Quelch was a tall, Anglo-Saxon type, very thin, with the lantern jaw and heavy eyebrows that distinguished his class, his long nose veined and lined from exposure to the elements, his cheeks ruddy from the winds and waters of the Seven Seas. He dressed with casual good taste and spoke that languid, almost sluggish, English I had learned to recognise as the best. Again I heard the pure literary accents of my Pearson’s, Londons and Strands! How I loved to listen to it. Even his Latin sounded exotic, authoritative. When he offered me a glass of claret from the bottle he had brought with him, it was, of course, first-class. I had not enjoyed such good wine, I said, since leaving Paris. I began to remember what it was to be an educated, cosmopolitan European; it was as if half my being were coming alive again.
‘Paris?’ Quelch was dismissive. ‘Is she not completely vieux jeu, these days? With all those Americans!’
We sat in the candlelit semi-darkness Seaman favoured, a trademark of his pictures, which had to be underlit to pass any code of decency. Mrs Cornelius tuned in to the radio, the headphones almost perfect decoration on the twin rolls of hair she had arranged in Oriental style. With her loose silk gown, she acknowledged the occasion. We smoked cigars and enjoyed a cognac from another bottle Quelch had brought. I told the elegant old seadog that I recognised one with the true undemonstrative taste of an English gentleman and he smiled modestly. ‘The taste but not the pocket, unfortunately, old chum. A taste for champagne and foie gras was always my downfall in the end. Never women.’
Wolfy asked about his background and he revealed a twin brother in England. ‘Not an identical twin, I fear. There are three of us in all. Our mother was blessed with my younger brother exactly a year after we were born, Horace is now a very successful academic. He’s my twin. Our family motto, you see, Aut non tentaris aut perfice! It’s Malcolm who’d interest you, sir, I’d guess.’
‘The Egyptologist?’ Seaman’s voice was somewhat thickened by the cognac. He was not entirely sure if he had pronounced the word correctly, and repeated himself less successfully, but Quelch understood.
‘That’s the chap. Brainiest fellow in the family. Avito vivet honore! For some reason he prefers it out East. It’s his temperament, like mine, really. As soon as I know our plans I’ll write him in Alexandria and tell him when we’re arriving. He’s a stalwart sort, Malcolm, and just the lad to give you all the gen on Egypt “A” as well as “M”. Primus inter pares, they will tell you at the British Museum. There’s nobody with Malcolm’s contacts West or East of Suez.’
All this served to further fuel Wolf Seaman’s enthusiasm. Clearly comforted by Quelch’s sophistication and education, he had, in his awkward way, begun to relax. This meant he slapped Quelch and myself on our shoulders quite a bit. When Mrs Cornelius removed the headphones with a grumbled complaint that it didn’t sound so much like a band as a bunch of flatulent krauts after a heavy night on the beer and sausages, Captain Quelch suggested they must therefore be playing Mostfart and we all collapsed with laughter. Then Mrs Cornelius told me to bring out my cocaine since we were all friends. After sampling it the experienced old salt told me that my ‘snow’ was on the same level as his ‘sangue de vie’ and congratulated me, in my turn, on my taste. There was a bond very quickly established between Quelch and myself, though I remained instinctively wary of Seaman. Since he had identified his siblings, I asked Quelch what his Christian name was. After some hesitation he admitted it was Maurice and this set Mrs Cornelius to giggling. Eventually she asked, between gasps, ‘Yore Maurice, yore twin’s ‘Orace and yore ower brower’s Malcolm! Yer’d fink yore ma an’ pa would ave corled ‘im Boris, at least!’
Over his glass Captain Quelch’s expression was both mournful and serious. He was only a little more sober than Wolf Seaman or myself. ‘It’s my belief that they lost heart,’ the seadog told her sadly. ‘You see, Miss Cornish, I rather think they’d set their hearts on a Doris . . .’
