By indulging in such disputes, He said, we always gave Him additional strength. Where He was not recognised was where He was strongest. He spoke in a hollow, weary voice and each breath was a torment to Him. Once I saw the entire Triumvirate: the Goat, the Cow and the Ram. I saw them in the shadows of that terrible temple. Rosie! Rosie! There is metal in my womb. He reached out with that cold claw and seized my heart.
I met a brother in Odessa. He was a good Jew; he is probably dead now. The wideboys sprawl in the alleys; the little birds sing untruthful songs. The synagogues are burning. And in Orange County the ashes of executed Japanese are stirred by the feet of tourists to rise on a wind that blows from Nagasaki where the steel hulls of great battleships are tormented into the ikons of our victories, rising and falling as the water turns to steam around them and their crews die unquiet deaths. And the air is like mother-of-pearl and your skin turns scarlet, stretches upon volatile flesh, then bursts and your blood blends with the sun and you and your city die in a single violent convulsion. But this was not the fault of America. It was the fault of those who, without understanding its institutions, would take advantage of our Enlightenment, our old Law, and grab at the trappings, the obvious wealth which it had gained for us. The Goat whispered to them in Odessa. It whispered to them in Memphis and Carthage and in Los Angeles. They bled me. They drank my blood. I follow no flags. I am myself. I waited for him to touch me but he never touched me. He went with me to the tram-stop. I never saw him again. Fanatic man denies the universe and apes a cruelty which is no cruelty at all but sublime equilibrium. The cities breathe and are themselves. Identity and the city fuse together. They will fly. They will fly, my cities. I am a child of my century and as old as my century. I am one of the great inventors of my age. I am the voice and the conscience of civilised Europe. My achievements are a matter of history. A record.
Thoth, disguised as a bird, was our guide through that House of Death; and Nekhbet, the vulture-crowned, was our protectress. At night we waited in the sands by the oasis and there were some who argued that the palms themselves were weeping or that the water whispered alien names, yet I saw only the face of God, benign but unapproving, looking down on me through the stars. Those stars were like little pricks of truth, like so many epitomous points which I could gather in my hands and bring together as a blinding, illuminating whole, truth in singularity, truth in simplification. My truth. My reconciliation. And my death. I was never afraid of that. Only they would not let me die with dignity. A hawk which flings himself on sudden currents and, embracing random Nature, hurtles into mystery, cares not what crushed his body while his spirit’s free. And I was to be called the Hawk. I was to be loved and called the Hawk. By the one they’d named Al War’d.
Kull al-medina, al-medina kulliha. Fi ‘l-medina di buyut ketire: Al-lela di hiya tawila tawila. Safirt min America ila hena we-ma’i sahibi we-sayisna. Bashayrt? Maybe. Suddenly I knew the release and the escape of sea travel. I was leaving all our anxieties behind me, I became my old ebullient self in no time!
‘Are we not halves of one dissevered world, whom this strange chance unites once more?’ Captain Quelch asked me as we sat together in his comfortable cabin celebrating, at his suggestion, the fact that, with Panama behind us and Haiti dead ahead, we had left American waters once and for all. He was given to such fanciful language when relaxed, and admitted that it was a habit of all his family to quote poetry. The others tended to prefer Greek, Latin or old French. He was really the only modern. He got on with me, he confided, because I preferred the present to the past and, like himself, seemed inclined towards contemporary or near-contemporary artists. I was quick to protest that I was no Futurist or faddist of any kind. I enjoyed the good, solid poetry and tales to be found in the higher type of English magazine. He agreed with enthusiasm and added, a little mysteriously, that Browning was actually his limit in that direction. ‘Although, to tell the truth, Peters, the lines seemed rather apt, you know. It does appear to me that we have a certain bond. As if we’d been pals in former lives, sort of thing. Actually, I’m a great believer in reincarnation.’
