Leisure time is a variety to tireful affairs. God Almighty created
the Universe in six days and took a rest in the seventh. He
wished to teach us the necessity of leisure time. Man soon discovered
by experience that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ But
this leisure time may be dangerous and ill-used if the mind will not
take its handle and move it wisely to different directions. Many
people love idleness. It is a great prodigality which leads to ruin.
Many Egyptians spend their times in cafés longing for women and
tracking them with their eyes, which corrupts and pollutes manners.
They are perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime. Others try
to have rest through gumbling, which is the scourge of society and
individual. But let _us_ rather enjoy external nature, the beautiful
leavy trees, the flourishing fields, and the vast lawns of green
grass starred with myriads of flowers of greater or small size. There
the birds sing and build their nests, the meandering canals flow with
fresh water, and the happy peasants, toiling afar from the multitude
of town life, purify the human wishes from personal stain. Also
museums are instructive. It is quite wrong to keep to usual work and
fatigable studies, but quite right to free our minds from the web of
wordly affairs in which they are entangled.
Yes, let us with the lark leave our beds to enjoy the cool breeze
before sunrise. Let us when the lasy or luxurious are snoring or sunk
in their debaucheries sit under the shady trees and meditate. We
can think of God, the river and the moon, and enjoy the reading of
Gray’s _Elegy_ to perfection. We shall brush the dues on the lawn at
sunrise, for,
A country life is sweat
In moderate cold and heat.
Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable
passions, wise moral and good pathos: reading maketh a full man,
nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument
at little price. ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law
which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the
sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of
the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the
sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better
than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do
a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a
sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that
the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or
the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the
Egyptian Exhibition, and the soldier may go to the sea to practice
swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may
take shelter in time of war.
Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his
books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among
the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and
Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it
is his own fault. He _can_ be happy if his leisure time brings profit
and not disgrace.
‘The Diploma Class students are supposed to be four years in advance
of my own, and, not being of the moneyed class, are more interested
in passing their examinations with distinction. Also, since their
careers as teachers of English depend on the continuance of the
British military occupation, they take the morality of this
regime more seriously than the University students, who are mostly
the sons of pashas. These, with few exceptions, suffer from the
bankruptcy of modern Egyptian life; they are able to take neither
European culture nor their own Islamic traditions seriously. So far
as I can make out from talking with the more intelligent of them,
what Egypt asks for is a European government and education free of
European political domination, but with a European technical personnel
in the key positions, which it cannot do without and will pay highly
for. Egypt can never be a great independent spiritual or political
force in the Near East, but because of its wealth it can become at
least the commercial centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Turkey is already
a modern European country; Egypt will remain for some time yet
eighteenth-century in spirit—a compromise between political romanticism
and religious classicism. For a generation or two yet the descendants
of the landowners enriched by European administration will continue to
“spend their times in cafés longing for women,” and to be “perplexed
and annoyed by the length of daytime,” while “the happy peasants” go
on “toiling afar from the multitude of town life.” And my professional
successors will continue to become “fatigable and fond of leisure.”’
* * * * *
For I had already decided to resign. So had the professor of Latin,
my only English colleague. And the one-legged professor of French
Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on.
The Egyptians were most hospitable. I attended one heavy banquet,
at the Semiramis Hotel, given by the Minister of Education. Tall
Sudanese waiters dressed in red robes served a succession of the most
magnificent dishes that I have seen anywhere, even on the films.
I remember particularly a great model of the Cairo Citadel in ice,
with the doors and windows filled with caviare which one scooped out
with a golden Moorish spoon. I heard recently that this banquet, which
must have cost thousands, has not yet been paid for. I found little
to do in Egypt (since I had no intention of mixing with the British
official class, joining the golf club, or paying official calls) but
eat coffee-ices at Groppi’s, visit the open-air cinemas and sit at home
in our flat at Heliopolis and get on with writing. My sister, who lived
near, continued sisterly. During the season of the Khamsin, a hot wind
which sent the temperature up on one occasion to 113 degrees in the
shade, I put the finishing touches to a book called _Lars Porsena, or
The Future of Swearing and Improper Language_. I also worked on a study
of the English ballad.
The best thing that I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old King Seti
the Good unwrapped of its mummy-cloths in the Cairo Museum. Nearly all
the best things in Egypt were dead. The funniest thing was a French
bedroom farce played in Arabic by Syrian actors in a native theatre.
The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on
opposite sides of the stage. They sang French songs (in translation),
varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of
their own music. The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts,
oranges, sunflower-seeds and heads of lettuces.
I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic
year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at
the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told to
collect it from his A.D.C. He asked me how I found Egypt and I said:
‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly.
