compassion, became fitter for contempt when their causes were apparent in laziness and self-indulgence, and when he was seen to cherish them as occupations of his too-great leisure. his casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims; his friendliness became caprice; his good humour love of pleasure. the leaven of insincerity worked through all the fibres of his being. even his simplicity appeared false upon experience; and inherited religious prejudice was allowed rule over the keenness of his mind because it was less trouble to him than uncharted thought. his brain often betrayed its intricate pattern, disclosing idea twisted tightly over idea into a strong cord of design; and thus his indolence marred his scheming, too. the webs were constantly unravelling through his carelessness in leaving them unfinished. yet they never separated into straight desires, or grew into effective desires. always he watched out of the corner of his bland and open eye our returns to his innocent-sounding questions, reading an insect-subtlety of significant meaning into every hesitation or uncertainty or honest mistake.
one day i entered to find him sitting upright and wide-eyed with a spot of red in either cheek. sergeant frost, his old tutor, had just come from colonel bremond, innocent bearer of a letter which pointed out how the british were wrapping up the arabs on all sides — at aden, at gaza, at bagdad — and hoped that abdulla realized his situation. he asked hotly what i thought of it. in answer, i fell back on artifice, and replied in a pretty phrase that i hoped he would suspect our honesty when he found us backbiting our allies in private letters. the delicately poisoned arabic pleased him, and he paid us the edged compliment of saying that he knew we were sincere, since otherwise we would not be represented at jeddah by colonel wilson. there, characteristically, his subtlety hanged itself, not perceiving the double subtlety which negatived him. he did not understand that honesty might be the best-paying cat’s paw of rogues, and wilson, too, downright readily or quickly to suspect evil in the dignitaries above him.
wilson never told even a half-truth. if instructed to inform the king diplomatically that the subsidy of the month could not at present be increased, he would ring up mecca and say, ‘lord, lord, there is no more money’. as for lying, he was not merely incapable of it, but also shrewd enough to know that it was the worst gambit against players whose whole life had passed in a mist of deceits, and whose perceptions were of the finest. the arab leaders showed a completeness of instinct, a reliance upon intuition, the unperceived foreknown, which left our centrifugal minds gasping. like women, they understood and judged quickly, effortlessly, unreasonably. it almost seemed as though the oriental exclusion of woman from politics had conferred her particular gifts upon the men. some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment’s offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it there was nothing female in the arab movement, but the camels.
the outstanding figure of abdulla’s entourage was sherif shakir, a man of twenty-nine, and companion since boyhood of the four emirs. his mother was circassian, as had been his grandmother. from them he obtained his fair complexion; but the flesh of his face was torn away by smallpox. from its white ruin two restless eyes looked out, very bright and big; for the faintness of his eyelashes and eyebrows made his stare directly disconcerting. his figure was tall, slim, almost boyish from the continual athletic activity of the man. his sharp, decided, but pleasant voice frayed out if he shouted. his manner while delightfully frank, was abrupt, indeed imperious; with a humour as cracked as his cackling laugh.
this bursting freedom of speech seemed to respect nothing on earth except king hussein: towards himself he exacted deference, more so than did abdulla, who was always playing tricks with his companions, the bevy of silk-clad fellows who came about him when he would be easy. shakir joined wildly in the sport, but would smartingly punish a liberty. he dressed simply, but very cleanly, and, like abdulla, spent public hours with toothpick and toothstick. he took no interest in books and never wearied his head with meditation, but was intelligent and interesting in talk. he was devout, but hated mecca, and played backgammon while abdulla read the koran. yet by fits he would pray interminably.
in war he was the man at arms. his feats made him the darling of the tribes. he, in return, described himself as a bedawi, and an ateibi, and imitated them. he wore his black hair in plaits down each side of his face, and kept it glossy with butter, and strong by frequent washings in camel urine. he encouraged nits, in deference to the beduin proverb that a deserted head showed an ungenerous mind: and wore the brim, a plaited girdle of thin leathern thongs wrapped three or four times round the loins to confine and support the belly. he owned splendid horses and camels: was considered the finest rider in arabia: ready for a match with anyone.
shakir gave me the sense that he preferred a fit of energy to sustained effort: but there was balance and shrewdness behind his mad manner. sherif hussein had used him on embassies to cairo before the war, to arrange private business with the khedive of egypt. the beduin figure must have looked strange in the stucco splendour of the abdin. abdulla had unlimited admiration for shakir and tried to see the world with his eyes of gay carelessness. between them they seriously complicated my mission to wadi ais.
