In the large, closed limousine we steered through a chaos of trucks and beasts of burden into the old town. Surrounded by the awnings of shops and stalls, busy with donkeys, women and boys, with squatting oldsters, wobbling handcarts, impossible burdens, squalid bargains, Bab Marrakech Square sold the discarded junk of three continents. Tin cans, broken toys, yellowed magazines were offered by ill-fed urchins who threw back the frayed pieces of oil-cloth or old linoleum with which they protected their pathetic wares from the elements and sang their virtues in shrill voices while elsewhere a variety of grubby entertainers performed their frequently puzzling and sometimes grotesque tricks like toddlers in a school yard.
All the news in Casablanca was to be heard here, said Captain Hourel. He sent his Berber sergeant to investigate.
There was nothing to do but take a table outside the cafe and watch the snake-charmers and tumblers go through their rather limited paces while Captain Quelch quietly thanked God for the invention of the printed book and the moving picture. Even these performers had a bedraggled hopeless mood not designed to improve the spirits of their audience. Captain Hourel drove away a group of boys who approached us pointing at their bottoms and their open mouths. ‘They are hungry and they have dysentery,’ Captain Quelch observed with an amiable wave to the departing troupe, whose only response was to scowl and spit. On the far side of the square, under sodden awnings, in heavy woollen djellabahs which even from here stank like wet sheep, men of all ages sat sipping mint tea and discussed the gossip of the day or whatever international news affected the fate of this wretched monument to unchecked commercial greed. ‘It is where the detritus of Africa, Europe and the Middle East finally discovers it can flow no further and it silts up here in a great heap. The population grows greater every week, it’s hard to believe that this was not much more than a village whose people were massacring Frenchmen in this very square less than twenty years ago. After that, of course, Paris had to take control of the damned country. And they’re thanking us now.’
‘All but a few ingrates.’ Presumably Captain Quelch referred to Abd el-Krim.
The sergeant returned with the news that a tall negro had been seen with a party of nomad tinkers buying provisions in the souk only a short distance from the west side of the Bab Marrakech itself. He had visited the shop but the owner had been able to tell him very little. He thought the tinkers had a camp out near the new airfield. ‘Well, let’s get off to the bloody airfield!’ demanded Quelch as if determined to suffer every possible discomfort and inconvenience on this, in his view, pointless quest. ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum!, etc.’ And so there was nothing for it but to drive out through the sleeting rain on the freshly-laid wide black road, past a succession of modern concrete and steel factories, to a broad, glittering strip on a horizon as flat as Kansas with one very small white control- and customs-station and a spanking new single-engined mail-carrier, a Villiers biplane of the latest type, bearing the blazons of both France and her Postal Service, on the far side of the field. Near some ruined dirt-walled farm-buildings, cleared in the progress of modernisation, we came upon the tinkers’ abandoned camp. They had left the usual collection of litter and dung, but there was no sign of Mr Mix ever being with them. ‘We shall have to get a Berber tracker,’ Captain Hourel decided. ‘If those people have your friend or have harmed him, don’t worry - we shall soon know.’ But it was clear to me, at least, that he thought the expedition had been a waste of time. He kicked suspiciously at a black and red paper sugar-sack bearing the cheerful features of a French provincial pierrot, and revealed the half-burned corpse of a day-old child. ‘A girl.’ He shook his head. ‘But we’ll have to get after them for that.’
He sighed and spoke in Arabic to his sergeant. The man saluted and took his rifle to stand guard. We drove back to Casablanca in moody silence. ‘We are overworked,’ said Captain Hourel out of the blue. ‘Ever since Lyautey went.’
Captain Hourel assured us that he would send a telegram to the Hope Dempsey just as soon as he knew what had become of Mr Mix. We had to be content with this. We returned to the ship to tell Mrs Cornelius that the entire Casablanca garrison had been put to work to locate our friend and the tinkers who might have captured him. We had also informed the American consul. Privately I wondered if Jacob Mix were fulfilling some strange ambition to journey to the heart of the Dark Continent in search of something he might recognise as his homeland. I could certainly understand this yearning for a place to call home. Scarcely an hour of my own life goes by when I do not remember Kiev and those happy years before War and Revolution robbed me of my past, my mother and my sister.
