Naturally enough, it was at this point that Professor Quelch and I, ascending from the lobby, stepped from the electric elevator to the soft carpet of our floor to be confronted by a Wolf Seaman who had clearly caught the sun and had hay fever. He was burning red. There were tears in his eyes. I suggested he should lie down. I would send someone to him. Perhaps he required a doctor. He spoke in incoherent, guttural Swedish. I could understand hardly a word. In his hand he held a crumpled buff form, obviously a telegram. After we had taken him back to his room and ordered him a large gin and tonic, he was able to tell us that he had stopped at Sir Ranalf Steeton’s office on the way back from the pyramids. Sir Ranalf had been hoping to see him. He had accepted a cable from Goldfish on Seaman’s behalf. At last the Swede permitted me to examine the wire. I remember it clearly:
where are you stop if not there inform me immediately of whereabouts stop stop all production stop where is your star since cherbourg stop await further instructions stop ps has he gone to tangier stop s.g.
Seaman was baffled. I, of course, understood something of Goldfish’s bewilderment and, I suspect, anger. In my obsessions with my own problems I had forgotten to pass on the earlier message to remain in Alexandria until our new star arrived. Clearly the star had arrived and, finding us gone, with Goldfish’s steamer getting ready to depart for Tangier, where Captain Quelch had further business, had decided to take passage on the Hope Dempsey.
I advised Seaman to relax. This was just another of Goldfish’s self-contradicting cables. He sent them when he was bored. Tomorrow would bring us a further wire countermanding everything in the previous one. We should proceed as normal and begin shooting tomorrow.
‘That would be wonderful,’ said Seaman with that heavy tone he intended for irony, ‘if Sir Ranalf Steeton did not have to authorise all our bank orders. We have no money, gentlemen. We cannot pay crew, actors or our hotel without Steeton’s authority. We have only the money we carry. And Steeton’s master is Goldfish. He must do as Goldfish commands. I respect him for that.’
‘But tomorrow or the next day Goldfish will be asking us why we have no “footage”,’ I said. ‘We shall waste time if we pay too much attention to this cable.’
‘He has never been so adamant.’
‘You have never understood him to be so,’ I coolly pointed out. Thus, little by little, I was able to calm the Swede long enough to get his agreement not to inform the others. It would cause unnecessary alarm. Meanwhile, we would begin shooting as planned, early the next morning when the sun’s rising above the pyramids would be the backdrop to the first love-scene between myself and Mrs Cornelius.
Our story must become an actuality! Mrs Cornelius and I would appear in a prologue where, as modern lovers doomed by society’s rules to separate, we meet, ostensibly for the last time, and embrace beneath the stern and battered features of the Great Sphinx; I, Bobby Sullivan, the playboy, apparently debonair and fancy-free; she, Colleen Gay, the debutante, engaged to a titled man of honour and probity whose heart and reputation she dare not and will not threaten. Our story would then sweep back in time some three thousand years, to the age of the Boy King. Now ‘Colleen Gay’ is unhappily betrothed to the sickly child whom she loved as a brother and to whose cause she is committed. I, too, as the new young High Priest, am loyal to the Boy Emperor. However, there is another, namely Esmé’s Cleopatra, who also loves me and is prepared to bring down the entire dynasty to further her own petty ends. When Tutenkhamun is poisoned, we, of course, are blamed. A motive is obvious in our almost unendurable love. Wolf Seaman had found the story moving and he was sure it would appeal to the audience jaded by his sexual comedies.
Even Goldfish had known this could be the movie play of the decade, one which would heighten his reputation, more, even, than The Squaw Man. He, better than any, understood the value of a strong moral where heroic self-sacrifice, preferably from both male and female leads, is the turning-point of a tale in which virtue is finally rewarded.
