When Captain Quelch took his ‘private time’, I would have Mix set up the projector and show me my escapades in plane and on horseback, a daring transplanted son of the Steppe. I told Esmé she should join me to watch Buckaroo’s Code, my finest. She would be proud of me. Instead she became agitated.
Between her periods of sickness and her laudanum-slumber, I had little chance to know from Esmé what upset her most. By now, my darling was despairing of everything. From a spider-web of ruined mascara she wailed about her unhappy fate, convinced she would never get back to Hollywood, would never become a motion-picture star and was doomed to die in some nameless ocean. Her little fists pounded on the walls of her cabin like Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms. I reassured her that the Atlantic had a name and that the ship was wonderfully seaworthy.
We should return home in triumph. The critics would celebrate her presence in The Bride of Tutenkhamun (Goldfish’s final suggestion for a title, wired to the ship in the Gulf of Mexico).
‘Celebrate what?’ she asked, lifting her pale, pouting, delicate head from the pillows. ‘My employment as a lady’s maid? I could have got that job, Maxim, without going further than fucking Pera.’
‘A flag of convenience. Once in Egypt, you’ll have your chance. I am altering the script even now to give you a larger part. You will be Cleopatra.’
At this she revived a little. ‘The Queen of Egypt?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘eventually.’ Actually the part was for a Greek slave-girl who becomes Tiy’s rival. The plot would pivot on this triangle. The suggestion was not mine but a man named Thalberg’s. He was a friend of Seaman’s and Mrs Cornelius and had some experience with scenarios. A German of the best sort, he later went on to direct Gone With the Wind with my own mentor Menzies. I think Mrs C. met him through one of her actress friends. I was not sure Esmé would be objective enough, at that time, to appreciate the irony of her final fate (although it did offer the chance of a sequel). I contented her with some elaborate sketches of herself on top of one of the smaller pyramids, framed by a huge rising sun, flanked by palm trees. She would be clad in gold and jade and lapis lazuli and in one hand she would hold the rose of life, in the other, the rose of death.
‘You will be a vision!’
But she was not to be calmed. ‘I’m bored with being a vision, Maxim. I would like to be an actress. Show me my lines.’ At that stage I could offer her no further consolation.
In the saloon, much later that same night, with the sea relatively smooth, I encountered Jacob Mix. He was smoking one of his Haitian cigars, his feet stretched out before him in the ship’s only comfortable lounge chair, a look of considerable satisfaction on a noble face which could have graced a Benin relief. Somehow I felt I had intruded on a moment of history. All the lazy, beautiful barbaric pride of Africa was present in his muscular frame and I again reflected on the injustice of that wholesale and unselective stealing by slavers of every tribe and type. The nobler breed of negro, the dignified warriors of the Ashanti, the Zulu or the Masai, were treated exactly the same as the more degenerate natives. Even the Dutch admit to the difference between King Chaka and some ignorant Bantu houseboy. The Zulus and the Masai will tell you so themselves. Africa is, after all, a large continent. Civilisation was born there and there, some believe, it will meet its final decline. But it was the old African dignity, an ancient dignity that had existed long before Arab or white man discovered the wealth the negroes themselves despised. This is to blame neither white nor black. It was the forces of history that moved Livingstone and Rhodes into the Dark Continent in obsessive pursuit of knowledge. It was not their fault they also found gold, diamonds and timber and millions of acres where food could be grown. The black man did not want these things. The white man had to feed his people. One only has to see what the blacks do with their resources once they are given back to them - Burundi, for instance, or so much of the old Congo, and we need not discuss here the obscenity of Uganda - to see how little they value the gifts of nature which the whites cherish for their scarcity. The Bantu or Biafrans have no will to tame and control, as we have. They are merely content to pass their time in tribal squabbles and watch their women do whatever work is immediately necessary for their well-being. Machismo is the undoing of the Third World as it is of our inner cities. The infusion of negro blood into the Arab race produced an entire philosophy and religion based on this attitude. They call it Islam. A dignification, in my view, of the notions of a singularly lazy half-bred Arab, a complicated justification for an attitude summed up by a Jamaican sailor in a Soho drinking-club one evening in 1953 when I was dancing with Mrs Cornelius. ‘You’re working too hard, man.’ He barely moved his own body and occasionally snapped his fingers. ‘See? You got to let the woman do the work.’
