When the Going Was Good Read online

  We went to Cana of Galilee, where a little girl was offering wine jars for sale. They were the authentic ones used in the miracle. If they were too big she had a smaller size indoors; yes, the small ones were authentic, too. Then we drove on to Tiberias, a small fishing village of cubic houses on the Sea of Galilee. There were the ruins of some kind of fort and a white domed public bath of steaming mineral water. We were led into this bath. In the courtyard a kind of picnic was going on; an Arab family sitting on the ground and eating bread and raisins. It was almost dark in the bath; the naked bathers lay about in the steam undisturbed by our intrusion. We lunched at Nazareth in an hotel managed by Germans, and ate omelettes, rissoles, and pork, and drank an uncommendable wine called Jaffa Gold. During luncheon the rain stopped. We went to visit the holy places. We were shown the site of the Annunciation and Joseph’s Workshop; both these were caves. A cheerful Irish monk with a red beard opened the gates for us. He was as sceptical as ourselves about the troglodytic inclinations of the Holy Family. The attitude of my fellow travellers was interesting. This sensible ecclesiastic vexed them. They had expected someone very superstitious and credulous and medieval, whom they would be able to regard with discreet ridicule. As it was, the laugh was all on the side of the Church. It was we who had driven twenty-four miles, and had popped our tribute into the offertory box, and were being gently humoured for our superstition.

  Outside the church a brisk trade was done in olive-wood paper-weights. Small boys flung themselves at our feet and began cleaning our shoes. A nun sold lace doyleys. An old woman wanted to tell our fortunes. We struggled through these Nazarenes and got back to the cars. Our driver was smoking by himself. The other drivers were ignorant fools, he said. He wasn’t going to waste his time talking to them. He looked with derision at the souvenirs we had bought.

  ‘They are of no interest,’ he said, ‘none whatever. But if you really wished to buy them you should have told me. I could have got them for you at a tenth of the price.’ He lunged out with a spanner and rapped an old man over the knuckles who was trying to sell us a fly-whisk. Then we drove on. The hills were covered with asphodel and anemones and cyclamen. We stopped him, and I got out to pick a bunch for Juliet.

  ‘They will all die before you get back to the ship,’ said the driver.

  Poor Geoffrey had spent the day with the ship’s doctor securing the services of a nurse. They secured a squat young woman of indeterminable nationality, who spoke English of a sort and had had hospital training. She spent the first half-hour scrubbing Juliet and tumbling her from one side of the bed to the other till her temperature rose to formidable heights. Then she scraped her tongue with a nail file. Then she was very sick and retired to her cabin, and poor Geoffrey, who had been up all the night before, shared another night’s vigil with the stewardess (whom the nurse addressed as ‘sister’). They sent this nurse back by train from Port Said. It was the first time she had been at sea. Despite the fact that she had spent the whole of her voyage prostrate in her cabin, she expressed the utmost delight in her experience and applied to the doctor for a permanent position on board. After she had gone Geoffrey found an odd document in the cabin. It was a sheet of the ship’s notepaper. At the very top, above the crest, was a line of very unsteady pencil handwriting. ‘Pneuminia (La Grippe) is a very prevalent epidemic Disease in the spring it is.’

  Many of the passengers left the Stella at Haifa and went on to Egypt by way of Damascus and Jerusalem, rejoining her eight days later at Port Said. The others stayed on board for the night and left next morning by train for Cairo and Luxor. Geoffrey, Juliet, and I, and the two other invalids, were alone on board after the first day at Port Said. Everyone on board values this week of inaction in the middle of the cruise. The officers change into plain clothes and go shopping at Simon Arzt; the sailors and stewards go ashore in jolly batches of six and seven. It is about the only opportunity they have for prolonged land excursions; several of them went up to Cairo for the day. Those who are on duty are employed in renewed prodigies of cleaning, polishing, and painting. We were filled up with fuel and water. The band played on shore in one of the cafés. The Captain gave luncheon-parties to officials and friends. The sun was brilliant and warm without being too hot, and for the first time we were able to sit comfortably on deck without scarves or greatcoats, and watch the continual coming and going of the big ships in the canal basin.

