As the province of France, England and Spain, Tangier could well have become one day the thing I first imagined. The Hope Dempsey steams through the glowing mist of the morning to drop anchor in the offing where the dirty brown and orange motor launches rush back and forth between the steamers and the wharf.
A pleasure ship disembarks her white froth of passengers into more of these boats (the only means of reaching the shore) while a boat which follows is loaded with nothing but cabin-trunks and suitcases, and is rapidly followed by a further wave of white cotton and peach lace as a party of German ladies, each with her pink-trimmed parasol and crocheted gloves, flies in on the foam to flirt for a week or two with the exotic. Through Captain Quelch’s glasses I watch other tourists disembark on the quay to entrain directly for Fez and Rabat while soldiers, primarily of the Spanish Foreign Legion, ensure their safety, though not, I imagined, their complete peace of mind. Nothing protects them from the hordes of little boys, the trinket-sellers, the carpet-merchants, the grinning purveyors of moist and mysterious sweets protected from the sun by a solid covering of black bugs I mistake at first for raisins, until they move.
‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.’ Captain Quelch joins me, taking the glasses to scan the port. ‘Still, it’s our last chance to restock our supplies.’ We have rather overindulged in le poudre during the last several nights.
‘I’ve ‘ad four ‘arf-pints at the Magpie an’ Stump, an’ two goes o’ rum jes ter keep up me sperits, me mince pies are waterin’ jes like a pump, and they’re red as a ferrit’s. ‘Cos why? ‘Tain’t the missis nor kids wot I’ve lost. But one wot I care-ful-lie doctored and fed, the nussin’ an’ watching’ ‘as turned art a frost, the Jeerusalem’s dead!’ Considerably more cheerful, Mrs Cornelius comes strolling along the deck, singing with sturdy professionalism the song she always uses to get herself on top, as she puts it, of her blue devils, and jerks a thumb towards the donkeys on the dock.
‘Albert Chevalier’s one of my favourites!’ Captain Quelch lifts his cap in salute. He is wearing an old-fashioned bow-cravat, a smart ‘bum-freezer’ white jacket and tight blue trousers. He is every inch a gentleman of the sea. ‘Funny without being vulgar, eh, dear lady?’ He fingers some slight cut on his jowl.
Mrs Cornelius is always unrelenting and will not be drawn. ‘Actcherly,’ she says in her best accents, ‘I’m more partial to Gus Elen meself.’
Up comes the Swede, disconcerted to find such a party already here, for he is usually the only one of us to exercise before breakfast, and turns a surly colour when he sees his paramour, the star of his movie play, staring eagerly towards the shore as if trying to catch a glimpse of a friend. He tries to turn, to go back, but Captain Quelch takes him by the arm. ‘Tell me, old boy, wouldn’t this do for Babylon?’
‘We are not doing Babylon, Captain Quelch. Nor are we doing Sodom, nor, indeed, Gomorrah. There are no records, I’m afraid, of Egyptian orgies.’
‘I thought one of Mr G’s wires specifically mentioned an orgy. And my brother says they couldn’t stop themselves, though it was religious, I gather.’ Captain Quelch has a habit of goading the Swede, whose lack of humour is notorious.
‘And the next wire completely contradicted that,’ says Seaman, shrugging free of the captain’s hand. ‘I intend to make my original picture, my friend, come hell, high water or Samuel Goldfish! That will fulfil my contract. Then I shall return to Sweden.’
‘I can’t say I blame you, old boy. They’ll be missing you, I should think. Absens haeres non erit, don’t you know.’
To which the Swede replies, with unnecessary venom: ‘Magna est Veritas et praevalebit!’ But, refusing to expand, he wrenches his awkward limbs through our company, and descends.
‘ ‘E’s bin orf-colour fer days,’ says Mrs Cornelius by way of vague apology. ‘ ‘E ain’t wot y’d corl a natchral Vikin’.’ And she roars with her old good humour, though her manner still grants no special intimacy to me and I understand I am not entirely forgiven for my non-existent crime.