Jacob Mix had benefited from an unusual intelligence as well as Christian values. He was neither particularly lazy nor immoral. He lay in his deck lounger with the satisfied air of a man relaxing after a hard day’s work. Having volunteered to help Mrs Cornelius with her lines, he had taken the part of Tutenkhamun as well as the High Priest. Few actresses were as conscientious as she. Most simply learned what they needed as they went along. No prompter could be heard on the silent screen. Besides, so much more depended on pantomime. But Mrs Cornelius had been trained in a tougher school and Mr Mix understood that. He, too, had known real hardship, real despair. Seaman meanwhile, having grown somewhat sulky for reasons I could not be bothered to comprehend, confined himself to his cabin and was no great comfort to his ‘protégée’, even when he was well enough to visit her. Since so much of my own time was spent tending Esmé, it was fortunate that Mrs Cornelius had Mr Mix’s help. Such a good-hearted fellow. Naturally, I did not require any special ‘valet’ duties from Mr Mix and only used him as a projectionist when the seas were calm enough to let us watch further episodes of The Masked Buckaroo. In all other matters I neither needed nor missed his assistance.
I was glad to come across him in the saloon. Captain Quelch aside, Mr Mix was the only man on board with whom I had any real rapport.
After giving him another moment or two of privacy, I pushed open the door. I was jovial. ‘Well, now, Mr Mix! What’s this? Planning to purchase your own plantation?’
He started, seemed to scowl, then realising it was me, turned his expression into a grin. He knew I meant no harm. ‘You got it, Max.’ He shifted a little in the chair and took another cigar from his pocket. ‘Care to join me?’
I accepted an Havana and lowered myself into the nearest basketwork armchair.
‘Think the storm’s over?’ he asked me.
I was no mariner but I admitted the weather seemed to be settling. ‘Not before time. We should be able to see the conclusion of The Fighting Buckaroo tomorrow, with luck.’
‘Has the captain told you yet where he plans to put in? Tenerife is it?’ Mr Mix seemed hardly awake.
‘Probably Casablanca.’
He smiled. Fingering the corners of his mouth he peeled a piece of tobacco from his heavy lip. ‘It’ll be good to get my feet on that continent.’
I heartily agreed with him. I told him how Esmé was growing increasingly depressed. ‘The fact is, Mr Mix, she has no talent for pictures. Perhaps she’d be better if she had some stage experience.’
‘Maybe she don’t need no more experiences for a while,’ he suggested. ‘She’s only a kid, Max.’
I knew that better than anyone, and it was my duty to protect her. I had failed at least once in that duty and I did not intend to fail again. But was it also my duty, I asked Mr Mix, to help her persist at something for which she had not the slightest vocation? All the big nigger could say was that I had to do what I thought best. ‘I guess you got her hooked on this glamour shit, Max, and everything else you promised her, and you got to deal with the consequences as best you can.’
I had not meant her to become addicted to Hollywood. I had wanted only a soul-mate. A comrade. A wife. It was still what I wanted.
‘Then you’d better look for someone your own age.’ Mr Mix spoke softly so that I knew he was not criticising me. But his gesture with his cigar was clear. He had no more to say on the subject. He rose and went to stand at the window. The sea was unstable ebony. ‘What language do they speak mostly in Casablanca, Max? French, Spanish?’
‘I would guess it was chiefly French and Arabic. But I think English, Spanish and German are used a great deal, too. Don’t worry, Mr Mix. I’ll see us through. I have something of a gift for languages.’
‘I picked up a little bit of the Spanish during the time I was in Mexico,’ he said. ‘I guess they’ll understand me.’
I reminded him we would only be in Casablanca for a few days at the most, refuelling and taking on supplies before we completed the journey to Alexandria. While I did not expect to find much in Casablanca not found in any similar international port, it was clear that he thought it would be magically different.
