Jerusalem Commands

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 Talmadge. 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.’

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 better 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 been 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.

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 the 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.