We were to learn no more for at that point Mrs Cornelius began to choke and was forced to speed in unstable panic for the bathroom.
And so, in an atmosphere of jolly expectation, looking forward to good company and with a marvellous artistic edifice to create, as it were, out of the sands of the desert, I prepared for my brief leave from the United States. Captain Quelch had a poor opinion of the Egyptians and a worse one of the generality of races and religions in that part of the world. He pointed out that there is really no longer an Egyptian race as such. Instead it is a mongrel mixture of all races, a living example of the disaster that occurs when white, brown, yellow, black and olive intermarry, especially where Negro and Semitic strains predominate. ‘Omar Sharif Bradley’ is no advertisement, I think, for the future! My estimate of Julie Christie certainly went a very long way down after I saw her embrace first an American Jew pretending to be a Russian and then an Egyptian Copt posing, of all things, as a Slav! I would say that Slavic blood was the only blood not spilled during that particular piece of cinematographic nonsense. It was the work of Lean, the communist, who made his reputation with the novels of Charles Dickens and Graham Greene before he accepted millions to produce a distorting and ignoble version of the Lawrence story. I met Lawrence more than once. He was a quiet man, a visionary like myself whose warnings had been ignored. He told me that if it had not been for the jealousy of the British High Command he would neither have been forced back to work in the pits as a common miner, nor had to produce pornography for a living. Of course he picked up those particular habits in Port Said, that sink of filth.
In spite of all these considerations I will admit that some of the romantic expectations which filled the others also touched me. I found myself succumbing to the Lure of the East, at least in my imagination. In one’s imagination, of course, there is no harm in the Lure of the East. But the dusty realities are another matter. Hadol el-’arab haramiye.
I was spending more time than I wished in Seaman’s company, chiefly because I hoped to convince him that Esmé would be an ideal supporting actress and that Mr Mix, my servant and assistant, was absolutely essential to me wherever I went. Of course no one understood the desperate urgency of our situation, so on one hand I had to pretend to casualness and on the other to professional pride. Once or twice I came in danger of parting company either with Seaman or, more importantly, with Goldfish or with MGM, for whom I had just completed the gigantic mechanical revolve so remarked on when The Show was eventually released. My revolve was to help make Browning’s reputation long before he offered his obscene Freaks to a thrill-greedy public. As ‘Tom Peters’, I also had a small part in the picture, in the famous Salome’s Dance sequence where I was the clown who plays Herod. My other large parts at that time were as Rasputin in Last Days of the Romanofs, Cardinal Richelieu in Seaman’s The Queen of Sin and John Oakhurst in Ingrams’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat, from which Ford stole his ideas for Stagecoach. I was never to see most of my Hollywood films in the city of their origin. Instead, I saw them in the most disgusting conditions, in the worst possible prints, in various run-down cinemas which continued to show silent films before the talkers completely drove them to ruin. So many fine films are now gone forever, including many of my own, the brown, brittle celluloid cracking and crumbling to dust within their canisters. It is as if certain seminal books in the history of literature had been tossed on a bonfire, never to be read again. I sometimes wonder if there is some heaven where these films still live, where their stars and their crews murmur of the trials and triumphs of their glory days. Stalin, in his war upon the word, was never as successful as Time, who let the old, volatile film stock powder into nothing. I read only reviews of The Show, for instance, for not a single print still exists. Someone came to me from the National Film Theatre after I had written about my involvement with Hollywood in The Kensington Times. As usual they milked my brains for information and gave me nothing in return, hardly a mention in the programme. Why should I have trusted a man called Brownshirt? But I got to see some of the pictures Mrs Cornelius and myself had worked in. We went together to watch Ben Hur. Like our Egyptian pictures it had been filmed partly on original location, until politics forced them to complete it in America. Some of the sketches credited to Mastrocinque are in fact mine. And Mrs Cornelius appeared only briefly as a priestess in the final cut.