‘Only all right?’ That was all that passed between us. He believed
in his job more than I did in mine. He used to drive through Cairo in
a powerful car, with a Union Jack flying from it, at about sixty miles
an hour. He had motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way—Sir Lee Stack,
the Sirdar, had been killed the year before while driving through
Cairo and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day I
was shown the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened;
there was a crowd at the spot which I at first took for a party of
sightseers, but the attraction proved to be a naked woman lying on
the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms. She was one of the
_hashish_ dope-cases that were very common in Egypt. The crowd was
jeering at her; the policeman a few yards off paid no attention.
I attended a levee at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It
began early, at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable
precedence to the staff of the University; it came in soon after the
diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before
the army. While still in England I had been warned to buy suitable
clothes—a morning coat and trousers—for this occasion. To be really
correct my coat should have had green facings, green being the national
colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon.
Opinions differed greatly as to what was suitable Court-dress; most of
the French professors arrived in full evening dress with swallowtail
coats and white waistcoats, others wore ordinary dinner jackets. Most
of them had opera-hats; they all had decorations round their necks.
They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball. After
signing my name in the two large hotel registers, one belonging
to the King and the other to the Queen, I was given a refreshing
rice-drink, a courtesy of the Queen’s. I then went up the noble
marble staircase. On every other step stood an enormous black soldier,
royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye commented
on their somewhat listless attitudes; but, no doubt, they pulled
themselves smartly to attention when the Egyptian army general staff
went past. I had been warned that when I met King Fuad I must not be
surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was
apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he was nervous. When
he was a child his family had been shot up by an assassin employed
by interested relatives; and Fuad had taken cover under a table and,
though wounded, had survived. We were moved from room to room. At last
a quiet Turkish-looking gentleman of middle age, wearing regulation
Court-dress, greeted us deferentially in French; I took him for the
Grand Chamberlain. I bowed and said the same thing in French as the
professor in front of me had said, and expected to be led next to the
Throne Room. But the next stage was the cloak-room once more. I had
already met King Fuad. And no Eastern magnificence or wheezing cry.
I attended a royal soiree a few days later. The chief event was a
theatrical variety show. The performance was predominantly Italian.
King Fuad had been educated in Italy, where he attained the rank of
captain in the Italian cavalry, and had a great regard for Italian
culture. (He was ignorant of English, but was a good French scholar.)
The performance belonged to the 1870’s. There was a discreet blonde
shepherdess who did a hopping dance in ankle-length skirts, and a
discreet tenor who confined his passion to his top notes; and there
was a well-behaved comedian who made nice little jokes for the Queen.
I clapped him, because I liked him better than the others, and
everybody looked round at me; I realized that I had done the wrong
thing. An official whispered to me that it was a command performance
and that the actors were, therefore, entitled to no applause. Unless
His Majesty was himself amused the turns must be greeted in silence. I
was wearing Court-dress again but, not to be outdone by the Frenchmen,
I had put on my three campaigning medals—and wished that I had that St.
Anne of the Third Class with the Crossed Swords. And the refreshments!
I will not attempt to describe that Arabian Night buffet; it was so
splendid indeed that it has remained a mere blur in my memory. I
pocketed some particularly fantastic confections to bring home to the
children.
What caused me most surprise in Egypt was the great number of camels
there. I had thought of them only as picture-postcard animals. I had
not expected to see thousands of them in the streets of Cairo, holding
up the motor traffic—in long trains, tied head to rump, with great
sacks of green fodder on their backs.
Our children were a great anxiety. They had to drink boiled milk and
boiled water and be watched all the time to prevent them from taking
off their topees and blue veils. Then they all got measles and were
carried off to an isolation hospital, where they were fed on all the
things that we had been particular since their birth not to give them;
and the native nurses stole their toys. They returned very thin and
wretched-looking and we wondered if we should ever get them safely
home. We booked our passages some time at the end of May. We had only
just enough money for third-class on a small Italian boat with a cargo
of onions. We disembarked at Venice and stopped a day there. After
Egypt, Venice seemed like Heaven. It could never again be to me
what it was that day. I had a European egg in Venice. Egyptian eggs
were about the size of a pigeon’s egg and always tasted strongly of the
garlic which seemed to form a large part of the diet of the Egyptian
fowl.
There are plenty of caricature scenes to look back on in Egypt. Among
them, for instance, myself dressed in my smart yellow gaberdine suit
and seated at a long, baize-covered table in the Faculty Conference
Room. In front of me is a cup of Turkish coffee, a sun helmet, and a
long record in French of the minutes of the last meeting. I am talking
angry bad French at my Belgian and French colleagues in support of the
young professor of Latin, who has just leaped to his feet, pale with
hatred. He is declaring in worse French that he positively refuses
to make a forced contribution of fifty piastres to a memorial wreath
for one of the Frenchmen (who had just died), since he was never
consulted. I am declaring that neither will I, blustering to him in
English that so far as I am concerned all dead Frenchmen can go bury
themselves at their own expense. The lofty, elegant room, once a harem
drawing-room—a portrait of the late Khedive, with a large rent in it,
hanging at a tipsy slant at one end of the room; at the other a large
glass showcase, full of Egypto-Roman brass coins, all muddled together,
their labels loose, in one corner. Through the window market-gardens,
buffaloes, camels, countrywomen in black. Around the table my
horrified, shrugging colleagues, turning to each other and saying:
‘Inoui.... Inoui....’ And outside the rebellious shouts of our students
working themselves up for another strike.
