‘You are contemptuous of these barbaric laws and traditions. But imagine coming to 13th-century France and deciding that chivalry, old-fashioned and primitive, should be done away with. Like it or not you have destroyed their only ethic, since the one you offer in exchange is to them no more than an aspect of an alien rule they already resent.’
Lieutenant Fromental protested at this: ‘El Glaoui is a true friend of the French.’
‘Because friendship with the French is all that sustains his rule. He has made his decisions and knows he must follow them through. I am not accusing our host of lack of courage, sir! But Moorish chivalry is dying, too, believe me. Were the French to go tomorrow they would leave behind a ruined myth - a bewildered monster. They do not ask for theories of democracy. They should be offered what those theories are based on. And that, I believe, is the Christian religion or something very much like it. In exchange for their freedom you are offering these people a modern philosophy that is at least three hundred years ahead of their needs.’ I think Graf Otto was expressing some of that fashionable paganism which brought Weimar to its knees, but he was of a fine old tolerant South German stock and I later found it very difficult to believe he was guilty of those crimes. He was interested in Kolya’s theories about Wagner, whom he called ‘the great modern genius’. ‘I should like to talk to your Russian prince,’ he said. I told him that it was quite likely he would. Kolya could even now be on his way to Morocco, although Fate might also have taken him into some more remote region of the Muslim world.
‘Wagner is the future,’ declared Count Schmaltz. ‘These gleamingly finished innovations! They turn with such novel precision, like highly-finished movements in some massively complex machine. It is the sublime music for the twentieth century. Strauss and Mahler are mere flounderers, desperately presenting us with novelties and cacophony rather than substance and sublime melody.’
‘The light so bright and the shade so black!’ exclaimed Fromental. ‘Oh, those inspired vulgarities!’ And he laughed admiringly. He had a Frenchman’s traditional suspicion of German seriousness.
‘You are an opponent of imperialism, I take it.’ His attitude towards Count Schmaltz was rather challenging. We all knew that Schmaltz had an East African family whom he planned to visit after he left Marrakech. ‘Would you rather have French influence here, my dear Count, or the kind of barbarism which existed throughout this century before we arrived?’
‘We were not comparing benign foreign imperialism to savage tribalism,’ declared the German. ‘I would agree, the first permits at least a modicum of opposition while feudalism permits none. But those are not the only choices. That is my point.’
‘You think, do you old boy, the weaker Power should be permitted to determine with which strong Power it links its destiny?’ Mr Weeks’s favourite argument held that, given the choice, most countries outside Europe, including America, would prefer to live under the amiable protection of the Union flag. Indeed he had some notion of a Pax Britannica which would dominate the globe by means of gigantic airships, expanding trade, increasing the wealth of all who elected to join his great Commonwealth of Nations. He saw his country’s Empire as the core of a new World Order, making justice and peace available to all. While I had every affection for his optimistic dream I could not see it becoming a reality without invoking the power of Christ, and Mr Weeks, among many other quirks of character, attested to a firm and old-fashioned atheism. Frequently other guests (who visited for a week or two and were often clearly no more than anecdote-hunters who would use their exotic experience as after-dinner topics for the next ten or twenty years) would grow vehement with what they considered Mr Weeks’s socialism, but in fact he called himself a syndicalist and based his particular creed on the work of that droning naturist William Morris, who insisted on working naked in his Oxford carpentry shop in imitation of his hero Blake. Both thought they could build the New Jerusalem upon interminable verse with an artist’s palette and a couple of dovetail joints. Mr Weeks quarrelled only with the PreRaphaelite’s muscular Protestantism, but excused him for it on the grounds of being born too early. I can see the madman now, with his great bottom shining over the limewashed table, those mighty genitals, which made him they said such a Tarzan to his Jane, swinging with manly insouciance above the falling shavings as he tackles another sideboard with his ever-accurate awl! I am no denigrator of Morris as a furniture-maker, nor as a decorator. More than once Mrs Cornelius had said how much she fancied his wallpaper, but it is too expensive, even from Sanderson’s. G. K. Chesterton was another disciple of that hearty Victorian visionary and came to promote his views through a newspaper he founded. I saw nothing wrong with his ideas, any more than with Mr Weeks’s, but they were as flawed by Catholicism as Weeks’s were flawed by apostasy. These days such large men become transvestites. They are never content.
There is a considerable similarity between working for a Moroccan Pasha and a Hollywood Mogul. Both have a tendency to keep you waiting for hours, sometimes months. Both are inclined to change their minds rather more often than they change their undershirts and always find it surprising that you should fail to anticipate their every momentary whim (which usually involved dismantling anything which has already been created). Your master also provides a rich but erratic flow of money, which makes it impossible for you to make long-term plans and puts you permanently at his disposal. He wishes you to socialise with him, to become his confidant when, at three in the morning, he has become bored with his latest sexual conquest. On other occasions you can expect him to pass you by without even recognising you. You are no more than a shadow-player in his complicated vanities. Like one of his women or boys, you are merely something to pass the time with. And yet, while you remain in his favour, you are invested by him with considerable power of your own. Much of his authority becomes yours even though to him you are no more nor less useful and worthy of affection than a good gun-dog. My latest patron was, I had to admit, somewhat more tolerant than most tyrants of human weakness, and so weary was I of my ordeal I grew very swiftly to welcome the opulence, to rest at last under the patronage of the Pasha. I came to take as natural the power and the immediate security of my position at the Pasha’s court, just as I had come to take Hollywood for granted. Indeed I might have been in Hollywood when I awoke in the morning to stand on my balcony and look through tall palms, across Moorish roofs and battlements, past the towers of the muezzin to the mountains. Why should I not give up a few months of my life to this wonderful venture? I had no great reason to rush back to America. I drank sherbet. I read books. What else could I do?
A few days after I had arrived I again buttonholed Mr Mix. This time I put my hand over his lens and humorously warned him that I should do this every time I saw him unless he came to my room at Le Transatlantique that evening. He agreed with the quick, unthinking air of a boy not used to following his own desires. ‘I’ll be there. Now let me go, Max.’ But he was reluctant, disturbed. He seemed fatigued, almost maniacally distracted. For the first day or two I had been given quarters in the Pasha’s palace, one of several small buildings adjacent to the courtyard housing honoured guests or high-ranking officials. All were built of the same salmon-coloured piste, with green tiled roofs, and their windows looking only inward, like every traditionally built house in the part of Marrakech they were beginning to call ‘the Medina’, meaning ‘Old City’. The new French administrators and merchants raised themselves fine mansions beyond the walls. Some of these, save for their distinctive colours, could have graced any provincial street from Brussels to Barcelona. Whatever its benefits, imperialism also has a knack for banality.