Somewhat off-handedly, Esmé asked Professor Quelch how long he had lived in Egypt.
‘Since the beginning of the War, dear mademoiselle. It was the War which brought me here, in fact. I was attached to British Intelligence. I dealt chiefly with the Turkish underground in Cairo.’ He dropped his voice to a throaty whisper, giving his remarks a mystery and significance which meant little to us.
‘Don’t you adore it?’ Dreamily, Esmé stared out at the bright leafy streets of the passing suburbs.
Professor Quelch’s smile was forgiving. ‘Egypt may be a country that one is predisposed to adore, mademoiselle, but adoration, in the face of the facts, changes very soon to reaction, even to detestation, for there is much in Egypt that evokes material, and not merely theoretical, detestation! You have arrived here in the winter when the climate is at its best. Spring, summer and autumn, however, are an endless trial! They are detestable. The insects are detestable the whole year through, and lethal in the hot weather. What’s more Cairo, in the spring, is infested by even more detestable dust-raising winds. A year, and you will detest all you now find attractive.’
‘You are a cynic, m’sieu!’ laughed my child.
‘Far from it, mademoiselle. When one is not plagued by the weather and the wild-life, one has the common Cairene to deal with. I refer not to the native of the countryside, nor to the better-class Egyptian - many of these, of either kind, are worthy and decent people, with many virtues; but what visitor ever makes their acquaintance? No, I mean the Cairo native of the lower class. Of him, mademoiselle, there is little good to be said. He is a noisy, rude, excitable pestilence. The cosmopolitan conditions of Cairo life, combined with the natural tolerance and justice of the regime he has enjoyed for so long, have not tended to improve him. It is safe to say that the average European (we must except the English, whose business it is to like the native) abhors him. And he returns the sentiment in most cases. I will grant you he is at his most trying in the more European parts of the city. To the east and to the south of Cairo (his own haunts) it must be granted he is usually more dignified, quieter, polite and helpful. But the foreign atmosphere seems to throw him off balance. Egypt is not in itself a white man’s country and so conditions for white men are abnormal and artificial.’
‘But ther sights!’ said Mrs Cornelius attempting to lighten the proceedings. ‘Yer gotta grant the sights, prof!’
He accepted this. ‘Perhaps. In my view the scenery and the elements, if one may so call them, of the country are also artificial. The Delta is a large market-garden, intersected by canals. Upper Egypt is a market-garden on either side of the Nile. The rest is the rock and sand of the desert. And the features of the country are not, I find, in themselves attractive. When you have seen a village, a village mosque, a grove of palms, the desert hills, processions of men on camels, and a few other such things, you have seen about all there is to see, and everything becomes very much the same. Summa: it would seem that Egypt is, save for her history and her art, a distinctly uninteresting and even detestable country.’
‘Then why do so many people visit Egypt?’ Esmé’s question was almost innocent.
Professor Quelch had a ready answer for her. ‘White men come to Egypt for their work. They are naturally disposed to make the best of where they work. They are not going to say there is nothing in Egypt for them, so they say the scenery is marvellous. And others believe them. But, believe me, mademoiselle, Egypt is an entirely artificial land. Europe can be exquisite. England is sacred to those who know her. Compared to Europe Egypt has nothing save the beauty that may be found in the disposition of hills and water and fields. What dreams can you find on an Egyptian hillside, or in an Egyptian cotton-field or in an Egyptian canal? You may find the fullest force of solitude, but it is objective, never subjective. You may admire it, but you cannot enter into it unless you choose to surrender yourself to it without condition.’
‘It looks orlright ter me,’ said Mrs Cornelius doubtfully. ‘That sunset larst night was a joy ter be’old.’
Professor Quelch nodded as if in agreement, then leaned forward to speak in an authoritative murmur. ‘The beauty of Egypt, Miss Cornish, depends upon illusion. The theatrical illusion of the fitting moment, the accident of disposition. You, of all people, surely understand the reasons how one can see beauty in anything that is wholly man-made. You must see what beauty you can in Egypt and be thankful for it. My father, the Reverend Quelch of Sevenoaks, although he never visited Egypt, wrote an excellent book on Islamic architecture in which he pointed out the flaws and fallacies of such buildings, showing how the infirmities of the Moorish arch, for instance, reflect the moral sand, as it were, on which Islam itself is built.’