‘It’s Africa.’ He was reverential.
From something in his movements I assumed him to be thinking of women. He hoped, perhaps, to find a wife amongst the Nubians, or probably only a whorehouse where the colour of his skin would not be particularly remarkable. I was sympathetic and about to ask him more when Captain Quelch, returning from his sojourn on the bridge, went by with a wave, then came back through the door which led to the boat deck. ‘I supposed myself the only one still awake,’ he said. He walked towards the small bar. He always carried a key to the liquor cabinet and he took it out now. ‘Gaudeamus igitur! Would you two gentlemen care to join me in a night-cap?’
Diplomatically Mr Mix declined and left us together, saying he had to get a few hours sleep.
‘We’ve picked up some speed.’ With a nod to the nigger, Captain Quelch settled himself in the vacated lounge chair. ‘We might even spot the Canaries by morning. Conjunctis vivibus, our ordeal is over! Does that lift your gloom at all, Mr Peters?’ I was surprised. I had not realised he had so sensitively read my mind.
He raised his glass and broke out with a few lines of Jerusalem, which he was always inclined to sing when in good spirits. He saluted me. ‘De profundis, accentibus laetis, cantate! That’s my motto, Max, old boy. It’s the sailor’s anthem!’
‘You’re pleased to be close to home again, eh, captain? Glad to visit some of your old haunts?’ I found myself responding in kind to his high spirits.
‘Oh, I suppose so, Max. But you know what they say: Plus ne suis ce que j’ai été, Et ne le saurois jamais être.’
Long after the captain had retired to his bunk, I stood reflecting on the sad truth of this last remark.
* * * *
EIGHT
‘O, THE WILD ROSE BLOSSOMS on the little green place,’ sang Captain Quelch a trifle obscurely as he supervised his laskars running with the ship’s lines back and forth upon the slimy cobbles.
He had planned to lay off the port a small distance and send people ashore from the lighter, but the French authorities had ordered us to dock. Grumbling, our captain had anchored at the far end of a long stone mole, curved like a hockey-stick, which extended out of the old harbour and was thick with yellow weed. The new harbour lay on our starboard side and was still in the process of being built. From it French engineers and local Arab labourers watched us heave to. Casablanca crouched beyond, a scruffy, unremarkable medina surrounded by half-ruined mud-brick walls, and suburbs which were the usual miscellany of any boomtown from the Klondike to Siberia. There were a few nondescript mosques, lean-to shanties, traditional Arab tiled houses built next to elaborate Gothic mansions whose internal timbers were warping so rapidly they took on an oddly organic look, reminiscent of my more fanciful sets, something von Sternberg was to imitate for The Scarlet Empress. An Arab two-storey house with a flat roof steadied itself against a fretwork fantasy from which paint had already flaked in Casablanca’s famous foul weather. Here and there stood solid-looking customs sheds and official buildings, in the usual nondescript French 19th-century style which makes Paris a beautiful unity and everything else a piece of unsightly haute bourgeoisie. Here and there attempts had been made at the ‘Moorish’ manner, but these miniature palaces already had the air of follies erected in some South American interior. Elsewhere were commercial premises which could have been transported from the ‘Gower Gulch’ back-lot.
Indeed, some were so flimsy that any carpenter building them for MGM would have been fired for his sloppiness. And upon this sorry sprawl of pseudo-European and pseudo-Berber a grey rain was falling with that unique steadiness that only comes from the Atlantic, as one damp billowing cloud, occasionally a little darker or a little lighter, followed another with such remorselessness that you immediately believed it had always rained like that and would rain like that forever.
