Judith by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781453270806
Publisher: Open Road E-Riginal
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

A Visitant

The visitations of Donner always occasioned the sinking feeling which Bovril was invented to prevent — for, during some years before he reached the dizzy eminence of his present post, he had been in charge of the arms raids; these enabled him to pay off any number of petty scores or imagined slights, purely in terms of the destruction of kibbutz property. Consequently, his appearance at Ras Shamir early one morning came as something of a surprise, as he had not been seen for some months anywhere north of Galilee.

Pete saw the self-assured figure from the roof parapet, where she was busy discussing a deal with the two settlements at the end of the line — the ones they called “Glasgow” and “Brisbane” because of the nationalities of the overwhelming mass of their inhabitants. She went down to meet him, muttering “Here’s a bird of ill omen. I hope it isn’t a raid.” But Donner was alone, walking with an air of preoccupied nonchalance and tapping his knee with his swagger-stick. He was even disposed to be waggish in his earthbound way, spreading out his hands as he saw her and saying: “This time I come in peace, Miss Peterson. Honour bound. Cross my heart.” He crossed his heart and cast his eyes up to heaven like some grotesque doll. Then, nonchalantly, as if to assert his official power by a calculated rudeness, he picked himself a fine rose. She watched him stonily. “I am glad to hear it,” she said. And truthfully she was, for recently they had received quite a lot of automatic weapons and some boxes of industrial dynamite, out of which Aaron had plans to build... “I am very glad.” The last time Donner and his party, with a lot of infantry, had spent four hours going over the settlement with a fine-tooth comb in a hunt for arms, they found nothing; but it was really a miracle that they did not. Old Karam had put their hand-grenades under the chickens in their boxes; now he claimed that the hens had tried so hard to hatch them they had become neurotic. With these thoughts turning over in her mind, she shook hands gravely with the policeman.

“I came,” said Donner, “more or less to say goodbye, Miss Peterson, as I am going for a soldier shortly — a Syrian posting. You won’t see my ugly face around here any more.”

“I am glad,” said Pete absently, “of course I mean sorry.”

Donner gave an awkward laugh, rather louder than it should have been, and not as self-assured as he would have liked it to sound.

“You must have your little joke,” he said.

She nodded. They walked side by side back to the office where, dismissing the supernumeraries working there, she placed a chair for Donner and settled behind her desk with the air of one who awaits the oracle. But the oracle did not know quite how to begin; it was difficult, like trying to pick up a crab.

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