For some considerable time there was silence. Suddenly Lord Blair rose from his chair, and hurried across to a cupboard, from which he returned bearing in triumph the missing cigars. He proffered them to his visitor, who, without raising his eyes, took one, smelt it, and put it in his breast pocket.
At length, through a cloud of smoke, Daniel looked up. “The man’s a fool,” he said, and laid the paper back upon the table.
“You think I ought to refuse?” asked Lord Blair.
“No, procrastinate. That’s the basis of diplomacy, isn’t it?”
The document in question was a request made by the Egyptian Minister of War that the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the desert should be brought under the Conscription Act, from which, until now, they had been exempt.
“I ventured to ask you to come in,” said his Lordship, “because I am sure, indeed I know, you have the interests of these rascals at heart. I thought you would wish to be consulted; and at the same time I felt that you would be able to tell me just what the consequences would be of any action of this kind.”
Daniel nodded. “Yes, I can tell you the consequences,” he answered. “If you conscribe them, they will evade the law by all possible means, and you will turn honest men into law-breakers.”
“But, as you see, he suggests that it will bring the benefits of discipline into their lives,” Lord Blair argued. “And if some of them escape across the frontiers into Arabia or Tripoli, it will be, surely it will be, no great loss to Egypt.”
Daniel spread out his hands. “What is military discipline?” he asked. “Good Lord!—d’you think the Bedouin will be better men for having learnt to form fours and present arms? Will barrack life in dirty cities bring them some mystic benefit which they have missed in the open spaces of the clean desert? Don’t you realize that it is just their freedom from the taint of what we call civilization that gives them their particular good qualities? Why is it that the man of the desert is faithful and honourable and truthful? Because time and money and power and ambition and success and cunning are nothing to him. Because he is not herded with other men.”
He leant forward earnestly. “Lord Blair,” he said, and his voice was grave, “hasn’t the thought ever come to you that we civilized people, with our rules and regulations, our etiquette and our conventions, have built up a structure which screens us from the face of the sun?”