So furious was Mrs Cornelius at this unexpected but hardly tragic event - I, too, held Mr Mix in considerable affection, but did not fear for a man so evidently resourceful - that she turned almost scarlet and all but accused us both of having sold the negro for Arab silver. ‘ ‘E never said nuffink abart leavin’,’ she said. ‘I’d ‘a sensed it. I’ve orlways bin able ter sense fings like that.’
‘Well, madam.’ Captain Quelch was understandably sharp, having spent a great deal of his valuable time trying to track down our errant Mix. ‘It appears your darkie has been abducted by the gypsies. Either that or he has run off with them to join a circus. Or he has become a cannibal. Or they killed him, sold him or worshipped him as a devil. We shall know soon enough. Pastor est teu Dominos. Meanwhile you’ll forgive me if I return to the running of my ship. We have just discovered a serious theft - no doubt conducted during the hue and cry for Mister Jacob Mix. I would be particularly grateful, Colonel Peters, if you would join me this evening after supper.’
And with the curtest of salutes, he went back to his bridge.
Mrs Cornelius remained dissatisfied. She accused me of not trying hard enough to find the man. She reminded me that he had saved my life. Was this, she demanded, how I repaid him? I pointed out that everything had been done. I felt sure Mr Mix would find a means of rejoining us in Alexandria or possibly even Tangier, if he did not return or radio before we sailed. Personally, I still felt he would be back, perhaps shame-faced, perhaps somewhat hung-over, perhaps with an elaborate excuse, before we sailed. But I was to be proven wrong. When the Hope Dempsey upped anchor that evening to plough on through adumbrate air and gloomy breakers, Mr Mix was no longer of our company.
It was only when I joined Captain Quelch in his cabin that night that he broke the news which shattered me. One of our film projectors had been stolen, doubtless during the hue and cry for Mr Mix while we pursued him in the bazaar, but what was worse was that almost every can of film was gone - every adventure of Ace Peters, virtually the only surviving proof of my starring career in the cinema, had been taken! The thieves had stolen the only things they could find that looked valuable. ‘God knows what they’ll make of them.’ He had reported the theft to the police. They assured him that they would locate the culprits and seize the films and equipment on our behalf. They would telegraph as soon as they had news.
‘Don’t worry, old chap. They’ll turn up in the Bab Marrakech tomorrow and some copper’ll spot them.’ I was reassured by his hearty confidence.
Having settled the complaining Esmé down with her night-lantern and her laudanum and escaped Mrs Cornelius, who remained unreconciled to Mr Mix’s disappearance, I was exhausted. I, too, was sorry to lose such a loyal companion, but perhaps loss is more familiar to me than to others. Thus I have learned to bear loss mostly in silence, even to denying it entirely and driving it from my mind. I bore the loss of my movie plays with a stoicism Quelch himself might have envied.
We had both had enough of speculation. We agreed not to discuss Mr Mix’s fate or the fate of my films, until we had further intelligence. Instead I listened while Captain Quelch told of his adventures on the Gold Coast before the Great War which had eventually made him the owner of a white girl not more than thirteen. ‘She was German and had been bought and sold several times since her abduction, at about the age of seven, somewhere in t
he Congo. Her father had been in charge of a Belgian mining concern. Happily I spoke a little German and she seemed pathetically grateful for that. She was a lovely little thing and with a wealth of experience, as you can imagine. I was soon in two minds whether to keep her for myself or inform her relatives and claim whatever reward was going. It turned out there wasn’t one. Everybody she knew was dead so she was content to stay with me. I had the pleasure of her company for almost a year.’ He poured us some more cognac as I untwisted the paper containing our cocaine. ‘Easy come easy go, eh, Max? Bad luck, really, my deciding to sail for Java. She caught something pretty odd and incurable up-country while I was doing a river job near Puwarkarta. I had to leave her with some nuns in Bandung. I often wonder what became of her.’
