We missed, most of us, the Canal
Company's garden, which happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact
division between East and West.
Up to that point - it is a fringe of palms, stiff against the sky - the
impetus of home memories and the echo of home interests carry the young
man along very comfortably on his first journey. But at Suez one must
face things. People, generally the most sympathetic, leave the boat
there; the older men who are going on have discovered each other and
begun to talk shop; no newspapers come aboard, only clipped Reuter
telegrams; the world seems cruelly large and self-absorbed. One goes for
a walk and finds this little bit of kept ground, with comfortable
garden-gated houses on either side of the path. Then one begins to
wonder - in the twilight, for choice - when one will see those palms again
from the other side. Then the black hour of homesickness, vain regrets,
foolish promises, and weak despair shuts down with the smell of strange
earth and the cadence of strange tongues.
Cross-roads and halting-places in the desert are always favoured by
djinns and afrits. The young man will find them waiting for him in the
Canal Company's garden at Port Said.
On the other hand, if he is fortunate enough to have won the East by
inheritance, as there are families who served her for five or six
generations, he will meet no ghouls in that garden, but a free and a
friendly and an ample welcome from good spirits of the East that awaits
him. The voices of the gardeners and the watchmen will be as the
greetings of his father's servants in his father's house; the evening
smells and the sight of the hibiscus and poinsettia will unlock his
tongue in words and sentences that he thought he had clean forgotten,
and he will go back to the ship (I have seen) as a prince entering on
his kingdom.
There was a man in our company - a young Englishman - who had just been
granted his heart's desire in the shape of some raw district south of
everything southerly in the Sudan, where, on two-thirds of a member of
Parliament's wage, under conditions of life that would horrify a
self-respecting operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men in a
year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of fever. He had been moved
to work very hard for this billet by the representations of a friend in
the same service, who said that it was a 'rather decent sort of
service,' and he was all of a heat to reach Khartum, report for duty,
and fall to. If he is lucky, he may get a district where the people are
so virtuous that they do not know how to wear any clothes at all, and so
ignorant that they have never yet come across strong drink.
