William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘Why divorce? He’s a good man.’

‘But I want to marry you.’

‘He might die,’ I said, ‘of hydrophobia. Wait and see.’

‘How long?’

‘Perhaps not very long. All is in the hands of God — and Aunt Teresa.’

She paused, thoughtful.

‘If you go on loving me, and I go on loving you — what else do we want?’

‘Oh, that’s all right, we shall go on and on and on!’

She cooed like a dove.

From Port Said, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel and I set out for Cairo. On the platform at the station I saw Wells’s First and Last Things and bought it.

‘Buy me a Daily Mail , darling,’ said Sylvia.

The hot, weary journey. Restaurant-car like anywhere else, but Arab waiters in red fezes. The head waiter, whose conception of the lunch seemed to be to get it over in order to begin the second lunch, and to get that over in order to get over the third lunch, exhorted us to take our places, and the waiters, urged on by the head waiter, rushed us through our meal. The man next to me winked one eye at me. ‘They don’t ’arf chuck it at yer!’ he remarked; thus, in a second, wafting us to the Thames-side from where he sprang. But we looked out of the window at the whirling fields of Egypt: a white-robed Arab leading a donkey, a dusky young woman flashed by. On, on, and on.

Cairo at last. We stepped into the victoria and drove off, my knees touching Sylvia’s as I sat on the little seat, facing her. Why had she bought that hideous hat, which was like a helmet, covering wholly the upper portion of her face which was entirely lovely, and revealing but the lower part which was less lovely? And sitting there, I thought, as the carriage wafted us out of the station confines into the splendours of the city, that I shouldn’t have overtipped the Arab porter as I did. But then I could not very well have asked for change with Sylvia and Uncle waiting for me in the carriage. So there you are, and as we drove along I had to make the best of it. Still, why that hat?

‘Darling, why that hat?’

‘Eighty-seven rupees,’ she said. ‘Besides, it protects against sunstroke.’

There was a pause. The still angel winged by.

‘Poor Natàsha.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t I bring my uniform? We ought to have called on Lord Allenby,’ observed Uncle Emmanuel.

Sun-scorched houses, shuttered windows, elegant victorias, red-fezed coachmen. But, withal, distrust verging on hostility. And when we set out, on camels and dromedaries, to see the Sphinx and the pyramids, the look upon my driver’s face was a dark leer, foreboding the rebellion of the Moslem world, and Uncle Emmanuel, balancing himself upon the dromedary’s hump, looked small and frightened, while the white-robed Arabs all the way along kept yelling for ‘Backshish! Backshish!’ or selling us, at intervals, Egyptian coins dating back to 2,000 years B.C. (actually manufactured by an enterprising firm in Sheffield for the benefit of unsuspecting tourists).

But the failure to fall in with the driver’s offer to backshish him or to buy his coins always meant his giving the dromedary a vicious whack with his big stick which sent the animal a-cantering in a most unpleasant fashion, so that Uncle Emmanuel from the uneasy vantage of the hump, exclaimed: ‘ Cessez! Ah! Voyons donc! ’ in anguished protest.

‘Backshish!’ cried the Arab.

‘No!’

And he whacked the animal again, so that my uncle found it difficult to keep his balance on the hump, which pitched and tossed like the mast of a small schooner in a heavy sea. Arrived at the foot of the pyramids, two Arabs climbed to the top in less than three minutes, and then demanded a backshish. Backshished, they offered to repeat the feat provided we backshished them all over again.

The Sphinx — what did he think of it all? For, contrary to tradition, the Sphinx, I insist, is male. He was right: life was terrible. He knew that talking, writing, even at its best, was prating. To make a statement, unless it be safeguarded by a thousand definitions (when it were better it had not been made at all), is to prate. To state is to ignore. To maintain a position is to maintain a false position. To maintain no position is to negate existence. To assert is to give oneself the lie. To cease asserting is to give the lie to other men’s assertions — the sanction to that lie. To know, to know all, would mean to be silent; indeed, what is there in the world to do for such as he? Will you have him explain that things are and are not; that we have a will and have not; that we change and change not? There are moments when one feels uncertain about everything, even the essential, fundamental things of life; when one gropes in the darkness waiting for the light to return; when all is transient, vague, unfounded, casual, one’s soul not worth expressing; when every phrase seems arbitrary, every page a string of sentences beginning with ‘perhaps’. It is as if one trod upon an empty world, an atmosphere of void, a universe of nothing. Hush! if the whole world be unreal, by what standard, what undying reality is it so? If we are to be dead for all time, by what living truth is it to be?

Arrived back from where we had started, the Arab drivers demanded more backshish. We refused — and they cursed our children and our children’s children into the seventh generation.

Next day we went by motor to the splendid Cairo suburb Heliopolis — the Monte Carlo of the East. How luxurious and for the most part how vain. A faint melancholy summer day was nearing to its close, and there was that other feeling that … a little more, and it would all be over. In the evening we sat in the park, along with others, round in a circle. The flower beds are so symmetrical, so neatly laid out. We watch the flower beds, we watch our sticks and parasols. How dull and how senseless. Among other things, the mosquitoes are biting through the socks atrociously. I think: as days gone by have crumbled into dust beneath my feet, so my future days will crumble — give them time; and the unmeaning present, poising, pale, in the abyss, shall fall — and be no more. I felt sorry for Sylvia and for myself, and for the Arabs, over whom we had come — God knows why — to exercise a perennial fatherly control, and even for the simple-minded, cheerful, military brass-hats who were making asses of themselves. Their band played absurd music in the hot, stifling, melancholy air. One sat and drank against the all-invading heat. And life passed, and one hardly minded its passing.

At night, when we walked down the dormant Cairo streets, harlots called after us from the balconies, enticing us to come up, and Uncle Emmanuel waved his hand to them. Sylvia in bed, my uncle insisted on my seeing the kan-kan , the danse du ventre , the big black man, and the rest of it. Perhaps I am too much of a puritan, but the sight of the nude Arab woman kan-kaning was enough for me.

‘Let us go home.’

‘ Ah, c’est la vie !’

And walking home, through the stifling night, all the time there was that feeling that … a little more of this, and we shall go forth into more bleak, more real experiences.

When we came back from Cairo we found the General with the mad eyes, who had not been allowed on shore, wearily strolling about the deck in his sweat-eaten canvas shoes, like a cat on a deserted raft. He would, he decided, go on to Gibraltar and thence, through Spain, to Italy. We found a cable for us from Gustave, who confirmed Uncle Emmanuel’s appointment as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee, with a salary of 300 francs per mensem .

On Friday morning we left Port Said — the gate into Europe — and passed into the astounding deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea. In the quiet blue waters Beastly had risen, and Berthe and he were standing a good deal together at the rail. But I do not think that anything came of it. At Gibraltar a white motor-boat flying the naval ensign came up cutting the water, with two white-capped sailors standing up at the stern and three naval officers inside in white flannels and white-topped caps. They asked for ‘General Pokhitonoff’, and left word that he should not be allowed on shore.