Afar in the Forest

Affair in Araby, by Talbot
Mundy

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Title: Affair in Araby
Author: Talbot Mundy
Release Date: December 31, 2003 [EBook #10551]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFFAIR IN
ARABY ***

AFFAIR IN ARABY
by Talbot Mundy
CHAPTER I
"I'll make one to give this Feisul boy a hoist"

Whoever invented chess understood the world's works as some men
know clocks and watches. He recognized a fact and based a game on it,
with the result that his game endures. And what he clearly recognized
was this: That no king matters much as long as your side is playing a
winning game. You can leave your king in his corner then to amuse
himself in dignified unimportance. But the minute you begin to lose,
your king becomes a source of anxiety.
In what is called real life (which is only a great game, although a
mighty good one) it makes no difference what you call your king. Call
him Pope if you want to, or President, or Chairman. He grows in
importance in proportion as the other side develops the attack. You've
got to keep your symbol of authority protected or you lose.
Nevertheless, your game is not lost as long as your king can move.
That's why the men who want to hurry up and start a new political era
imprison kings and cut their heads off. With no head on his shoulders
your king can only move in the direction of the cemetery, which is over
the line and doesn't count.
I love a good fight, and have been told I ought to be ashamed of it. I've
noticed, though, that the folk who propose to elevate my morals fight
just as hard, and less cleanly, with their tongue than some of us do with
our fists and sinews. I'm told, too, quite frequently that as an American
I ought to be ashamed of fighting for a king. Dear old ladies of both
sexes have assured me that it isn't moral to give aid and comfort to a
gallant gentleman--a godless Mohammedan, too; which makes it much
worse--who is striving gamely and without malice to keep his given
word and save his country.
But if you've got all you want, do you know of any better fun than
lending a hand while some man you happen to like gets his? I don't. Of
course, some fellows want too much, and it's bad manners as well as
waste of time to inflict your opinion on them. But given a reasonable
purpose and a friend who needs your assistance, is there any better
sport on earth than risking your own neck to help him put it over?
Walk wide of the man and particularly of the woman, who makes a

noise about lining your pocket or improving your condition. An altruist
is my friend James Schuyler Grim, but he makes less noise than a
panther on a dark night; and I never knew a man less given to
persuading you. He has one purpose, but almost never talks about it. It's
a sure bet that if we hadn't struck up a close friendship, sounding each
other out carefully as opportunity occurred, I would have been in the
dark about it until this minute.
All the news of Asia from Alexandretta to the Persian Gulf and from
Northern Turkestan to South Arabia reaches Grim's ears sooner or later.
He earns his bread and butter knitting all that mess of cross-grained
information into one intelligible pattern; after which he interprets it and
acts suddenly without advance notices.
Time and again, lone-handed, he has done better than an army corps, by
playing chief against chief in a land where the only law is individual
interpretation of the Koran.
But it wasn't until our rescue of Jeremy Ross from near Abu Kem, that
I ever heard Grim come out openly and admit that he was working to
establish Feisul, third son of the King of Mecca, as king of just as many
Arabs as might care to have him over them. That was the cat he had
been keeping in a bag for seven years.
Right down to the minute when Grim, Jeremy and I sat down with Ben
Saoud the Avenger on a stricken field at Abu Kem, and Grim and
Jeremy played their hands so cleverly that the Avenger was made,
unwitting guardian of Jeremy's secret gold-mine, and Feisul's open and