Like vergers in a
cathedral and say, 'We'll see if it can be managed.' They double down
the alleyway and shout, 'Matcham' or 'Ponting' or 'Guttman,' and in
fifteen seconds one of those swift three has the taps going and the
towels out. Real ships are not annexes of Westminster Abbey or Borstal
Reformatory. They supply decent accommodation in return for good money,
and I imagine that their directors instruct their staffs to look pleased
while at work.
Some generations back there must have been an idea that the P. & O. was
vastly superior to all lines afloat - a sort of semipontifical show not
to be criticised. How much of the notion was due to its own excellence
and how much to its passenger-traffic monopoly does not matter. To-day,
it neither feeds nor tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships well
enough to put on any airs at all.
For which reason, human nature being what it is, it surrounds itself
with an ungracious atmosphere of absurd ritual to cover grudged and
inadequate performance.
What it really needs is to be dropped into a March North Atlantic,
without any lascars, and made to swim for its life between a C.P.R. boat
and a North German Lloyd - till it learns to smile.
II
A RETURN TO THE EAST
The East is a much larger slice of the world than Europeans care to
admit. Some say it begins at St. Gothard, where the smells of two
continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car
dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Venice on warm April
mornings. But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail - that
shark's fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white
bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a suggestion of menace,
a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or
fruiting or coasting.
'This is not my ancestral trade,' she whispers to the accomplice sea.
'If everybody had their rights I should be doing something quite
different; for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, she was the
Dhow, and between the two of 'em they made Asia.' Then she tacks,
disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative
steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, as it were, up her
baggy sleeves.
Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show
their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness. They are all
children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it
was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope
and patch.
Old Port Said had disappeared beneath acres of new buildings where one
could walk at leisure without being turned back by soldiers.
Two or three landmarks remained; two or three were reported as still in
existence, and one Face showed itself after many years - ravaged but
respectable - rigidly respectable.
'Yes,' said the Face, 'I have been here all the time. But I have made
money, and when I die I am going home to be buried.'
'Why not go home before you are buried, O Face?'
'Because I have lived here so long. Home is only good to be buried
in.'
'And what do you do, nowadays?'
'Nothing now. I live on my rentes - my income.'
Think of it! To live icily in a perpetual cinematograph show of excited,
uneasy travellers; to watch huge steamers, sliding in and out all day
and all night like railway trucks, unknowing and unsought by a single
soul aboard; to talk five or six tongues indifferently, but to have no
country - no interest in any earth except one reservation in a
Continental cemetery.
It was a cold evening after heavy rain and the half-flooded streets
reeked. But we undefeated tourists ran about in droves and saw all that
could be seen before train-time. 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.
