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.