— His allegorical father, sir. I only meant it as a parable.
— I beg your pardon, sir. It was just an attempt at interpretation…
— As you wish, Colonel… why, of course…
— Yes, indeed, sir, that’s what I’m aiming at. It will all fit together in the end. I’m dreadfully sorry, sir.
— I’ll most assuredly be quick about it, sir; the events now become quicker themselves. The armies prepare to lock horns, and in March we suffer a stinging setback in Gaza, although it’s clear to all that we haven’t said our last word yet. All summer long there is a constant trickle of nebulous rumors; it’s not that the Turks are deliberately spreading them, it’s just that they themselves don’t know where the English bull, our esteemed Sir Edmund, who in late summer moves his cavalry into the Holy Land, will strike from. By now it’s autumn, sir, the season of the Jewish holidays, although quite frankly, autumn here is just more of summer with a bit of an evening breeze; but it’s the time of the Jews’ New Year, when they rise in the middle of the night to blow a ram’s horn; and he felt the winds shift to southerly and rose one day himself and set out, taking his British passport from under the quilt and sowing it into the lining of his old coat. His first stop was Bethlehem, where nothing seemed to have changed: the Turks shuffled about as always and the Arabs were their usual sleepy selves; only in the eyes of the Jews did he notice a soft gleam that made him stretch his neck a bit, as if straining to hear foreign voices. A party of Jews was on its way to Hebron to pray in the Cave of the Patriarchs, and he traveled with them for a while until their way was blocked by a Turkish detachment bound for Gaza, at which point he left the main road and caught a ride on a cart heading down into the desert of Judea. It was late afternoon; the sun was setting; a mixed company of Turkish cavalry and infantry marched by, singing a jolly Turkish tune, as if homebound at last, their officer brusquely ordered the cart aside and told its occupants to stay put; and our Mr. Mani had no way of knowing that as the last Turkish soldier marched by him, four hundred years of Turkish rule, the only rule he had known in his life, were peeled away as though they were a puff of wind… And so they remained there in that no-man’s land, south of Hebron on the way to Beersheba, not far from the tents of some Bedouin, who extended them their hospitality. It was the thirty-first of October, and our Mani had no idea either that Sir Edmund had taken Beersheba that same night. They lit a fire to warm themselves and sat around it…
— I wouldn’t say pleased, sir. Burning with anticipation was more like it. He was deucedly impatient to come in contact with us, even though he had no idea what that meant; but he did know that if he stayed where he was, there would no longer be any way back. And indeed, the next morning he found himself encircled by Chatwood’s cavalry under the command of Captain William Daggett of the quartermaster’s corps of the 67th Regiment. Captain Daggett’s affidavit, sir, is here in this brief, and he’ll be the first to take the witness stand tomorrow. An indomitable warrior, sir, a most esteemed member of Chatwood’s staff; a vain old bloody-tempered Scotsman who refused to be questioned at first and had to be locked up for two days before we could get the story out of him.
— Quite so, sir. You see, sir, the captain, who is seventy years old, is an absolute fiend for horses, you’d almost think he were part horse himself. In Midlothian, sir, where he lives, a horse isn’t raced without his say-so, and all he lives and breathes for is to breed a better, faster animal that will compete with his colors; his whole life, you might say, has been one long search for the ideal thoroughbred. When war broke out he joined up at once despite his age and was commissioned chief livery officer of the 67th Cavalry; his service in France was spent mostly poking about in stables, and I daresay he thinks the whole war is one colossal derby and can’t understand why the jockeys keep shooting at each other. And when all the jockeys had their mounts shot out from under them in Europe and the tanks came to take their place, he was jolly well cheesed-off and ‘eard the East a-callin’, and so he signed on with Allenby and sailed across the sea to go on searching for his equus idealis among the fabled stallions of Arabia, hoping to find it and ship it back to Midlothian to the astonishment of all his racing mates. He’s determined to track it down if it’s the last thing he does, and this whole ruddy war, as far as he’s concerned, from that duke shot at Sarajevo to the millions who died at Verdun, has been fought solely to transport him to the deserts of Arabia for that purpose. Wherever he goes, commandeering horses and camels for his regiment, he keeps an eye out; and so the minute Beersheba was taken, while the smoke was still rising from the burning houses and the dead and wounded were being gathered, he put on his kilt and went galloping off into the wilderness with his cronies and two interpreters to look for the steed of his dreams…
— Thank you, sir, gladly. A small drop By George, it’s raining again! I’m sorry to have to bore you like this, but I had a don at Cambridge who said that God was in the details, and that’s so not only when God is an aesthete but when He’s a jurist as well. And the details matter here especially, because now is when our defendant links up with His Majesty’s forces, and had it not been for Captain Daggett’s enthusiasm, he would never have penetrated so quickly to the privy chambers of regimental headquarters…
— Quite so, sir, and without the most cursory check on him. Captain Daggett, you see, had no time for anything but horses; he was charging about from one Bedouin camp to another, rousting out every quadruped with a mane and having them lined up in front of him so that he could look in their mouths and at their fetlocks, and whistle to them with his special Scottish whistle that works on every horse in the world, which answers with a special wiggle of its ears that only Daggett understands, after which he waits for old Dobbin to defecate and sniffs its droppings to know what’s inside it.
— By George, sir, I’ve seen it myself. It’s the sort of connoisseurship that borders on madness. And after that he summons the horse’s owner to recite its family tree; and his two interpreters — who never recovered from the heatstroke they came down with in Cairo, to which they were whisked straight from Queens College in Oxford, where they studied with dons who had never been east of Magdalen Bridge — are so terrified of him that they forget what little Arabic they know; so that each question he wants to ask the Bedouin calls for a lengthy confab on their part and much leafing through the dictionary, in which they don’t even always understand the English; whereupon they stand there working out a final draft in whispers while the Bedouin wait patiently and the gray-haired captain grows flushed with rage; and when at last the magic words are carefully uttered in their atrocious accents, any resemblance between which and the speech of real Arabs is purely accidental, the Bedouin turn crimson and then white with anger; and spitting on the ground, they stalk off, fold their tents, take their horse, take everything, and vanish over the horizon, leaving nothing behind but a whirlpool of dust and two mortified interpreters with no idea what their mistake was…