A personable and impressive young officer, Fromental had gained his promotion, like so many, in the trenches of Flanders, but he had an enormous admiration for his ex-commander and, inspired by what Lyautey was trying to do for these people, had volunteered for the colonial service. ‘He was a realist. When he came here every little sheikh and caïd claimed to be in charge and everyone was corrupt, everyone was poor. Now we have only a few big chiefs in charge. They are corrupt, of course, but we know who we’re dealing with and the people are richer. It is a further step on the long road to constitutional democracy. In a few generations, no doubt, they will be making laws about minimum wages and maximum hours. Every so often the Italians or the Germans or someone else slips a local pasha a few cases of repeating rifles or a Gatling gun so he can set himself up as an “anti-imperialist” or “nationalist”, or in other words some such try for a traditional power-grab! But Lyautey always saw to it that the bigwigs stayed in power so that it was always in their whole interest to support the French. The Sultan is a cipher. El Glaoui, of course, holds the real reins of power amongst native Moroccans. It makes him our best friend.’
At dinner that night, conversation returned to the Pasha of Marrakech, El Glaoui (whose family title was similar to ‘the MacTavish’ in Scotland). ‘Indeed,’ said Captain Quelch, ‘the whole system seems thoroughly Scottish to me. One day they’ll make a great race of engineers and music-hall comedians!’ We sat beneath chandeliers, eating off a vast mahogany table furnished with that excessively heavy silverware the French feel is necessary to set off their normally exquisite food. I must admit the food in this case was not entirely worthy of the knives and forks, as I had hoped, but it was served very elegantly by native servants in a livery of white, dark red and royal blue. Esmé, Mrs Cornelius, Wolf Seaman, Captain Quelch and myself were the guests, while Mr Mix had gone ashore with O. K. Radonic, Harold Kramp and some of the film crew to explore the pleasures of the medina. Bolsover was the duty officer.
‘I heard El Glaoui was the original of Valentino’s Sheikh,’ said Seaman, ‘and was told that the Pasha spends more time beside the Oued Seine than he does beside the Oued Dra.’ He offered the company his least constipated smile.
‘He is a charmer.’ Madame Fromental was one of those very plain French women whose features assume a kind of frosty beauty when animated. She put pretty fingers to her hirsute chin. ‘But scarcely a Valentino. A little darker, perhaps?’ At which everyone laughed. It seemed to me that Madame Fromental had spoken with a less than impersonal warmth of the Pasha whose reputation as a lady’s man had already been mentioned.
The French officers and their wives found my Esmé delightful and enjoyed her strangely-accented French, learned from her Roumanian mother. Mrs Cornelius was also a considerable success. She made no attempt to rid herself of her Cockney lilt while her frequent shrieks of laughter and ‘oo la la’s made her a hit as usual, at least with the younger officers. Esmé’s girlishness appealed more to the older men, who made great play with their whiskers (much as a woman unconsciously fingers her hair before a man who attracts her), yet the wives were tolerant and were happy to talk to my innocent, if only to annoy their entranced husbands.
‘Elle est un bijou,’ confided one of the matrons to me just as Mrs Cornelius came by on return from the powder room.
‘She bloody well should be!’ - my friend was a little the worse for the local claret - ‘She fuckin’ corst enuff!’ Before I could admonish her she had returned to her party, but Esmé had caught something of the exchange and directed a glare down the table which, had the child really been Mrs Cornelius’s dresser, would have put the terror of Satan into my friend.
After more toasts and all kinds of assurances of their co-operation if we ever wished to film in Morocco, we returned very late to the Hope Dempsey. With our gossip of Hollywood’s famous we had more than sung for our supper and everyone was thoroughly satisfied with the evening. From that moment we were assured of impeccable consideration from the local Arabs and might have been visiting Royalty to the military and police. Of course, Captain Quelch found the whole thing hugely amusing. ‘It would be almost worth telling them, Max, that we’re a couple of wanted outlaws!’ In one of our close moments I had decided to reveal the circumstances of my sudden departure from the USA and my problems in France. The confidence had only served to deepen our sense of common experience.
‘Volvitur vota,’ he remarked the next day on the bridge as he oversaw our ship’s move to a more respectable part of the quayside. He was delighted by the irony of our situation. “The wheel turns, eh, old boy?’ The entire episode was affording him considerable pleasure.
It was all he could do, he said, not to go into the mellah and strike some deal with one of the Hebrews. ‘Could we ever have a finer cover? We’d make a certain fortune overnight! Especially with the Rif in the Spanish territories.’
‘Guns, captain?’ I reminded him that he said it was against his principles to sell a gun that might kill a white man.
‘Good God, old boy,’ he said in some astonishment. ‘You don’t regard those dagos as white men, do you?’
