Jimgrim and Allahs Peace | Page 3

good that has come to the Near East in the last fifty
years has been American, they spoke with the authority of men who
have lived on the spot and watched it happen.
"You see, the Americans who have come here haven't set up
governments. They've opened schools and colleges. They've poured in
education, and taken nothing. Then there are thousands of Arabs, living
in hovels because there's nothing better, who have been to America and
brought back memories with them. All that accounts for the desire for
an American mandate--which would be a very bad thing, though,
because the moment we set up a government we would lose our chance
to be disinterested. The country is better off under any other mandate,
provided it gives Americans the right to teach without ruling. America's
mission is educational. There's an American, though, who might seem
to prove the contrary. Do you see him?"
There were two Arabs in the room, talking in low tones over by the
window. I could imagine the smaller of the two as a peddler of lace and
filigree-silver in the States, who had taken out papers for the sake of
privilege and returned full of notions to exploit his motherland. But the
tall one--never. He was a Bedouin, if ever a son of the desert breathed.
If he had visited the States, then he had come back as unchanged as
gold out of an acid bath; and as for being born there--
"That little beady-eyed, rat-faced fellow may be an American," I said.
"In fact, of course he is, since you say so. But as for being up to any
good--"
"You're mistaken. You're looking at the wrong man. Observe the other
one."
I was more than ever sure I was not mistaken. Stately gesture, dignity,
complexion, attitude--to say nothing of his Bedouin array and the
steadiness with which he kept his dark eyes fixed on the smaller man
he was talking to, had laid the stamp of the desert on the taller man
from head to heel.

"That tall man is an American officer in the British army. Doesn't look
the part, eh? They say he was the first American to be granted a
commission without any pretense of his being a Canadian. They
accepted him as an American. It was a case of that or nothing. Lived
here for years, and knew the country so well that they felt they had to
have him on his own terms."
You can believe anything in Jerusalem after you have been in the place
a week or two, so, seeing who my informant was, I swallowed the fact.
But it was a marvel. It seemed even greater when the man strolled out,
pausing to salute my host with the solemn politeness that warfare with
the desert breeds. You could not imagine that at Ellis Island, or on
Broadway--even on the stage. It was too untheatrical to be acting; too
individual to be imitation; to unself-conscious to have been acquired. I
hazarded a guess.
"A red man, then. Carlisle for education. Swallowed again by the first
desert he stayed in for more than a week."
"Wrong. His name is Grim. Sounds like Scandinavian ancestry, on one
side. James Schuyler Grim--Dutch, then, on the other; and some
English. Ten generations in the States at any rate. He can tell you all
about this country. Why not call on him?"
It did not need much intelligence to agree to that suggestion; but the
British military take their code with them to the uttermost ends of earth,
behind which they wonder why so many folks with different codes, or
none, dislike them.
"Write me an introduction," I said.
"You won't need one. Just call on him. He lives at a place they call the
junior Staff Officers' Mess--up beyond the Russian Convent and below
the Zionist Hospital."
So I went that evening, finding the way with difficulty because they
talk at least eighteen languages in Jerusalem and, with the exception of
official residences, no names were posted anywhere. That was not an

official residence. It was a sort of communal boarding-house
improvised by a dozen or so officers in preference to the bug-laden
inconvenience of tents--in a German-owned (therefore enemy property)
stone house at the end of an alley, in a garden full of blooming
pomegranates.
I sent my card in by a flat-footed old Russian female, who ran down
passages and round corners like a wet hen, trying to find a man-servant.
The place seemed deserted, but presently she came on her quarry in the
back yard, and a very small boy in a tarboosh and knickerbockers
carried the card on a tray into a room on the left. Through the open
door I could hear one quiet question and a high-pitched