  The only disturbing element in this happy week was Juliet, who was by this time very seriously ill. The doctor pronounced her unfit for travel, and she was accordingly lowered in a stretcher and taken ashore to the British hospital. I accompanied the procession, which consisted of the ship’s doctor, carrying warm brandy and a teaspoon, an officer, Geoffrey, half distracted with anxiety, a dense mob of interested Egyptians, Copts, Arabs, Lascars, and Sudanese, and a squad of ambulance men, two of whom fought the onlookers while the others bundled Juliet – looking distressingly like a corpse – into a motor van. These last men were Greeks, and refused all payment for their services. It was sufficient reward that they were allowed to wear uniform. They must be the only people in the whole of Egypt who have ever done anything for nothing. I met one of them some weeks later marching with a troop of Boy Scouts, and he fell out of the ranks and darted across the road to shake my hand and ask me news of Juliet.

  It was a melancholy journey to the hospital, and a still more melancholy walk back with Geoffrey. The British hospital lies at the far end of the sea front. We passed a game of football, played enthusiastically upon an uneven waste of sand, by Egyptian youths very completely dressed in green and white jerseys, white shorts, striped stockings, and shiny black football boots. They cried ‘’ip-’ip-’ooray’ each time they kicked the ball, and some of them blew whistles; a goat or two wandered amongst them, nosing up morsels of lightly buried refuse.

  We stopped on the terrace of the Casino Hotel for a drink, and a conjuror came and did tricks for us with live chickens. These are called ‘gully-gully men’ because of their chatter. They are the worst possible conjurors but excellent comedians. They squat on the ground, making odd clucking noises in their throats and smiling happily, and proceed with the minimum of deception to pop things in and out of their voluminous sleeves; their final trick is to take a five-piastre piece and drop that up their sleeve, but it is a good entertainment the first two or three times. There was a little Arab girl in the town who had taught herself to imitate them perfectly, only, with a rare instinct for the elimination of inessentials, she used not to bother about the conjuring at all, but would scramble from table to table in the cafés, saying, ‘Gully-gully’, and taking a chicken in and out of a little cloth bag. She was every bit as amusing as the grown-ups and made just as much money. On this particular afternoon, however, Geoffrey was not to be consoled so easily, and the performance seemed rather to increase his gloom. We went back to the ship, and I helped him pack up his luggage and move it to his hotel.

  Two days later I decided to join him.

  The hotel where Geoffrey and I stayed was on the front – a brand new concrete building kept by a retired English officer and his wife. It was recommended by all the British colony in Port Said on the grounds that it was the only place where you could be certain of not meeting any ‘gyppies’. The people we did meet were certainly very British but far from gay. Few people stay in Port Said except for some rather dismal reason. There were two genial canal pilots who lived at Bodell’s permanently, and there was an admirable young lawyer just down from Cambridge who added immeasurably to our enjoyment; he was spending his holiday from the Temple in investigating the night life of Alexandria, Port Said, and Cairo. As some people can instinctively find the lavatories in a strange house, this young man, arriving at the railway station of any town in any continent, could instantly orientate himself towards its disreputable quarter. But apart from him and the pilots, the other guests at Bodell’s were all people on their way through who had been obliged to leave their ships by the illness of wi
ves or children. There was a planter from Kenya with a small daughter and governess; he was returning home for the first time after fourteen years; his wife was lying desperately ill in the hospital. There was a captain in the Tank Corps, on his way out to India for the first time, whose wife had developed appendicitis and had been rushed to the operating theatre. There was a soldier’s wife taking her children home for the hot season; her youngest son had developed meningitis. I grew to dread the evenings at home, when we all sat round in wicker arm-chairs dolefully discussing the patients’ progress, while the gentle Berber servants, with white gowns and crimson sashes, stole in and out with whiskies and sodas, and Mr Bodell attempting to cheer us up with an ancient gramophone and an unintelligible gambling game played with perforated strips of cardboard.