I was rather discomfited by this racialist display from a man I respected for both his learning and his experience. While I was bound to admit that the Pope’s greedy hand had squeezed proud Spain’s wealth from her every pore, she was still a noble land who had single-handedly cleansed herself of the curse of Jewry and of Islam. Yet I would learn there are two kinds of Spaniard, one largely untainted by the blood of Carthage, while the other, true to form, was soon to attempt what the even more polyphyletic Castro succeeded in accomplishing some years later: to create the first Latin Bolshevik state. Unfortunately there are many Castros and only a few General Riveras. In retrospect I came to understand what Captain Quelch meant. From Phoenician to Barbary pirate, Oriental Africa left much of itself behind before the brave Iberians drove it back to its own desert domains. That part of Europe is still rich with their ancient sorceries, however, their barbarous creeds.
I reminded the adventurous old sea-dog that it would not do to upset Mr Goldfish, who was still technically the owner of the ship, even though we were supposed to be independent ‘Seaman Pictures’, and that there would be plenty of perfectly legal opportunities for him once we arrived in Alexandria. ‘So long as they don’t look too closely at my passport,’ he said. It had cost him a two-guinea bribe in Belize and had been obtained to replace one still held by the Cape Town police. He promised he would take no illicit cargo on board the Hope Dempsey. However, later that day he disappeared into the mellah and returned some hours later sporting an oily stogey of anonymous origin and the air of a man completing or predicting an excellent piece of good fortune. All I could do was turn the discreet eye of a friend but I would have speculated more on this had not Mrs Cornelius appeared in my cabin asking, with some concern, if Mr Mix had said anything to me about ‘jumpin’ ship’. I admitted that he had not. ‘Why should he?’ Whereupon she became even more alarmed. ‘Eiver ‘e’s done a bunk or that scamp of a captain’s sold ‘im,’ she declared.
Naturally I defended Captain Quelch. That she was attached to our ‘Sancho Panza’ was understandable, but this was no excuse for idle mud-slinging!
‘If he has been sold,’ I told her, ‘all we have to do is inform the French police. They’ll have him back for us in no time. Slavery is illegal in French Morocco. In fact, if you are worried, why not ask Major Fromental to look into it?’ My view then was that Mr Mix was enjoying himself mightily amongst his own kind and I did not think it fair to disturb him. It was not like Mrs Cornelius to panic or make silly accusations.
‘ ‘E wos due back larst night,’ she said. ‘ ‘E swore ‘e’d be on board before midnight.’ She had clearly become used to Mr Mix’s help, even though she no longer needed it, and seemed singularly grieved.
‘I would guess he has been temporarily diverted by feminine charms,’ I suggested delicately.
‘ ‘E’d bloody bett
er not’ve bin,’ she declared in some heat. I hastened to reassure her that the ladies Mr Mix would be visiting would be of a suitably dusky persuasion.
We were due to leave on the evening tide. I told her that I was sure Mr Mix would be back well before then. Unconvinced and still in poor temper, my friend flung herself from the cabin.
I found her later on deck, staring out towards the medina and looking at her wrist-watch. I had rarely known her so worried.
Though the rain had eased there was an unpleasant chill in the air, and the grimy smoke, drifting from factories and ships alike, hung close to grubby buildings and filthy streets as if reluctant to join the general greyness above. Donkey-carts and overloaded camels slipped and lumbered through the befouled mud to the screams and curses of their owners. Mix was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if he had taken passage on another ship. The port was half full, but there were vessels of many flags anchored there, steamers from Hull, Hamburg and Le Havre, from Genoa, Surabaya, Marseilles, Casablanca, from Athens and from Amsterdam, some of them phosphate carriers, all of them tramps, save for the white-painted warships of the French navy, gathered together some distance away, as if in disgust at the company they were forced to keep. I could tell that Casablanca was not the favourite station of France’s services.
Captain Quelch, in fine spirits despite the weather, climbed up the companionway to our left, pausing beside the ventilator pipe to glance towards the shore. ‘Lost somebody?’
Mrs Cornelius offered him a look of profound suspicion. ‘Only Mr Mix,’ she said.
‘He went ashore with that chap Radonic and the Chief, didn’t he?’
I had seen Radonic earlier. ‘Is everyone else back on board, captain?’
‘As far as I know. Your Mr Seaman is keeping a check on his people and mine are AP and C, including a somewhat hung-over Chief Kramp who remembered seeing Mr Mix hailing a cab outside the Penguin Verte in the Rue de Londres. I’ve put him to work cleaning his engines. Can’t afford to let my chaps have a lot of time off. Your Mr Mix can’t get into much trouble out there unless he profanes a mosque or something, though they’re not fond of blacks much. Still, they’ll assume he’s an off-duty Zouave and leave him alone. And if they mistake him for a Senegalese, they will certainly leave him alone. Those chaps make our Ghurkas look like maiden aunts.’ He sniffed the cold wind. ‘I can tell you, this place hasn’t improved since I was last here. It’s even more of a cesspit. Crawling with every kind of riffraff. I’ll be glad when we’re underway. Not my kind of progress, I’m afraid. Past flowed forward and future backward fled, While ever-turning Tellus wove new fabric of the present.’
I loved to hear those rich, educated tones quoting Wheldrake and was not looking forward to reaching Alexandria where I would be deprived of the enormous luxury of the captain reading from his favourite books while we enjoyed a drink and some good cocaine in the wonderfully civilised surroundings of his cabin. Captain Quelch’s quarters were an intellectual, artistic and sensual oasis in a desert of vulgarity and pretension. I refer in particular to our self-important Swede, who had grown even surlier since arriving in Casablanca.
