It is not the Semite I fear. It is the ‘Jew’ and the ‘Arab’. All that is barbaric, decadent, immoral, everything which engulfed and drowned that great civilisation as surely as it were Atlantis, can be explained in those two words. They are the creeds of the barbarians who overran Semitic Africa and Mesopotamia, challenging the sublime justice of those Greeks who were themselves the inheritors of the ancient world’s best. And I do not say this Semitic decline was consistent. Until idolatry and war finally divided it, there were times when it seemed halted, when the sanity of the Phoenicians still mediated the lust for conquest best symbolised by haughty Carthage. There were periods when the ages of Solomon and David and Haroun al-Raschid seemed to have come again, before that bizarre will for self-destruction overtook them in quarrels and warfare, even to this very day, where Egypt sides with Syria and Libya sides with Algeria and Algeria sides with Syria against Egypt and Libya or Iraq or Jordan and even the time-bomb that is Israel cannot unite them or, the thought is impossible, persuade them to consider uniting with their fellow Semites to found a common state where religion becomes a matter of spiritual choice, not of politics or of life, or of death. This is the ‘principle’ they would export to the West, to match Voltaire’s or Tom Paine’s? But they have won, anyway. It is no longer even permitted to voice such warnings any more, let alone represent, them in Parliament. More and more we descend to imitating them, our old principles and virtues forgotten. Certainly allow these people to bring back blood-war and the feudal system! They have that ambition in common, at least, with Comrade Stalin. (Nobody in Russia was surprised by this. They know their Georgians. Those people are themselves scarcely a footstep away from Allah.) I am not, you must realise, saying we should do away with those hopeless millions, but at least we might encourage some form of sterilisation? Or, at the minimum, maintain the system which worked so well for everybody in Ukraine, before the Bolsheviks, before the Babi Gorge was anything more than the background of my first great triumph as I ascended into the purity and freedom of the skies. Now infamous smoke obscures that vision, that wonderful memory; yet no single one of us, I think, is to blame for that. If we conspired, we conspired in ignorance. If we all colluded, it was in our determination to believe that there were simple political answers to our ills, in our clinging to old simple virtues, to old securities, as a falling man will innocently cling to a rotten limb, believing himself saved.
Captain Quelch has some business ashore but none of the rest of us wish to go through the complications of passports and bargaining involved in landing so, after we both receive the captain’s assurance that he will enquire for news at the local police station, Mrs Cornelius and I return to our former closeness around the phonograph, singing snatches from the latest records. ‘I’m tellin’ the birds, tellin’ the trees . . .’ murmurs Whispering Jack Smith to Mrs Cornelius’s rudimentary soft-shoe shuffle, while I pretend that my plate is a ukelele. ‘You can bring Pearl, she’s a darned nice girl. . .’
‘I miss my Swiss . . .’
‘I’m the Sheikh of Araby, as all the world can see!’
As we try out the Charleston to the music of the Savoy Orpheans, Esmé enters the saloon and stands at a critical distance until we stop. Mrs Cornelius has the giggles.
I gasp, ‘What is it, my dearest?’
‘I was hoping to go ashore,’ Esmé says. ‘To do some shopping. I need proper clothes. And other things. For women.’
‘No need ter worry there, dear,’ says Mrs C. ‘I’ve a bloody suitcase full o’ stuff. Yer carn’t be too bloody careful in these parts. I know to me corst.’
‘I wish my own.’ Esmé mutters this last in English, staring at the floor.
‘Suit yerself.’ Mrs Cornelius shakes her head and collapses into a cane armchair. My girl receives from me a glance of admonition for rejecting a friendly gesture. I remain mysteriously awkward when both women are present. Perhaps I make them jealous.
‘We shall be disembarking in a few days now.’ I hope to placate her. ‘In Alexandria. Where they have English shops. They have a Whiteley’s, so I’ve heard.’
‘There are French shops in Tangier,’ she declares. ‘There is a Samaritain and a Bazar Nürnberg.’
‘Wot yer want wiv Kraut knickers?’ Mrs Cornelius has risen to change the record. It is noon, now, and seems warmer than the barometer’s guide.
‘I fear that one pair will not last me an entire journey.’ Esmé is sharp but no match for my old friend.
‘I wouldn’ve thort you’ve ‘ad ‘em on for more’n a minnit.’
This bickering was not confined to the women. Virtually everyone aboard not from the South China Seas was suddenly at odds with everyone else. I would be relieved to reach Alexandria where the confines of the ship would no longer force so many temperamental human beings into over-frequent contact. O.K. Radonic, of such usually placid temper, was refusing to take his meals with the rest of the film crew, Chief Kramp had become gloomily reclusive, while Grace had fallen in love with a laskar and was no longer as attentive to Esmé as he had been. Only myself and Captain Quelch, perhaps because we still discovered so much in common, were content. I wished, indeed, that I could please my girl, but most of the time she had little need of what I could offer. The friction between me and Mrs C. at least was over, though she made one or two jibes, demanding to know how much Quelch and I had got for ‘the big buck’. I longed for a telegram from Captain Fromental to say that Mr Mix was safe and sound. I longed still more to hear that my reels were recovered! Recently the Second Officer, Bolsover, had begun to make notes, in an extremely small hand, on a pocket-sized pad of the kind carried by a police constable. He seemed to be starting some sort of account. I had watched him in the evenings when the rest of us were entertaining ourselves. Seated in a corner he wrote down the number of gins the captain had taken with the passengers, how many whiskies the barman had donated to his favoured customers. I think he had some idea of reporting Quelch and the rest of us to the owner, but I was not sure even Goldfish would concern himself with such pettiness. After all, our little picture was not costing a fraction of what had been spent on Ben Hur before the whole thing was recalled to Hollywood and built again in Burbank. Since we were most of us under contract, very little money was being wasted at all, and if the movie play were a success it might compensate for some of the more costly failures at that time alarming the cinema world. Temptress of the Pyramids, as we currently called it, would not merely be a popular success, it would positively impress the jaded critics. Wolf Seaman was, I guessed, staking his future reputation on it. His brand of ‘jazz-baby satire’ had worn a little thin and historical spectacle, especially associated with the Orient, was the taste of the day. In this, at least, we were secure. Goldfish wanted his ship as far from American waters as possible and I think he felt much the same about Seaman, just one more foreign embarrassment like Maurice Maeterlinck. Indeed, it was almost impossible for anyone to like the Swede. He combined Scandinavian high-mindedness with a Teutonic aggressiveness, a blend which no doubt made Catherine the Great the woman she was. Unfortunately he had neither that lady’s looks nor her charm.