Esmé and Mrs Cornelius were growing visibly bored with Quelch’s idiosyncratic judgements. We had as yet seen nothing to support his arguments, but one doubtless had to live in Egypt a number of years before one understood him. He was, he said, an author himself. He had written on the subject of Egypt and been published in England. I asked him for titles. He was modest. He said he used a pseudonym. He had also been published by several Cairo firms and felt he had contributed substantially to the subject of aesthetics. Mrs Cornelius, challenged by this one gesture of discretion, insisted that he tell her under which name he published. Eventually, his entire angular face growing a deep and alarming red, he admitted that his best-known nom-de-plume was ‘René France’. He admitted his feeling that such a name gave authority to pronouncements which ‘Quelch’ did not. We approved his choice and told him that we would look out for his books the moment we arrived in Cairo. At this, he said he would be glad to help us obtain copies. He was sure he could get any title we wanted at a substantial trade discount.
Esmé remarked in French that the professor was clearly no romantic. He answered with a shrug.
‘I assure you, mademoiselle, that you will find the beauty of Egypt brille par son absence. Primarily it is the invention of the last century’s more sensational painters, exploiting our European greed for the exotic.’
These were sentiments unacceptable to almost any woman and to the majority of men. We had come to Egypt to film the exotic and to make an art of it. We did not wish to hear Professor Quelch’s cynical assessment of a country he admittedly knew very well. I did my best to change the subject. Even at that age I understood the plurality of human nature and how so many apparently conflicting views can exist quite cheerfully in one individual. Thus it is unjust to make immediate judgements upon one’s fellows. I am uneasy with the way youngsters these days so readily condemn or praise people they have never met, as if they were their own family. I have learned to bide my time. I judge people not by their opinions or how they present themselves, but by their actions. Finally, the only truth is in action, when they understand how their actions have effect. I judge by how they work to understand and control their actions, how careful they are not to do major harm to others. If all they have learned in life is how to justify those actions, no matter how subtly, then I grow quickly irritated with their company. The world is a dull enough place, these days, without having to listen to an old fraud inventing the reasons he was morally obliged to steal some other old fraud’s chickens. Circulus in probando as one of the Quelches would say. Iz doz mikh? Ikh farshtey. Ikh red nit keyn ‘philosophiespielen’.
‘What well-ordered streets Alexandria has.’ I nodded towards the suburbs.
‘As artificial as the rest of Egypt,’ Quelch maintained relentlessly and waved with contempt towards the vivid David Roberts postcards which Esmé had purchased at the hotel and which she now presented as proof against his argument. ‘Exactly what I have said. Those colours were never so vivid, those ruins never so artfully re-arranged. Roberts was out here for a year. Before he came he had discovered that a career could be made from a special subject. Thus he lived for the rest of his life on sketches he had made in his youth. Even at the time those sketches were exaggerated, fanciful. If that is the Egypt you want, p’tite
ma’mselle, no doubt your rose-coloured glasses will provide it. But do not be disappointed if the grandeur of Roberts’s fantasy is not quite matched by the squalor of the actuality.’
‘But that is only Cairo,’ I argued. ‘Further up-river it is less spoiled, perhaps?’
‘Less spoiled? Is an old harlot less spoiled because she services a handful fewer soldiers? Egypt, Herr Peters, has been spoiled by a succession of conquerors; by Bedouin savages, by Greeks, Romans and Jews, by Christians, pagan Arabs, Moslems, Turks, Italians, Frenchmen. And now the English, with their nostalgia for anything faded and valueless, are here to offer romantic overtures to the crone! Every passing footsoldier in history has left his urine and his initials somewhere on some proud Egyptian monument. Foreign dams have poisoned the Nile and infected the fellaheen, who can no longer work and so smoke hashish to help them forget their miseries. As in China, the British managed, in a matter of decades, to destroy Egypt’s last important resource: her hardy, cheerful working people. Now she must survive only because she provides a quick route to India for our Empire’s peace-keeper, good old Tommy Atkins.’
Mrs Cornelius chuckled. ‘Yore soundin’ more like a bloody bolshevik orl ther time, prof!’
‘My views are indeed somewhat radical,’ he agreed. ‘But I prefer to think of them as independently arrived at. I am not, I think, spouting mimicry, madam.’
‘Oh, yore orl right!’ she said, and held out her glass to Joseph for another cocktail. ‘I must say I’m glad ter be orf that effin’ boat. Know any songs, perfessor? Ower than ther Red Flag, that is?’
Normally this would have served to have broken any ice, changed the topic and got us all into a more relaxed mood, but Professor Quelch was resistant to my old friend’s social powers. He drew back in his seat and pursed those large thin lips under the promontory of his nose so that he began to resemble, in profile, one of the stranger birds said to wade in the up-river reeds.
Mrs Cornelius did not follow this line. For some reason she liked Quelch and wanted to see the best in him. She leaned forward and patted his knee. ‘Didn’t mean ter get up yer nostrils, prof. Go on wiv wot yer wos sayin’, abart the Imperialists an’ that.’