‘Shoot!’ said Mr Mix, joining us at the rail. ‘I hadn’t expected Africa to be so damned wet.’ Yet there was a gleam in his eye as he inspected the city, cloaked with steam and mist, and its damp miserable droves of bodies making muddy chaos of the narrow streets, sending up a noise and a smell to make Constantinople’s seem as sweet as Kensington’s. Apart from a miasma of coalsmoke, oilsmoke, woodsmoke, garbage-smoke and dungsmoke characteristic of many such ports, there was the cloying stink of phosphates from the holds of the tramp steamers trading in minerals, the fumes of charcoal and a thousand boiling pots of semolina, of new paint, of mint and coffee, of rain-soaked filthy clothes and panting donkeys, camels, horses and mules, of carbon monoxide from the buses and military vehicles, of half-rotted fish and slaughtered ruminants, of filthy seaweed flung upon the rocks to port where half-naked little boys scampered in and out of the grey breakers and called to us to throw them coins (yet even they fell silent when they caught sight of our laskars). And everything so sodden with the rain, so dulled by the cold and the cloud, that Captain Quelch could only grin and quote poetry in response. ‘Doesn’t it remind you, Peters, a bit of mournful, ever-weeping Paddington?’
‘Or Summers Town,’ I said, not wishing to disabuse him of his impression that I was directly familiar with England. Moreover, my reading and my listening to Mrs Cornelius’s early life were enough to give me a knowledge of London a native might have envied.
‘Well, it sure isn’t Babylon.’ Now Mr Mix bore the almost comical air of a man who knew he had somehow been cheated at chuckaluck but could not easily prove it. Wide-eyed, he enquired, ‘Is it all like this, cap’n sir?’
‘Africa has a way of making her coast seem her least attractive aspect.’ Captain Quelch was avuncular. ‘That’s how they hung on to everything for so long. Nobody suspected the wealth and the beauty of the interior.’ Kind as he was to Mr Mix, I fancied he was like myself a little nervous. Neither he nor I had parted from the French authorities on the best of terms and while I relied on my American passport, my change of name and my new career to afford a fairly reliable smokescreen, Captain Quelch had only time on his side. He had not, he said, been in this particular port as an independent master since 1913 when he had commanded a Tripoli-registered freighter the French had attempted to seize as he took on a cargo of opium for Marseilles and the European market. ‘I can still smell the cases of dried fish we were carrying it in,’ he had said. They had outrun the French customs launches but had been forced to sink the cargo in international waters. ‘The damned Moroccan Hebrew went witness against me and a notice was issued. I doubt if they could make anything stick now, but there’s always a chance some bureaucrat will remember my name and they use the bloody Code Napoléon here! You could be locked up for bloody ever! Still, L’univers est à l’envers, as they like to declare these days. A large-scale war is a great obscurer of small sins, old boy. A fact which many of us have learned to our profit.’ He was rarely anything other than cheerfully optimistic.
It emerged that the French officials, noting we were American and carrying a film crew, assumed we were all natives of the USA, hardly looked at a passport, and wanted only to enquire after Charlie Chaplin and Constance Talm
adge. When they learned that our lady stars were still feeling the effects of the wintry Atlantic they made all kinds of offers of accommodation and medical help. We refused the accommodation, but accepted the services of a doctor. There was no way, however, that we could refuse an invitation to dine with Major Fromental, who was in temporary command of the garrison. At seven a procession of broughams, each driven by a uniformed native, conveyed us to the Official Residence, which stood in its own grounds above the town, aloof - half-Moorish, half-French, protected by palms imported from Australia. A thickset giant with dark Breton good looks, Fromental spoke excellent English, though we were happy enough to converse with him in French. He told us how there was rebel trouble in the interior, under the notorious Abd el-Krim. They were a little short-staffed as a result. I had a high opinion, I said, of Marshal Lyautey, whose drive to modernise Morocco without losing her essential qualities was admired by many who usually thought poorly of French colonial policies. Lyautey, I added, would soon have the Rif in order again. At this, Fromental, his eyes hiding some fiercer emotion, murmured that the Quai d’Orsay, in her wisdom, had recently recalled Lyautey and replaced him with Petain, the hero of Verdun. ‘They argue that since today el-Krim employs the tactics and rhetoric of Europe, he should be fought by someone with European experience. Pah! It will break Lyautey’s heart. He loves Morocco more than wife or God. What’s more, he already had the Rif on the run. El-Krim flew too high. He’s finished. Petain will get Lyautey’s glory and Lyautey will die of homesickness! The old africain still has his vital roots in the Maghrib.’
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 14