I was not surprised by this. Frequently I have found the most practical of men - soldiers, sailors, engineers - to reveal a spiritual side not out of place in a cleric and which is often noticeably absent in a man of the cloth. Captain Quelch’s education had been impeccable - Haileybury, Cambridge and, for a term or two before he decided on the Navy as his career, Doncaster - ‘Where I developed a greater interest in the racing than the ritual’ - and he was fully conversant with the classics. But his thirst for knowledge had not stopped at Cambridge. His library, testifying to a broad range of interests, showed that he lacked the prudish streak common to most Englishmen. Baudelaire and Laforgue kept company with Wilde, Swinburne and Dowson, while Meredith and Hardy rubbed shoulders with Balzac and Zola. I was especially pleased to find a small volume of Wheldrake’s Posthumous Poems which Captain Quelch said, in some delight, was amongst his favourites. He felt that, while Wilde and Wheldrake had both suffered terribly for their sexuality, only Wilde had ever fully been reinstated in the public taste. I could not agree with him more. Homophobia, I assured him, was never one of my vices.
As the lair of a notorious rum-runner, the captain’s cabin was something of a disappointment to anyone expecting a scene from The Iron Pirate or some other stirring tale of seaborne skulduggery by Pemberton or Mayne Reid. Instead, the captain’s quarters had almost a fussy air to them, and might have belonged to some college-bound don. Everything was very tidily stowed. There were Liberty-print curtains at the portholes, a deep, adjustable armchair in some dark brocade, its wood and brass polished to perfection, fixed lamps in the modern Italian style, mahogany and brass shelves or cabinets containing the mementos of six continents, all carefully fitted so that only the heaviest seas might dislodge them. I was especially impressed by his neatly-secured collection of Meissen harlequinade characters and Tang figurines, all of the highest quality and condition.
‘I got the Chinese stuff mostly from the same old merchant. He brought them with him to Shanghai after his province was snaffled up by some local saviour.’ Quelch ran his long fingers over the mane of an ethereal horse. ‘It was in May, almost three years ago, just before I decided to try my luck in America. Since he was willing to finance the trip I agreed with more than ordinary alacrity. But there was a nasty run-in with some pirates off Taiwan and the poor old devil had a heart-attack. Since he wasn’t on board officially we slipped him into the drink while I read a few words over him, thanked him for his help, and set course for the Philippines. I’ll tell you, old boy, China’s being eaten alive by those bandits. Another few years, what with them and the Japs, there’ll be nothing left of her. Life’s cheap enough almost anywhere these days but it was never cheaper than in China. The whole country’s up for grabs and if the Yanks don’t take it, the Japs surely will. That year in South America was like a rest-cure.’ While, like many well-informed people, he foresaw a war between America and Japan over their imperial ambitions in the Far East, he did not foresee the gigantic scale of the conflict. Few of us did. Events in Europe were beginning to change the fundamental ways in which we viewed world politics, but in those days we were still highly optimistic, in spite of the continuing volatility of the Balkan states and France’s punitive attitude towards the exhausted and beaten Germans (an attitude which was, of course, to lead to a war almost everyone thought could have been avoided). Europe rejected America’s last great effort at peace-making and, disheartened, Uncle Sam gave herself up to pleasure-seeking, with a determination worthy of the Byzantine court.
Calm seas and warm weather meant that we spent a great deal of our days on deck. For November it was unusually mild, even when to Mr Mix’s considerable relief Port-au-Prince was behind us and we moved out into the wider waters of the Atlantic. Captain Quelch planned to head either for Tenerife or Casablanca, depending on our available time and the duration of our supplies. He called the Mediter
ranean his ‘old stamping-ground’ and was, he said, looking forward to getting back. He was feeling nostalgic. At least he had a better ship now than the last one.
‘We had to scuttle the Nancy Dee off the coast of Albania and wade ashore with whatever we could salvage,’ he said. ‘But we lost the guns. Not that they were worth much. Even Arabs won’t buy Martinis these days. Everyone wants Lee-Enfields and Winchesters.’ He sat back and sucked a reminiscent pipe. ‘Lost a wonderful wardrobe, too.’
I was content to glance through his Wheldrake while the old sea-wolf reflected no doubt on the nature of a present where the sophisticated repeating rifle was available to even the most barbaric peoples. He had told me that, long after the Armistice, it had been possible to buy a good German weapon, with a hundred rounds of ammunition, for as little as a hundred piastres, Egyptian. ‘They bring them in from the Western Desert and sell them in Palestine, mostly. But the fellahin get quite a few, too. British weapons are worth a lot more. A Lee-Enfield will set you back a fiver. And they’re still out there, hardly rusting, in the Cyrenaican and Libyan battlefields. I suppose we should be thankful they use the majority of the guns in blood feuds amongst themselves. Heaven help us if they decide to go political like those ridiculous johnnies in Cairo.’ This in reference to a newspaper report about the demands of the Egyptian Wafd ‘nationalists’. ‘Arms make a profitable cargo, by and large, but I’d never sell someone a gun that was going to kill a white man.’