A certain distance had grown between him and Mrs Cornelius, possibly on account of my friend’s determination to have a good time with whatever company available. It was in her nature. Those who were attracted to this Erdgeist must accept her, as I had, for the free spirit she was. Attempting to control my friend was as fruitless an occupation as attempting to control a South Easterly.
Mrs Cornelius scowled after the departing sea-dog. ‘I bet ‘e effin’ knows more’n ‘e’s effin’ lettin’ on, bloody old booze-artist.’
It pained me that she should hold such a low opinion of our master. I still believed that jealousy, as displayed in her manner towards Esmé, was at least part of what motivated her, though I never have been able to get her to admit it, even during our evenings, when we sit and look through scrapbooks and relive our happier times. She maintains that she always had my self-interest at heart. ‘You wos a sucker, Ivan, orl yer bloody life. You wos so effin’ much of a sucker, you even let you sucker yerself!’
It is true. I can now see that often, in mistaken kindness or generosity, perhaps, I was my own worst enemy. And yet, ironically, I have found myself accused, even today by Mrs Cornelius’s children and their friends, of the most outrageous and grandiose crimes! Some of them admire me for it. I am a kind of Captain Macheath to them. They expect me to quote the degenerate ditties of Brecht and Weill, as if that pair ever knew anything about the underworld or, indeed, the ordinary world! It is always the same with these Communists. They have either seen too little of real life or too much of it. The average European is, in the main, happy to have his necessities, a few luxuries, an opportunity to vote for a representative to look after his interests in the community. He is an honest, good-hearted fellow, willing to help any neighbour, be he German, Dutch, French or Slav, but perhaps he is also a little lazy-minded. It is here that he comes to find himself exploited. The Jew, whom in kindness he welcomes to his town after he hears how badly Jews are treated elsewhere, becomes a money-lender, a pawnbroker, a landlord, a factory-owner, a shopkeeper, and soon, Lo and Behold!, all the wealth is suddenly in the possession of that one, poor, put-upon Hebrew who is now building a synagogue in the middle of town and turning the honest burgher out of his house to make way for those of his co-religionists who can pay more! Karl Marx saw the problems of our world solved through the abolition of Capital, but the problems of the world will be instantly helped if we see to the abolition of Karl Marx and all he bred. Böyle bir yemek ismarlamadik! as the Turks say. Die Menge hält alles für tief, dessen Grund sie nicht sehen kann. But I suppose we are all subject to such self-deceptions from time to time. Karl Marx offered us a simplified Future. Martin Luther only offered the simplicity of God. Yet both have done damage in their time. God and Communism grew senile together and we can look only to their offspring. Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison! The little girls sing so sweetly in the cathedral. The blue and white mosaics reflect the light which cuts through that comforting gleam like the voice of Christ Himself. Ecce stolec! Behold the Fundament! We are granted a vision of Holy Russia resurrected. The glorious Russia into which I was born and where for many years I had hoped to die. But she is gone and I am doomed to perish in an English slum.
Yet, as Captain Quelch was fond of quoting from Wheldrake, One sweet moment is worth the suffering of the century. I have no regrets. Soon I shall be dead and I shall die knowing I have done all I could to pass on the wisdom of my experience, to show the world something of what went wrong since 1900. And if they do not wish to listen, I cannot feel guilty. The Holocaust, if you care to call it that, was not my fault, after all, any more than it was Adolf Hitler’s! I think we would do better to ask ourselves ‘Who was betraying whom in those days?’ Then perhaps we might see who continues to betray us and all we dream of. We are the people of the New Testament, not of the Book. El-kitab huwa sa’ab ‘ala ‘l’walad essaghir. Das ist meyn hertz. Rosi! Ayn chalutz, ich bin. Ayn gonif, never! Teqdir tefham el-Kitab da? El-’udr aqbah min ed-denb.
‘The excuse is more shameful than the offence,’ Captain Quelch frequently declared. Which was one reason, he said, he did not make excuses for himself. ‘If I step outside the law, well it’s for my own profit and I take a high risk. But I can’t honestly say, old boy, that I feel I’m doing anything wrong. And most people agree with me, certainly my customers.’
At Mrs Cornelius’s insistence the three of us were in the lobby of the French Line Hotel, about the only civilised place in the city, to meet Major Fromental’s Chief of Police, a soft-faced little man in an unnaturally smart white uniform and a képi which was drawn down almost to his thick, black eyebrows. He introduced himself as Captain Hourel and spoke in smooth, rather affected Parisian tones, assuring us that the slave trade had been completely wiped out under the French. He admitted the local moonshine might have KO’d Mr Mix. It was even possible he had be
en wounded in a quarrel. ‘But that we shall soon know, gentlemen.’ With the air of a man called from more important business he escorted us from the hotel to his waiting Daimler. The native chauffeur was driving curious youths away with an old-fashioned camel crop, clearly kept for this purpose alone.
Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3 Page 15
