‘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.
NINE
LITERACY IS OUR most valuable gift, the source of memory and enduring myth; the wellspring of all we now call civilised and the means by which we pool our commonwise. Communicating thus from Past to Present we improve our understanding of the world and our universe. Here in the Mediterranean (where a few years earlier I had been reborn) on December 18, 1925, barely a month before I began my second quarter-century, I came to understand the true value of literacy when I tried to imagine the emotions of the first man realising one day the potential of a written language!
Rising early, a little impatient with Esmé’s groans from the other side of a door she insisted on locking (‘in case you see me puking. I should hate that’), I begin to feel a certain pleasant excitement as I grasp the sparkling brass rails and ascend the companionway. Everyone has assembled on the boat deck. The sea is an uneasy blue and the clouds are turning to white and from white to wisps of vanishing mist while the black hull of the Hope Dempsey breaks up yellow spray. We are not yet in Paradise but we are passing at last through the gateway between Gibraltar to port and Morocco to starboard, with a great golden sun rising like a fortunate omen on our forward bow to release, it seems to me, an army of golden beings so brilliant as to be intolerable to the naked human eye, to drive the cold Atlantic back and lift up all our spirits so even the laskars wail what is clearly some native triumph as they go about their work. From his cabin, shaving, Captain Quelch stands up to chant a dirge, antique and monkish, in time to his open door’s creaking.
That was a subject dear to my own heart, and singularly apt as we sailed not three miles from the ghost of old Carthage. Hindsight says Carthage’s ghost was grinning at my back even as we glimpsed the white and green terraces of the great port which, three thousand years earlier and before their pagan empire was crushed by vengeful Rome, the Phoenicians named Tingis. Now it seemed to me to symbolise the very best of the ancient world combined with the finest of the new. At this distance Tangier was the perfect image of the modern, civilised city. Now you will say Tangier was an illusion, but I would prefer to call what I saw a vision. That the reality would prove both sordid and terrifying I was not to know for some time. Just then I relaxed in the presence of a silvery perfection, a city framed in the foliage of cypresses, poplars and palms, her terraces occasionally broken by the golden dome of a mosque or the vivid blue of some caïd’s summer home, the dignified green of Royalty, and this all festooned with natural draperies of violet, scarlet and deep ultramarine, of vivid ferns and vines, shrubs, grasses and brilliant pines, all ranked above us on seven hills, a Roman’s dream of tranquillity, a Christian’s dream of heaven, the promise of a new world order.