Esmé was not proving a good sailor. Now I recalled her discomfort on the boat from Constantinople. Although the Hope Dempsey was a considerable improvement on that leaking pleasure-launch we took to Italy, she confessed she had not been entirely well on the Icosium. In fact, she revealed, she had met Mr Meulemkaumpf when taken faint on her first day out. The poor child rarely appeared for meals and ingested what little sustenance she could hold down in the privacy of her cabin. For propriety’s sake we had separate accommodation, although there was a connecting door between our rooms. Very little unseemly was going on, however, given my little one’s condition! I tended to spend rather more of my evenings with Quelch, Esmé being content to take the laudanum our captain supplied from his own medicine chest, so spending most of her hours in uncomplicated and relatively comfortable slumber. Das Mädchen sieht schön aus. Er hat ihr den zucker gern gegeben. Mir ist kalt. Was heisst das? Ich bin nicht ein feygeleh!
Mrs Cornelius spent most evenings in a saloon a good deal better furnished than the one we had known on the old Rio Cruz. We had sailed on her together from Odessa some five years earlier. Mrs Cornelius enjoyed the company of simple-hearted men and found the ship’s crew as compatible as the film crew, who generally spent their free time singing songs or playing cards, both of which were favourite pastimes of my life-loving friend. Wolf Seaman, after a night or two in which he awkwardly tried to be ‘one of the boys’, took Ahab-like to walking the decks alone or in the company of Mr Mix who, though accepted in the saloon, had said something about not being sure he wanted to be a cheap source of entertainment for others. This chip on his shoulders denied him the chance to improve himself, but I had long since ceased attempting to reason with him.
With women on board, there was always the danger of racial tension flaring. Meanwhile my darling had a devotee. Grace, our make-up artist, was full of sympathy for Esmé. He made it his business, whenever I took my break with Captain Quelch, to ensure she was provided for and looked after. Grace could not do enough for his ‘little treasure’. These effeminate homosexuals balance their tendency towards small-mindedness by being marvellous carers for the sick. They are at once the best and worst exemplars of their kind. It has often seemed unjust to me that the honourable love of the Greeks, of man for man, has to be tainted by this overly-visible image of degeneracy. It is not something, however, that I have ever discussed in detail and never had the opportunity of raising with intimates such as Kolya or Maurice Quelch. I’tarim Nafsak, as the Moroccans say. It is the most important thing. Maalesh. Mush Mush’kil’ah. One learns patience, a little self-knowledge, if nothing else in the Arab’s world. But patience has always been one of my virtues. It was this quality which enabled me to enjoy our voyage, even when the seas grew very rough, and make the most of the company of a man whom I grew increasingly to admire and, indeed, to love. His knowledge of music, literature, history and science was far superior to my own. He passed on to me the benefits of the finest education in the world. As a Russian refugee whose own learning had been cut short by the follies of October 1917, it might be said I was privileged to enjoy, on an intimate basis, exposure to the English public-school system, to Cambridge and to the Royal Navy.
