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 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.’