  Geoffrey, the Cambridge solicitor, and I spent two or three evenings investigating the night-town, called by the residents ‘red lamp district’. It lies at the farthest extremity of the town on the shore of Lake Menzaleh, round the little wharf and goods yard of the Menzaleh canal, separated from the shops and offices and hotels by a mile or so of densely populated Arab streets. It is very difficult to find by day, but at night, even without our solicitor’s peculiar gifts, we should have been led there by the taxis full of tipsy sailors and stewards, or grave, purposeful Egyptians, that swept by us in the narrow thoroughfare.

  We set out after dinner one evening, rather apprehensively, with a carefully calculated minimum of money, and life-preservers of lead, leather, and whalebone, with which our solicitor, surprisingly, was able to furnish us; we left watches, rings, and tie-pins on our dressing-tables, and carefully refrained from alarming Juliet with the knowledge of our destination. It was an interesting walk. An absurd tram runs up the Quai du Nord, drawn by a mare and a donkey. We followed this for some way and then struck off to the left through Arab Town. These streets presented a scene of astonishing vivacity and animation. Little traffic goes down them and there is no differentiation of pavement and road in the narrow earthen track; instead, it is overrun with hand-barrows selling, mostly, fruit and confectionery, men and women bargaining and gossiping, innumerable bare-footed children, goats, sheep, ducks, hens, and geese. The houses on either side are wooden, with overhanging balconies and flat roofs. On the roofs are ramshackle temporary erections for store-rooms and hen-houses. No one molested us in any way, or, indeed, paid us the smallest attention. It was Ramadan, the prolonged Mohammedan fast during which believers spend the entire day from sunrise to sunset without food or drink of any kind. As a result the night is spent in feverish feasting; nearly everyone carried a little enamelled bowl of a food resembling some kind of milk pudding, into which he dipped between bites of delicious-looking ring-shaped bread. There were men with highly decorated brass urns selling some kind of lemonade; there were women carrying piles of cakes on their heads. As we progressed the houses became more and more tumble-down and the street more narrow. We were on the outskirts of the small Sudanese quarter where a really primitive life is led. Then suddenly we came into a rough, highly-lighted square with two or three solid stucco-fronted houses and some waiting taxis. One side was open to the black, shallow waters of the lake, and was fringed with the masts of the little fishing-boats. Two or three girls in bedraggled European evening dress seized hold of us and dragged us to the most highly-lighted of the buildings; this had ‘Maison Dorée’ painted across its front, and the girls cried, ‘Gol’-’ouse, gol’-’ouse,’ ‘Vair good, vair clean.’ It did not seem either very good or very clean to me. We sat in a little room full of Oriental decorations and drank some beer with the young ladies. Madame joined us, a handsome Marseillaise in a green silk embroidered frock; she cannot have been more than forty, and was most friendly and amusing. Four or five other young ladies came in, all more or less white; they sat very close together on the divan and drank beer, making laudably little effort to engage our attention. None of them could talk any English, except, ‘Cheerioh, Mr American’. I do not know what their nationality was. Jewesses, Armenians, or Greeks, I suppose. They cost 50 piastres each, Madame said. These were all European ladies. The other, neighbouring houses, were full of Arabs – horrible, dirty places, she said. Some of the ladies took off their frocks and did a little dance, singing a song which sounded like ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay. There was a jolly-sounding party going on upstairs, with a concertina and glass-breaking, but Madame would not let us go up. Then we paid for our drinks and went out.