He responded with a small smile, his cheeks softening and sagging. ‘I am not attacking Imperialism, madam. Merely describing its realities. An Empire is not maintained by kind words and a fatherly manner, as the Boy’s Own Paper insists. It is maintained by force. Sometimes by terror. Usually only by the hint of terror. It’s rather like most marriages, in that respect.’
So much bitterness did he express in this last remark that Mrs Cornelius became instantly curious. Even Esmé looked up from her toys. But Mrs Cornelius knew enough not to pursue the matter immediately. I watched with fascination as she charmed and calmed him. With a mixture of flattery, wit and gesture, she brought the leathery skin to a sort of glossy glow, the nearest it had been in many years to the bloom of youth. Within half-an-hour he was trying to recall the words of It Reely Woz a Wery Pretty Garden. I was full of loving admiration at my friend’s ability to discover the best in people. Soon he began to speak with some lyricism about his childhood in Kent, his envy of his brothers, who lived so often in a world of their own, his loneliness at home, his enjoyment of school. He had been sent to some famous establishment on the coast not far from where he was born and from there had gone to Cambridge where, in the family tradition, he had read Classics. ‘I am an archaeologist by vocation,’ he told us with some pride, ‘not, as it were, by degree.’ Divinity, he said, had never attracted him.
Mrs Cornelius, asking him if he knew London, saw him pause and begin to fade. Some harsh memory, some unwanted recollection. Quickly, she brought him back to the sunshine again, to ask him what he thought of China and India, where he had gone shortly after leaving England for the last time. His dismissive answers were brief and witty. He had enjoyed his time with the bank in Macao, he said. The Portuguese were very easy to work with. He had been lucky, sharing quarters with a cultured Lisbonite enduring a spell in the family business before returning to the Portuguese capital and a desk he would never use. ‘Manuel is a celebrated poet now. But like so many people these days he involved himself in politics. A dangerous game in the modern world. Where politics was once a worthwhile occupation for gentlemen, even in England the professional politician now holds sway. It’s the death of democracy, of disinterested representation. Their only alternative is mob rule. One day soon London will be like Alexandria. And serve her right.’
Again that wave of wounded outrage bandaged by dismissive cynicism.
‘Are you sure you won’t ‘ave a drink, love,’ said Mrs Cornelius. ‘Maybe just a lemonade?’
Like an old, abandoned cat gradually being reminded of the pleasures of the fireside, of regular meals and a loving hand upon his fur, he allowed himself to be coaxed. Even I, watching this performance, felt bathed by the same warmth, embraced by the same intensity of interest emanating from Mrs Cornelius. She was an Earth goddess. She was Isis.
‘I began life as something of a Graecophile.’ The lemonade in his thin fist, Quelch folded himself like a stick-insect joint by joint back into his seat. ‘But Athens has become impossible since the War.’
‘It reelly ‘as, ‘asn’t it?’ Mrs Cornelius convinced us all that she had known Athens since the beginning of Time. She had visited the city once, I believe, with her Persian playboy.
‘And after all that terrible business around Lawrence. The scandal and so on. Well, it was hushed up, of course, but that didn’t stop people here talking. I tried to get a publisher interested. There are several who do my little pamphlets, and I wrote to Seeker in London, but apparently these days he is only interested in elegant fictions. They’re what pay, I suppose. Ecstatic texts by followers of Goethe and Freud. You know the sort of thing.’
‘Awful,’ she agreed.
Esmé was watching Mrs Cornelius in a new way, almost like a tennis-player watching a fellow sportswoman’s serve. I remained filled with disappointment that these two wonderful women could not be friends. It was not as if they competed for the same man! Esmé had me. Mrs Cornelius had Wolf Seaman, who currently cast the occasional gloomy glare along the carriage’s sun-dappled luxury as our train left Alexandria behind to begin the journey across the fields, marshes and canals of the peninsula, where wild birds were startled by our loco’s arrogant bark and old men straightened up from ancient wooden ploughs to display fleshless arms and toothless grins. I sympathised with the wretches doomed to such an existence, when even the advent of the Cairo Express was more interesting than any other event in their lives. Yet the success of our cinema was based on such people, all over the world. At last the illiterate mass possessed a great art form of its own! It is no wonder that the most prolific cinema industries in the world are based in Egypt, Hong Kong and India. And it has become a means of controlling us. Now the peasant has no incentive to read at all. He finds the titles merely diverting. That is why the tycoons and their stooges make so much of violent action being the natural expression for film. It is no more the ‘natural’ function of film than it is of the novel. We have made an aesthetic theory from the realities of commercial necessity and political chicanery. Now the new directors in Hollywood can explain in the language of academia why the husband is knifed, the wife raped and the villain hunted down and killed during a car chase. I have asked the Cornelius girl if the opposite of ‘free speech’ is ‘imprisoned speech’ - or perhaps ‘imprisoning speech’. It is the kind of speech used to justify and maintain opinions no longer of relevant use or moral value in the world. We imprison ourselves by means of words far more frequently than we free ourselves. Vi heyst dos? Ikh red nit keyn ‘popsprecht’. Tsidiz doz der rikhtiker pshat? I watch these TV programmes. Every night I have to listen to the English explaining why they are superior to everyone else in the world. Turkish television is not, I would guess, so different now.