We agreed that les femmes were a glorious weakness which, sensibly or not, both of us would always indulge. I had to admit that Esmé, though my joy and delight, sometimes seemed in certain moods more of a burden than a comfort. Yet what could I do? I had always been a slave to women. Captain Quelch recognised this side of me and shared his own romantic intimacies. He had that same Spartan nobility of temperament, the Greek’s demand for excellence, moderation and balance in all things, a tolerance for every road a man takes in quest of a spiritual and sensual education, his mind always curious and explorative, forever probing in fresh directions, which I remember in Kolya, especially during our Petersburg days. Like Kolya, perhaps, my new friend represented a Byzantine rather than a Roman ideal. ‘Dux femina facti!’ The remarkable old sea-dog was philosophical as he bent a nostril towards his sneg. ‘Mother warned me women would be my ruin. But I’ll always be an incurable romantic, old boy.’ Again I remarked how, in so many ways, Captain Quelch was my perfect soulmate.
* * * *
NINE
LITERACY IS OUR most valuable gift, the source of memory and enduring myth; the wellspring of all we now call civilised and the means by which we pool our commonwise. Communicating thus from Past to Present we improve our understanding of the world and our universe. Here in the Mediterranean (where a few years earlier I had been reborn) on December 18, 1925, barely a month before I began my second quarter-century, I came to understand the true value of literacy when I tried to imagine the emotions of the first man realising one day the potential of a written language!
Rising early, a little impatient with Esmé’s groans from the other side of a door she insisted on locking (‘in case you see me puking. I should hate that’), I begin to feel a certain pleasant excitement as I grasp the sparkling brass rails and ascend the companionway. Everyone has assembled on the boat deck. The sea is an uneasy blue and the clouds are turning to white and from white to wisps of vanishing mist while the black hull of the Hope Dempsey breaks up yellow spray. We are not yet in Paradise but we are passing at last through the gateway between Gibraltar to port and Morocco to starboard, with a great golden sun rising like a fortunate omen on our forward bow to release, it seems to me, an army of golden beings so brilliant as to be intolerable to the naked human eye, to drive the cold Atlantic back and lift up all our spirits so even the laskars wail what is clearly some native triumph as they go about their work. From his cabin, shaving, Captain Quelch stands up to chant a dirge, antique and monkish, in time to his open door’s creaking.
‘Ad conflingendum venietibus undique Paenis,
Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
Horrida contremuere sub altis etheris auris;
In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum
Omnibus humanis esset, terraque marique.’
That was a subject dear to my own heart, and singularly apt as we sailed not three miles from the ghost of old Carthage. Hindsight says Carthage’s ghost was grinning at my back even as we glimpsed the white and green terraces of the great port which, three thousand years earlier and before their pagan empire was crushed by vengeful Rome, the Phoenicians named Tingis. Now it seemed to me to symbolise the very best of the ancient world combined with the finest of the new. At this distance Tangier was the perfect image of the modern, civilised city. Now you will say Tangier was an illusion, but I would prefer to call what I saw a vision. That the reality would prove both sordid and terrifying I was not to know for some time. Just then I relaxed in the presence of a silvery perfection, a city framed in the foliage of cypresses, poplars and palms, her terraces occasionally broken by the golden dome of a mosque or the vivid blue of some caïd’s summer home, the dignified green of Royalty, and this all festooned with natural draperies of violet, scarlet and deep ultramarine, of vivid ferns and vines, shrubs, grasses and brilliant pines, all ranked above us on seven hills, a Roman’s dream of tranquillity, a Christian’s dream of heaven, the promise of a new world order.
As the province of France, England and Spain, Tangier could well have become one day the thing I first imagined. The Hope Dempsey steams through the glowing mist of the morning to drop anchor in the offing where the dirty brown and orange motor launches rush back and forth between the steamers and the wharf.