Soon it was Mrs Cornelius’s turn to resort to Captain Quelch’s medicine chest. One by one the passengers fell to the terrors and miseries of a heaving Atlantic. One by one they accepted the cures of the generous old salt’s Red Cross cabinet. It supplied them with a variety of soporifics. Wolf Seaman found the morphine to his taste while Mr Mix, who, like myself and Quelch, was not hugely affected, chose to avail himself of what in those days was called ‘Tunisian tobacco’. This was actually Mexican in origin. He shared a taste for it with Harold Kramp, the ship’s mutton-chopped, half-caste Chief Engineer, son of a Dutch mechanic and a Javanese girl, with whom he had formed a friendship. They would talk together for hours while passing the brass pipe back and forth. With the exception of myself, Captain Quelch and the somewhat abstemious O.K. Radonic, it would be fair to say that almost the entire company and crew crossed the raging Atlantic in a state of complete and cheerful euphoria. Captain Quelch and I preferred to keep our minds sharp and happily his ‘refuelling stop’ in Haiti had provided us with a good supply of best-quality Colombian ‘Frost’. I have to thank that god-given miracle-drug for bringing us so close together and making the trip, for me at least, both an education and a pleasure. Such male friendship is of the highest quality, as the great Oxford philosopher Lewis tells us, though he himself, of course, was chiefly interested in the prepubescent, at least as subjects of literature and photography. We are not discussing here those European grotesques who inhabit the squalid bars and bals exotiques of Tangier and Tripoli, or who seek out the wretched freaks for which Beirut is famous, but the best type of homme de bien: physically and mentally healthy, of whom Röhm’s poor, murdered young men were so frequently the exemplars. Another crime laid at the door of the German leader, another accusation which led him, in his final years, to take the disastrous steps towards defeat which, had he been supported rather than attacked at such crucial times, might never have occurred. I am no apologist for Hitler’s excesses, or Röhm’s either, but most will agree there is a balance which has been lost. Those were not holiday camps, I am the first to admit. Nobody claimed that they were. Sacrifices had to be made or, as Goering said to me in a moment of intimacy, ‘wir werden keine die Zukunfte haben.’ What was Hitler expected to do when faced with such a fait accompli? Betray his own people? It was a terrible dilemma. No puedo esperar. Could any of us have handled it better? This is the stuff of noble tragedy, of Wagner and May. Alle Knaben. Alle seine Blumen. Ayn solcher mann! Und alle guten Knaben. Viele guten Knaben. Vor longer Zeit. Sie hat sich verändert. Captain Quelch would have understood this better than anyone. Sadly, by 1933 he was a ruined victim of French colonial politics and, I suspect, Spanish perfidy. He had, if anything, an excess of courage. He trusted his fellow-creatures far too much. That was why the older man so quickly became my mentor, a veritable Charon, kindly and full of practical wisdom, to ferry me across an especially agitated Styx, which after more than a week of gales, in which our little steamer behaved with wonderful precision and steadiness, made even me somewhat squeamish. All I needed to restore myself was a glass or two of Captain Quelch’s special laudanum, after which I was happy to join Esmé in the land of dreams whose beauty and strangeness was hardly a match for the tremendous realities of Nature which, night and day, continued to hurl our steamer about as casually as a mayfly in a mill-race
. But even those forces could not distract her by more than a few miles from her chosen course. With all his other qualities, Captain Quelch was also an instinctive navigator who frequently took over the wheel himself. It was this, I think, which made his laskars so loyal to him. Together with Chief Kramp (to whom our Hindoo sailors referred sardonically as ‘Sri Harold’, in reference to his visionary leanings) they had sailed with him from the South China Seas, through the Malay Straits, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Atlantic and now they sailed with him into the Mediterranean. Christopher Columbus or Francis Drake never had a better nor more loyal crew than was commanded by that unsung hero of a hundred daredevil ventures, truly a reborn Elizabethan navigator, his blood that blood of the gentlemen of England who sailed to defeat the mighty Spanish galleons which would make Romans of them once more. That mixed bunch of heathen Chinese, Malays, Dacoits, Muslim and Hindoos from the sinkholes of the Far Orient would have followed no one else save Satan Himself. They and ‘Sri’ Harold would have sailed with Captain Maurice Quelch across the fiery oceans of Hades if that was where he took a cargo.
A glass of brandy in one hand, a book of verse in the other, he would stride sure-footed up to his bridge and there drawl out his orders. Only his Second Officer, a feeble, pasty-faced individual by the name of Samuel Bolsover, seemed in any way critical of him. But Bolsover was of that typical British petite bourgeoisie which agonises so frequently about status and righteousness, and spends so much of its time squatting on a toilet straining for a bowel movement, that it has all but forgotten the unavoidable actualities of life. For him any mild sensation was like a spiritual experience. Also, as I pointed out to him one morning when only the two of us were left at breakfast, if he set so much store by the mores of the Boy’s Own Paper, he should have remained in the Merchant Navy. This remark was perhaps a little unfair, since I happened to know he was a morphine addict wanted for the murder of a whore in Maracaibo. (Yet all the more reason, I should have thought, to keep his moralistic BOP hypocrisies to himself.) His reply, given at length, amounted to telling me that my opinion was worthless since I was foreign.