  Then we went next door to a vastly more plebeian house called Les Folies Bergères, kept by a gross old Arab woman who talked very little French and no English. She had a licence for eight girls, but I do not think hers was a regular establishment. On our arrival a boy was sent out into the streets, and he brought back half a dozen or so Arab girls, all very stout and ugly and carelessly daubed with powder and paint. All round were the little alleys where the freelance prostitutes lived. These were one-roomed huts like bathing cabins. The women who were not engaged sat at their open doors sewing industriously, and between stitches looking up and calling for custom; many had their prices chalked on the door-posts – 25 piastres in some cases, but usually less. Inside iron bedsteads were visible, and hanging banners worked with the crests of British regiments.

  On our way back we came upon another gaily illuminated building called Maison Chabanais. We went in, and were surprised to encounter Madame and all her young ladies from the Maison Dorée. It was, in fact, her back door. Sometimes, she explained, gentlemen went away unsatisfied, determined to find another house, then as often as not they found the way round to the other side, and the less observant ones never discovered their mistake.

  While we were at Port Said, Ramadan came to an end with the feast of Bajiram. All the children were given new clothes – those that could not afford a frock wearing a strip of tinsel or bright ribbon, and paraded the streets on foot or in horse-cabs. The streets of Arab Town were illuminated and hung with flags, and everyone devoted himself to making as much noise as he could. The soldiers fired cannonade after cannonade of artillery; civilians beat drums, blew whistles and trumpets, or merely rattled tin pans together and shouted. This went on for three days.

  There was a fair and two circuses. Geoffrey and I and the head of the hospital went to the circus one evening, much to the bewilderment of one club. The hospital nurses were very shocked at our going. ‘Think of the poor animals,’ they said. ‘We know the way the gyppies treat their animals.’ But, unlike European circuses, there were no performing animals.

  We were the only Europeans in the tent. The chairs were ranged on rather unstable wooden steps ascending from the ring to a considerable height at the back. Behind the back row were a few heavily curtained boxes for the women; there were very few there; most of the large audience consisted of young men. A number of small boys were huddled between the front row and the ringside, and a policeman was employing his time in whisking these off the parapet with a cane. The seats seemed all to be the same price; we paid 5 piastres each and chose places near the back. Attendants were going about between the rows selling nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles. These were of the simplest pattern, consisting simply of a coconut half full of water, a little tin brazier of tobacco, and a long bamboo mouthpiece. The doctor warned me that if I smoked one of these I was bound to catch some frightful disease; I did so, however, without ill effect. The vendor keeps several alight at a time by sucking at each in turn. We all drank coffee, which was very thick and sweet and gritty.

  The show had begun before we arrived, and we found ourselves in the middle of a hugely popular comic turn; two Egyptians in European costume were doing cross-talk. It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was much the same as an English music-hall turn. After what seemed an unconscionable time the comedians went away amid thunderous applause, and their place was taken by a very pretty little white girl in a ballet dress; she cannot have been more than ten or twelve years
old; she danced a Charleston. Later she came round and sold picture postcards of herself. She turned out to be French. To those that enjoy moralizing about such things there is food for reflection in the idea of this African dance, travelling across two continents from slave to gigolo, and gradually moving south again towards the land of its origin.

  Then there were some Japanese jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn performed by the whole company. They sang a kind of doleful folk song and then, one at a time, with enormous elaboration of ‘business’, came in and lay down on the ground; after all the grown-ups were settled the little girl came in and lay down too; finally a tiny child of two or three tottered in and lay down. All this took at least a quarter of an hour. Then they all got up again, still singing, one at a time in the same order, and went out. After that there was an interval, during which everyone left his place and strolled about in the ring as people do at Lord’s between the innings. After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared. First he thrust a dozen or so knitting-needles through his cheeks, so that they protruded on either side of his head; he walked about among the audience bristling in this way and thrusting his face into ours with a fixed and rather frightful grin. Then he took some nails and hammered them into his thighs. Then he stripped off everything except a pair of diamanté drawers, and rolled about without apparent discomfort on a board stuck with sharp carving-knives.