Nothing of that surprised the mother; she had always known that her son was all that! So Lanny would be asked to meet dreamers and propagandists, fortune hunters and impoverished aristocrats from places whose names he had to look up in the atlas — Kurdistan and Croatia, Iraq and Mingrelia, Cilicia which must not be confused with Silesia or Galicia, and Slovenia which must be distinguished from Slovakia. Earnest strangers would appeal in the name of President Wilson's doctrine of “self-determination of all peoples”; and Lanny would take their stories to the experts at the Crillon — and like as not would learn that these same people were busily engaged in oppressing some other people, even perhaps killing them wholesale!
II
Beauty called the hotel, saying: “Lanny, I've just met the most delightful young English officer — he's been in Arabia for years, even before the war, and tells such interesting stories about it. You know, they wear robes, and gallop across the desert on beautiful horses, and take long journeys on camels. They say he has an Arabian sheik or something with him, and he's going to bring him to Emily's for tea. Couldn't you run over?”
So Lanny, who for the last six hours had been working without a break at making abstracts of several French reports on conditions in the Ukraine, said yes, and in the drawing room of Mrs. Chattersworth's town house he met a figure out of the Arabian Nights: a man of thirty or so, with a mild face, long and thin, such as painters have imagined for Jesus Christ. He had a black beard and mustache and very beautiful dark eyes, and wore a robe of soft gray silk edged with scarlet, and a four-cornered turban with a hood having a flowered pattern. His father was Sherif of Mecca and King of the Hejaz — at least he said the British called his father “king,” but it was silly, for the father traced his ancestry back to the Prophet, more than twelve hundred years ago, and what was any “king” in the world compared to that?
The Emir Feisal, as this young man was called, spoke no English; what he said was translated by the officer who was his companion and friend. The latter's name was Lawrence, and the two of them had been fighting the Turks and Germans all over the sun-scorched deserts of Arabia, and in the end had swept them out of the country. Colonel Lawrence was about thirty-one and seemed even younger, having the manner of a gay schoolboy. He was stocky, with sandy complexion much burned, and very bright blue eyes. He and his friend had a keen sense of humor and exchanged many jokes during the translating.
But they had a serious purpose, having come to Paris to tell the story of the heroic fight which their people had waged for freedom, and to present to President Wilson the claims they held under the terms of his Fourteen Points — Number 12, to be precise, which specified that “the Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”
It seemed impossible to misunderstand that. The Emir put it up to Lanny Budd, having been told that he was a compatriot of the great Democrat and a member of the Crillon staff. He begged to be told what Lanny thought about the prospects, and the secretary-translator, speaking unofficially, of course, replied that he had no doubt whatever that President Wilson meant to stand by his promises. It was hard to see how any question could be raised, because the Fourteen Points, with only two reservations, had been expressly accepted by the Allies as the basis of the armistice with Germany. Having given this assurance, Lanny shook hands with the gay young warriors from the sun-scorched lands and they parted the best of friends; the youth went back to his inaccessible hotel and told his chief about it — which of course was what Feisal and his companion assumed that he would do.
Alston smiled a rather wry smile and said that this question of the Hejaz was one of the battles which had to be fought out in the Peace Conference. Lawrence had promised, and the British government had ratified the promise, that the Arabian peoples would have their independence as the price of their support against Turkey and Germany; but unfortunately there was a great deal of oil in Mesopotamia, and a pipeline was proposed to run through Syria; also the British government had promised a lot of Arab territory to the French — it was one of those “secret treaties.” The French were now in possession of the land and it wasn't by any means sure that they could be got out without another war. Moreover, there was another Arab chieftain, Ibn Saud, who had driven the Turks out of eastern Arabia — and what about his claims?
All of which went to show how very inadvisable it was for a youthful translator of the American Commission to meet figures out of the Arabian Nights and cause them to believe that they had assurances of things which they might or might not be going to get!