Several times, Seaman wavered. Professor Quelch, doubtless concerned about his fees, lent his voice to mine, pointing out that only he knew the great secret places in the desert, the old temples and tombs which would best serve our story. The combination of authentic locales, strong scholarship, a powerful script and wonderful actors would be bound, under Seaman’s inspired direction, to win a vast world audience.
Seaman needed audiences. His old brand of pessimistic irony was no longer finding favour with a public regaining its pre-war optimism. Flame of the Desert would attract the kind of universal success he needed. That success was his only motive. Genuine artistic integrity destroyed Griffith’s career, but Seaman had his eye forever on the market. Within another ten years he would be making his fortune on Lash LaRue, Tim Holt and Sunset Carson, adventures which a greedy public demanded in vast quantities. He knew pretty clearly where he was going!
It took Quelch and me the rest of the afternoon to restore Seaman’s confidence and remind him that his crew awaited orders to begin a shooting schedule. With the help of several more gins he pulled himself together and by six o’clock was the centre of attention in the small meeting-room we had hired to discuss the next day’s work. Even Esmé attended, sitting near the front in one of her loveliest cream lace outfits. The sight of her seemed to restore Seaman’s confidence further and when he came to address us on our duties and responsibilities he was able to do so with a certain authority.
I must admit that secretly I was, from time to time, faint with anxiety, fearing the end of all my ambitions. Indeed by the time dinner was over my anxiety had become almost uncontrollable. Under normal circumstances cocaine is a wonderful means of recovering myself, but it was not effective then. I had little experience of dealing with such feelings. Anxiety came to me later in life than to many. Childhood and adolescence were virtually free of worry and it was only after I began to understand my responsibility for others that I experienced real anxiety. Whereupon I knew only one means of releasing myself from its grip: through the pursuit of sexual gratification. I had this in common with Clara Bow. Until recently careless lust rid me entirely of my fears. But since 1940 I chiefly used local prostitutes from Colville Terrace and Powys Square. They had no expectations of me. I had none of them. There is nothing but pain to be gained from attachments to the women one uses for the Release of the Beast, as I call it. In 1926 I had not yet learned that lesson and, when dinner was over, addressed Esmé on the matter. It was now perfectly safe for me to visit her in her room. With Wolf Seaman, Mrs Cornelius planned to be at Sir Ranalf Steeton’s for the rest of the evening. Esmé was feeling tired. I told her I would bring something to make her more wakeful. At length, almost as if she were wearying of the debate, she agreed to receive me.
By the time I arrived in her room, I was determined to make up to my darling for all those long months of unfulfilled desire. That night I planned to show her no mercy. That night, I discovered, she expected none.
* * * *
FOURTEEN
JE LA PRIS SAUVAGEMENT! Elle pleurait, grognait, criait. Je la griffai jusqu’au sang. Je la mordis. Je la pénétrai et le sang coula encore. Mais cela ne suffit pas à me rassasier . . .
The rest was never a memory, simply an impression from which, at length, I stole away. I had made Esmé my own again. My mark was upon her. I had seen a new respect in her eyes. Ses yeux paraissaient de cuivre incandescent, sa chevelure luifaisait comme un halo de flammes, son corps était convert d’ égratignures, d’empreintes laissées par mes dents et de marques voluptueuses . . . And my anxieties were vanished, as were hers. We had achieved mutual release. I do not regret all that. It was an act of confirmation. One must experience it to understand it. It was a shame, after so much exertion, that my little girl was wanted for work that morning. As we boarded the hired coach to drive out to the Mena Palace Hotel, where we would organise ourselves before the day’s shooting began, both Wolf Seaman and O.K. Radonic regarded us with a kind of distant curiosity, whil
e Mrs Cornelius even exuded a certain disapproval. None of that upset me. I am one who follows the Master. I fly like a Hawk. I cackle like the Goose. O Sovereign of all Gods delivered from that God who liveth upon the damned. I was restored to my old power and was fully a man again. I had proven my control over my own life and intended very firmly to continue with that control. I would not be diverted from my ambitions.