The rest makes no more than conversation—of the Government clerk who
was so doubly unfortunate as to be run over by a racing-car and to find
that the driver was the eldest son of the Minister of Justice;
and of the rich girl in search of a husband who went as paying guest
at fifteen guineas a week to the senior Government official’s wife,
agreeing to pay for all wines and cigars and extras when society came
to dine, and who, meeting only senior Government officials and their
wives, complained that she did not get her money’s worth; and of my
night visit to the temple of a headless monkey-god, full of bats;
and of the English cotton manufacturer who defended the conditions
in his factory on the ground that the population of Egypt since the
British came had been increasing far too rapidly, and that pulmonary
consumption was one of the few checks on it; and of the student’s
mother who, at the sports, said how much she regretted having put
him on the mantelpiece when a baby and run off (being only twelve
years old) to play with her dolls; and of ‘The Limit,’ so named by
Australians during the war, who told my three years’ fortune by
moonlight under the long shadow of the pyramid of Cheops—told it truly
and phrased it falsely; and of the Arab cab-driver who was kind to his
horses; and of my visit to Chawki Bey, the national poet of Egypt,
in his Moorish mansion by the Nile, who was so like Thomas Hardy and
in whose presence his sons, like good Turks, sat dutifully silent;
and of the beggar in the bazaar with too many toes; and of the veiled
vengeance there who tried to touch us; and of the official who, during
the war, on a dream of dearth, had played Joseph, dumping half the
wheat of Australia in Egypt, where it found no buyers and was at last
eaten by donkeys and camels, and who told me that the whole secret of
vivid writing was to use the active rather than the passive voice—to
say ‘Amr-ibn-el-Ass conquered Egypt,’ rather than ‘Egypt was conquered
by Amr-ibn-el-Ass’; and of a visit to ancient dead Heliopolis
with its lovely landscape of green fields, its crooked palm trees,
its water-wheels turned by oxen, and its single obelisk; and of the
other Heliopolis, a brand-new dead town on the desert’s edge, built by
a Belgian company, complete with racecourse and Luna Park, where the
R.A.F. planes flew low at night among the houses, and where the bored
wives of disappointed officials wrote novels which they never finished,
and painted a little in water-colours; and of the little garden of
our flat where I went walking on the first day among the fruit-trees
and flowering shrubs, and how I came upon no less than eight lean and
mangy cats dozing in the beds, and never walked there again; and of
the numerous kites, their foul counterpart in the sky and in the palm
trees; and, lastly, of that fabulous cross-breed between kite and cat
which woke us every morning at dawn, a creature kept as a pet in a
neighbouring tenement inhabited by Syrians and Greeks, whose strangled
cock-a-doodle-doo was to me the dawn-cry of modern Egypt. (Empty
cigar-box—no applause—and I thank you.)
So back to Islip; much to the disappointment of my parents, who thought
that I had at last seen reason and settled down to an appointment
suited equally to my needs and my talents; and to the undisguised
relief of my sister-in-law.
* * * * *
The story trails off here. But to end it with the return from
Egypt would be to round it off too bookishly, to finish on a note of
comfortable suspense, an anticipation of the endless human sequel. I
am taking care to rob you of this. It is not that sort of story. From
a historical point of view it must be read, rather, as one of gradual
disintegration. By the summer of 1926 the disintegration was already
well-advanced. Incidents of autobiographical pertinence became fewer
and fewer.
When we came back Nancy’s health was very much better, but none of us
had any money left. There were a number of books to be sold, chiefly
autographed first editions of modern poets; and Lawrence came to the
rescue with a copy of his _Seven Pillars_ marked, ‘Please sell when
read,’ which fetched over three hundred pounds.
In 1927 Jonathan Cape wrote to me suggesting that I should write a book
for boys about Lawrence. There was not much time to do it to have it
ready for autumn publication (about two months)—and Lawrence was in
India and I had to get his permission and send parts of the manuscript
there for him to read and pass. Lowell Thomas anticipated me with a
_Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrence_; so I decided to make mine a general
book, three times the length of his, working eighteen hours a day at
it. Most of those to whom I wrote for information about Lawrence,
including His Majesty the King, gave me their help. The only rebuff I
got was from George Bernard Shaw, who wrote me the following postcard:
Eyot St. Lawrence,
Welwyn, Herts.
8_th June_ 1927.
A great mistake. You might as well try to write a funny book about
Mark Twain. T. E. has got all out of himself that is to be got. His
name will rouse expectations which you will necessarily disappoint.
Cape will curse his folly for proposing such a thing, and never give
you another commission. Write a book (if you must) about the dullest
person you know; clerical if possible. Give yourself a chance.