A pleasure ship disembarks her white froth of passengers into more of these boats (the only means of reaching the shore) while a boat which follows is loaded with nothing but cabin-trunks and suitcases, and is rapidly followed by a further wave of white cotton and peach lace as a party of German ladies, each with her pink-trimmed parasol and crocheted gloves, flies in on the foam to flirt for a week or two with the exotic. Through Captain Quelch’s glasses I watch other tourists disembark on the quay to entrain directly for Fez and Rabat while soldiers, primarily of the Spanish Foreign Legion, ensure their safety, though not, I imagined, their complete peace of mind. Nothing protects them from the hordes of little boys, the trinket-sellers, the carpet-merchants, the grinning purveyors of moist and mysterious sweets protected from the sun by a solid covering of black bugs I mistake at first for raisins, until they move.
‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.’ Captain Quelch joins me, taking the glasses to scan the port. ‘Still, it’s our last chance to restock our supplies.’ We have rather overindulged in le poudre during the last several nights.
‘I’ve ‘ad four ‘arf-pints at the Magpie an’ Stump, an’ two goes o’ rum jes ter keep up me sperits, me mince pies are waterin’ jes like a pump, and they’re red as a ferrit’s. ‘Cos why? ‘Tain’t the missis nor kids wot I’ve lost. But one wot I care-ful-lie doctored and fed, the nussin’ an’ watching’ ‘as turned art a frost, the Jeerusalem’s dead!’ Considerably more cheerful, Mrs Cornelius comes strolling along the deck, singing with sturdy professionalism the song she always uses to get herself on top, as she puts it, of her blue devils, and jerks a thumb towards the donkeys on the dock.
‘Albert Chevalier’s one of my favourites!’ Captain Quelch lifts his cap in salute. He is wearing an old-fashioned bow-cravat, a smart ‘bum-freezer’ white jacket and tight blue trousers. He is every inch a gentleman of the sea. ‘Funny without being vulgar, eh, dear lady?’ He fingers some slight cut on his jowl.
Mrs Cornelius is always unrelenting and will not be drawn. ‘Actcherly,’ she says in her best accents, ‘I’m more partial to Gus Elen meself.’
Up comes the Swede, disconcerted to find such a party already here, for he is usually the only one of us to exercise before breakfast, and turns a surly colour when he sees his paramour, the star of his movie play, staring eagerly towards the shore as if trying to catch a glimpse of a friend. He tries to turn, to go back, but Captain Quelch takes him by the arm. ‘Tell me, old boy, wouldn’t this do for Babylon?’
‘We are not doing Babylon, Captain Quelch. Nor are we doing Sodom, nor, indeed, Gomorrah. There are no records, I’m afraid, of Egyptian orgies.’
‘I thought one of Mr G’s wires specifically mentioned an orgy. And my brother says they couldn’t stop themselves, though it was religious, I gather.’ Captain Quelch has a habit of goading the Swede, whose lack of humour is notorious.
‘And the next wire completely contradicted that,’ says Seaman, shrugging free of the
captain’s hand. ‘I intend to make my original picture, my friend, come hell, high water or Samuel Goldfish! That will fulfil my contract. Then I shall return to Sweden.’
‘I can’t say I blame you, old boy. They’ll be missing you, I should think. Absens haeres non erit, don’t you know.’
To which the Swede replies, with unnecessary venom: ‘Magna est Veritas et praevalebit!’ But, refusing to expand, he wrenches his awkward limbs through our company, and descends.
‘ ‘E’s bin orf-colour fer days,’ says Mrs Cornelius by way of vague apology. ‘ ‘E ain’t wot y’d corl a natchral Vikin’.’ And she roars with her old good humour, though her manner still grants no special intimacy to me and I understand I am not entirely forgiven for my non-existent crime.
There comes a half-subdued shout or two from below, as if lovers quarrel, but it is only Esmé passing Wolf Seaman who, for some reason, has tried to hamper her, and here she comes up in ruddy disarray, to join in the viewing of ‘the white city of the seven hills’ as Pierre Loti called it in one of those pieces of erotic trash he wrote in later years in order to maintain his exotic lifestyle. (There indeed was a man thoroughly infected by the poison of what the British used to call ‘Arabitis’, who did more to distort and romanticise the Oriental East than Ned Buntline the American West. Yet posterity will doubtless prefer his lies to mine, for the myths of Saladin, El Cid or Buffalo Bill endure beyond any commonplace reality, while the beau monde, of course, changes only its clothes, never its character.)