I had already confided some of this to Quelch as we prepared for the morning and he became positively fervid in support of my new determination. ‘We are all the slaves of Fate, dear boy. But it’s up to us to do our best and pretend that this is not so; to take up the reins of our own runaway chariot or die in the attempt! Abusus non tollit usum. That is my answer to those who would judge us.’ He had placed a friendly hand upon my shoulder as I shaved. ‘It is a motto well suited to this awful country which, I fear, is inclined to bring out all kinds of dormant or unimagined passions in the sexes. The residents here always recognised the danger. That is why it is so important to keep up appearances. Non nobis sed omnibus. But this is a rule you and I must take as it comes. We are not, after all, what they would even consider, I suspect, as omnibus.’ The tone of the older man, rather than his words, was comforting.
Malcolm Quelch was beginning to reveal depths unlike his brother’s yet just as mysterious and fascinating. His understanding of the Beast was oddly tolerant, like that of a clergyman confident in his own faith and the triumph of the Holy Ghost over Satan and His armies, even accepting of those times when he himself was in the power of the Beast. The Beast is within all of us. It is our gift from God that we learn to tame the Beast by any means we choose. Rasputin understood this. Quelch confided his ideas of God as we travelled side by side into the west, where the great ruins lay, famous and, like all great works, untarnished by familiarity. The reality was stupendous.
It was when we had changed from the car to the little open tram which carried us up the line through the sand on the last stages of our route that I was suddenly aware of the pyramids’ colossal size! I realised why it is not possible to take a picture of the pyramid that does not diminish it since one has to step back a considerable distance to include any idea of its shape and by that means lose the scale. We were fleas upon the remains of Pride; grubs crawling at the feet of the Gods. Never before have I known such awe as when I contemplated the enormous power of an individual able to dedicate the lives and resources of his entire nation to the construction of his own monument! Only Stalin has since known such total might.
‘I must say,’ Mrs Cornelius strolls up to join us, content beneath her parasol, ‘they ain’t a disappointment.’ With the satisfaction of a housewife who has seen the rising of a perfect pie she peers benignly upon the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
Behind us the film crew are unloading their equipment, observed by crowds of local hucksters and beggars controlled by our own private guards - burly men who gathered the skirts of their white gelabeas about them, using their long bamboo canes liberally and without anger upon an undismayed flock momentarily contenting itself with imprecations, wailed pleadings, filthy insults and the offer to sell any one of us anything our hearts or our lusts had ever remotely desired .
Wincing a little, Esmé moves closer to me. She has been sharing for a moment a seat with Seaman. She insisted on coming. I eventually agreed she should continue, to further her career. Our future after all is by no means as certain as it was. Seaman is begging every one of us to give of our best today, since Sir Ranalf Steeton will be driving out later to see how we work. He does not explain that Steeton’s word to Goldfish might bless the production again. Much as I am unhappy with Esmé’s acting ambitions, it was never in my nature to force another human being to a course of action that does not suit them. As Malcolm Quelch frequently remarks, what one did in one’s own bedroom was a matter of personal taste; what one did in one’s drawing-room must always be a matter of social probity.
I was thoroughly confident in Esmé’s love and respect for me and trusted her completely, in spite of Mrs Cornelius’s untypically jealous behaviour which had led her earlier that morning to ask me if I intended to start up as a full-time pimp in Cairo. I told her, rather stiffly, that there was a fairly large difference between a pimp and, for instance, an agent. I saw nothing wrong with a man encouraging his fiancée to follow a career. Most men would, I said significantly, be jealous of their sweetheart’s desire for success. And yet, as events were to show, Mrs Cornelius might have had at least a glimmer of honest concern for her rival, some intimation of the danger which lay ahead of us all. Tel de l’acier en fusion, mon sperme emplit son anus. Je vous aime toutes les deux. Il n’y a aucun mal à être en vie. Wir steckten in einer Maschine, die weissglühend and weich war, die jedoch härtesten Stahl zerquetscht hätte. Das Mahlwerk serrieb uns. Blut spritze. Blut spritze. Sie wollten Vergeltung, den Tod. Sie baten um Gott, um den gnädigen, strafenden Jesus, der in dieser Stunde der Offenbarung über sie gekommen war. Plötzlich war ich missgelaunt. . .