I asked Esmé to show me her postcards, the little treasures sh
e had bought for a few piastres from the various sellers of antiques manufactured in Pharaonic Birmingham and the Eleventh Dynasty’s factories along the Upper Ruhr. She had a little brass ibex, the bust of some nameless queen, a black cat of lacquered stone. She handled them with the delicacy and pleasure of some Egyptologist coming at last upon the treasures of Rameses Il and for her they clearly had at least the same value. Esmé’s simple enjoyment and Mrs Cornelius’s enthusiasm were bringing me a happiness I had not experienced for some time. I began to feel that America had restricted me, that I had forgotten the attractions and advantages of Europe and, now, the Middle East. Russia became a torture-chamber and a graveyard. The Comintern butchers struggled amongst themselves for Lenin’s mantle and spilled still more blood in the process. But at least there were parts of Europe, such as Italy, which were reviving, finding new idealism and hope, new strength to continue the work so many in those days knew to be our destiny. I do not say that I condone every one of Mussolini’s actions, but he was setting an example to the rest of Europe in the hope they might decide to follow. Other nations were sinking into fashionable despair, reading self-indulgent novels and watching introspective plays, writing music no one wished to hear, poetry no one could understand, painting pictures reflecting only the hideous turmoil of their uncertain souls. For me this lassitude was generally lacking in America. But that she lacked one thing did not mean she automatically possessed another. I had found vitality there, and optimism and political courage, I had found wealth and good friends, but I had forgotten what it was to live in a land where every tree and hill bore some reference to mankind’s urge to tame its own nature and the world around it. Then America was truly called the New World and it was a new coin struck in the currency of Hope. How valuable that currency might have become! Of course it did not happen. The coin of American idealism is worthless now. America became what I most feared. Washington is no longer the capital of the United States. New York rules the entire continent. Michob Ader need no longer fear immortality. Now he has the most powerful nation on Earth to comfort him. There Christ is conquered, yet elsewhere Christ is merely sleeping. He is worshipped and remembered by the Bolshevik’s enslaved millions. Christ is simply awaiting the moment of His return. They say the Second Coming is a thousand years late, but we shall now see it in the year 2000. Then I shall be a hundred years old or perhaps dead. How is it one Power pretends to testify for God and yet is increasingly brought under the rule of Satan, while the other claims it has abolished God, yet cannot destroy the love and the need of its people for Christ? Which, I ask any of you, is the strongest Church, the true Church? Could it, after all, be the first and oldest Church, the Byzantine Church, ever closest to the Source, to the origins of our history? I will let the Baptists and the Presbyterians explain how their Church has become a tool of Carthage while the Church of Greece remains the last great challenger to Satan’s persuasions. In 1926, of course, I had not returned to the Church and remained open-minded on this subject as well as on many others. My only certainty was in my own vocation, my need to help ease the suffering of all mankind by whatever means were available to me, whether through the miracle of engineering or through the exercise of my artistic gifts. Mrs Cornelius certainly recognised this in me, just as she recognised in Malcolm Quelch a cruelly tormented human being whose love of the world had been associated, perhaps, with the love of a certain woman. Some London beauty who had rejected him, or ruined him? This is what women can frequently see in a man that another man cannot. I was to be grateful, always, for the insights of women. If they made my life both harder and easier they always enriched it. I cannot always understand the arguments of the feminists. Like them, I love women. I admire women. I believe women have many virtues which men do not, many qualities which men cannot ever possess. On innumerable occasions they have been both a comfort and an inspiration to me. Sometimes, it is true, a woman can be a burden or a nuisance, perhaps a little bit of a strain, when she wants attention at a time you cannot give it. Does that make me an enslaver of women? A monster? I hope not. I was raised to respect and honour women. Yet this somehow makes me worse than some hippy journalist who looks like an extra from The Squaw Man carrying around on his arm some ‘chick’ who looks herself like the original squaw! This is progress? I saw a great deal of similar progress in Cairo.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 23