There comes a half-subdued shout or two from below, as if lovers quarrel, but it is only Esmé passing Wolf Seaman who, for some reason, has tried to hamper her, and here she comes up in ruddy disarray, to join in the viewing of ‘the white city of the seven hills’ as Pierre Loti called it in one of those pieces of erotic trash he wrote in later years in order to maintain his exotic lifestyle. (There indeed was a man thoroughly infected by the poison of what the British used to call ‘Arabitis’, who did more to distort and romanticise the Oriental East than Ned Buntline the American West. Yet posterity will doubtless prefer his lies to mine, for the myths of Saladin, El Cid or Buffalo Bill endure beyond any commonplace reality, while the beau monde, of course, changes only its clothes, never its character.)
‘O, elle est très jolie,’ exclaims my little lady in her prettiest French. And she claps her hands, a noise which brings a frown from Mrs C., a smile from Quelch and me, a sudden excessive wailing from the town as the dawn muezzim begin noisy admonitions to their grim old God. At which Captain Quelch turns from the rail with the news that he intends to order from the galley a decent English breakfast. ‘Sometimes it’s the only reminder of who and where you are.’ ‘That,’ says Mrs Cornelius in full approval, ‘an’ a reelly ‘earty cup o’ tea.’ With this she links her delicious pink arm in his, the other in mine, and we are forgiven. Only Esmé elects to remain. To let the air, she says, dispel the last traces of her mal-de-mer. We bump into Seaman coming towards us as we make for the dining-saloon. Pressing back to let us pass, he glares at us but will not say a word. ‘Wot’s the matter, Wolfy?’ calls Mrs Cornelius over her shoulder, ‘orl the free luv gettin’ too much fer yer?’ This is a somewhat cruel reference to the Swede’s joyless pantheism, a creed which has replaced religion for so many socialist Scandinavians. Some of them must surely long for the days when Thor could coax at least an occasional lusty laugh from even the Lord of Gloom, the brooding Odin? Months of sunlessness have made that people suspicious of spontaneity, I think. Even Scandinavian hearths are designed to discourage any random flame.
Much as I find their English ritual reassuring, so self-confident is it, I am forced to decline the pans of greasy bacon, eggs, tomatoes and fried bread with which the co-nationalists celebrate their arrival in the Mediterranean. Contenting myself with some bread and a little marmalade, I watch through the portholes the scheduled tourists, many of them day-trippers from France, Spain and Gibraltar. I doubt if tourism has changed much. A quick rush around the main points of interest - sometimes infrequent or pathetic - thirty minutes to see the souk, to savour the squalor and filth of foreign parts and shudder with pleasure at a fleeting whiff of Africa before being steered back to the security and comfort of their P&O or French Line cabins. Whereupon another parlour in Toulouse acquires a camel saddle or a brass hookah and some Guildford sitting-room shall soon sport a set of shoddy Bedouin flintlocks. They brought them in to me in bushels when I still dealt in general goods, before this present interest in old clothes enabled me to become an antiquarian costumier and exploit, I will admit, that folie de nostalgie which reflects youth’s unadmitted yearning for the spiritual values of their forefathers. They think that by wearing those clothes they will somehow restore the Golden Age. I say I would like to see this Golden Age of theirs. I point out into Portobello Road where the chip papers and the Wimpy boxes lie trapped in rotten fruit and animal droppings. Is it here? Or where? Firt mick tsu ahin, ikh bet aykh! I tell them clearly both who and what is to blame - and they laugh at me or swear or even threaten now I am too old to fight. There is nothing wrong with the Old Testament. I know what it is to be a Jeremiah. It is not an insult. They call me ‘anti-Semite’. I tell them they are ignorant fools. Our whole civilisation is Semitic. What is civilised about us is Semitic. Are these the statements of an anti-Semite? You will never hear me say anything against those great Semitic founders of our civilisation who brought about the Golden Ages, the real Golden Ages, of Sumeria, Babylon and, yes, Ancient Israel. But, at some point in the life of their race, noble Semites fell to internal warring and from there, exhausted, slipped into despondent slavery whereupon, for the price of their immortal souls, they bought from Satan a kind of freedom. And still today they fight, this Jew-and-Arab, Arab-and-Jew. As a united people they were great and noble, producers of monumental architecture, sculpture, painting, decoration, literature, philosophy and science. It is as if God punishes them. As if God keeps them perpetually on the very edge of Heaven and is forever devising new means by which to divert them and thwart them from building and keeping for themselves the earthly Paradise He placed around the Middle Sea so that they learned to treasure, not destroy, His gifts to us.