Le sang jaillissait. I have no further memory.
Sweet. I did love. Sweet, sweet. I did love. Sweet. There is no more sweet, sweet. I did love.
A kite, some scout for her fellow-scavengers, flared her wing feathers high overhead, about half-way to the peak of the pyramid, and the telescopes of a score of bird-watchers swung to observe her. We had arrived at the exact same moment as a Cook’s Tour of the British Ornithological Society, ‘Here to spot Egyptian exotics and familiar wintering friends!’ The tour, I was told by an excited matron, would also include visits to the principal sites of antiquity. She handed me a neatly folded blue and white brochure couched in prose worthy of Ouida. Before she was politely moved on by one of the crew, I returned her leaflet and gave my attention to the camera and our director who, like most of us, had donned his comfortable riding clothes. The cameraman’s boy was even wearing khaki shorts, while O. K. Radonic sported a suit of loud yellow golfing pyjamas he had bought the previous day, he told us, at Davis, Bryan and Company in West Street. The clothiers was famous in Serbia for the fineness of its English cut. On a British officer, perhaps, the golfing pyjamas might have looked almost elegant. On Radonic they looked as if he had borrowed a seaside pierrot suit several sizes too large for him. But the cameraman seemed pleased with his purchase and wore the outfit with the air of one who is at last perfectly a la mode.
A tent had been erected for Grace and his boxes. He would also help the actors dress. He had acquired, at Seaman’s suggestion, a little, round-faced Jewess as his assistant. She had some experience of the European beauty salon at Shepheard’s. She seemed competent, if surly. Speaking only Hebrew, Arabic and some French, she was of not much use to the rest of us. Happily Grace proved to be familiar with French and Hebrew and even seemed to have picked up a few words of Arabic. My anxieties, already ‘grounded’ by the activities of the night before, were almost completely forgotten as I saw we were building a useful team able to work with the camaraderie which makes for greater efficiency and improved artistic quality.
Malcolm Quelch, Esmé and I were not needed for at least half-an-hour while Seaman took readings and made judgements concerning light and focus, so we decided to stroll around the base of the pyramids. Quelch, used to the children and old men who begged from us, struck about him smartly with his malacca, a thin, amused smile on his face, as if he teased dangerous dogs. Cairo was out of sight and the only buildings were a few huts, the only traffic some ancient camels used to give rides to tourists. Out of all those rose the confident walls of the Mena Palace Hotel, a sprawling building in what Quelch called the ‘Swiss Egyptian’ style. The guides now claimed it as the hunting-lodge of King Faud’s ancestors. ‘These people are paying for Romance, dear friend, not Truth. One has to give the customer what she wants, I suppose. I try to educate them to the facts of Egypt, but they simply refuse to listen. Some of them become genuinely outraged. I can be attacked at any time for mentioning some perfectly ordinary reality. Did you want to
climb up? These chaps will help you.’ He tapped an affectionate cane upon a couple of native bottoms. The men grinned and pointed upwards along the flanks of the astonishing edifice where, because of uneven stones, it was possible to scale the pyramid all the way to the top. Several tourists were being pushed and pulled by muscular fellaheen as I watched. I had not really been prepared for this mixture of casual use and monumental grandeur. Even the mobs of tourists and jostling fellaheen, the tramway, donkeys and rickshaws failed to diminish them. As a hundred Brownies clicked and recorded a hundred identical memories, Malcolm Quelch paused to watch a German party as it was helped aboard its camels for a turn around the Sphynx. ‘Do you think anything is being broadened other than their already broad behinds?’ he speculated. ‘Or will they go home, as I suspect, confirmed in their conformity and xenophobia? We are in danger, as the world grows wider and more available to us in all its considerable variety, of becoming increasingly parochial and insular, even of embracing simplistic systems of ideas, like immigrant Jews, like American pilgrims, as a barrier against so much uncontrollable data. Bewildered men, trained to manipulate the universe, must first instil a fear of the “outside” in their families and then define the universe, making it something they can control, drawing up a system of values merely to justify maintaining power over the only creatures they can control, their wives and children. This, of course, is the central point to any understanding of Islam. It explains why the Arab will never progress under his own initiative. He has developed a religion, out of the original creed, which makes him ideally suited to be a client of more powerful states and peoples. Always somebody’s slave. It is what he has been bred for. It is almost a crime to offer him anything else. What are these so-called “free Egyptian elections” going to achieve? They demand as a right what the British earned through centuries of experience. Yet had the British never come here, the Arabs could not have conceived of the notion of freedom in the first place! They sneer at us, call us corrupt, tell us we are cruel conquerors. And it is we who brought them the notions of the European enlightenment! But will this produce an Arab enlightenment? I doubt it. Theirs is a religion which thrives on ignorance and belongs to the darkness. No further Enlightenment can come through Islam. It’s a dead end. These chaps must eventually make a choice between perpetual poverty and illiteracy, proud, sublime insensitivity and, if not Christianity, at least a form of secular humanism. One or the other - possibly both - will free them. Solve vincia reis, profer lumen caecis.’ He paused, as if taking control of something in himself of which he disapproved. ‘I have unfortunately inherited a touch of my grandfather’s messianism. My father, on the other hand, an altogether gentler person, did not really prepare us for the world. Grandpa Quelch’s fire and brimstone has rather more to do with the actuality of life’s vicissitudes, don’t you think?’ He led Esmé and myself around a gigantic corner, out of sight of our crew and the majority of sweating Burgers and Hausfraus, successful caterers from the Bronx and cattlemen from the Brazos, dowagers and doctors from Dijon and Delft, bored children, and ecstatic maidens jotting purple lines in palm-sized notebooks. It occurred to me, as we looked upon the barren solitude of the Western Desert, that we might easily be upon a desolated planet Mars marvelling at the grave-markers of a race of giants. Might not those beautiful, untypical Pharaohs and their queens have descended in spaceships from the dying planet? Such ideas are now the stuff of cheap science fiction and nonsensical attempts to prove not only that we were once ruled by a benign race from the stars but that the Earth is actually fiat. I have attended their meetings at the Church Hall. Mrs Cornelius was very interested in the telepathic aspects of their beliefs and I must admit I have always kept an open mind on the subject. She had several stories of ‘psychic phone omina’ as she called them. She had as little success as myself in getting someone interested in her ideas. She had, she said, ‘put it to them bland bastards at the BBC but they’re so bloody busy keepin’ mellow frough a mixture of buggery and booze they don’t ‘ave time ter fink abaht reality.’ I said that since they truly believed they had both defined and accepted reality, anything outside their definitions was therefore not real. I had the same trouble with Titbits magazine. The man interviewed me about my theories and then went back and published a story which presented perfectly sound notions in a mocking manner. They make what they do not understand into a farce so as not to consider the actual implications. Even the picture of me was altered. Neither was I flattered by a caption stating that ‘Mad Scientist Max Reveals Sphynx’s Secrets.’ These people have no respect for themselves or anyone else. I would say to them Ihtarim Nafsak! This is something the Bedouin still know. True men are judged not by their wealth but by the approval they command from their peers and the admiring fear they engender in their enemies. No one can admire or approve of those Fleet Street gutter-rats. I told Mrs Cornelius she should not sink to their level.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 26