TO THE EAST
I followed my husband to Egypt, where he had returned, in command at
Wady Halfa on the expiration of his leave, on November 14th, 1885. I
went with our eldest little boy and girl. A new experience for me--the
East! One of my longings in childhood was to see the East. There it was
for me.
Cairo in 1885 still retained much of its Oriental aspect in the European
quarter. (I don’t suppose the old, true Cairo will ever change.) I was
just in time. The Shepheard’s Hotel of that day had a terrace in front
of it where we used to sit and watch the life of the street below, an
occupation very pleasing to myself. The building was overrun with a
wealth of flowering creepers of all sorts of loveliness, and surrounded
with a garden. When next we visited Cairo the creepers were being torn
down, and the terrace demolished. Then a huge hotel was run up in
avaricious haste to reap the next season’s harvest from the thronging
visitors, and now stands flush with the street to echo the trams.
It is difficult for me now to revive in memory the exquisite surprise I
felt when first I saw the life of the East. I could hardly believe the
thing was real, everyday life. Though I have often returned to Egypt
since, that first-time feeling never was renewed, though my enjoyment of
Oriental beauty and picturesqueness never, I am glad to say, faded in
the least. Oh, you who enjoy the zest of life, be thankful that you
possess it! It is a thing not to be acquired, but to be born with. I
think artists keep it the longest, for it enters the heart by the eye.
The long letters I wrote to my mother on the spot and at the moment I
incorporated later in the little book already referred to. Oh, the
pleasures of memory, streaked with sadness though they must be, and with
ugly things of all kinds, too! Still, how intensely precious a
possession they are when _weeded_. To me, after Italy and, of course,
the Holy Land, give me the Nile.
I and the children remained in Cairo till I got my husband’s message
from the front that the way was clear enough for our journey as far as
Luxor. There I and the children remained until the fight at Giniss was
won and all danger was over further up stream. At Luxor began the most
enjoyable of all modes of travel--by houseboat. The _dahabiyeh Fostat_
was sent down from Wady Halfa to take us up to Assouan, where my husband
awaited us. We had reached Luxor from Cairo by the commonplace post
boat. The Assouan Dam was, of course, not in existence, and our
_dahabiyeh_ had to be hauled in the old way through the first cataract,
while we transferred ourselves to another _dahabiyeh_ moored off the now
submerged island of Philæ.
This cut-and-dried chronicle includes one of the most enchanting
experiences of my life. Above Philæ we entered Nubia, before whose
intensified colouring the lower desert pales. Time being very precious
to my husband, our slow, dreamy sailing houseboat had to be towed by a
little steamer for the rest of the way to Wady Halfa, where we lived
till the heat of March warned us that I and the children must prudently
go into northern coolness. And to Plymouth we returned, leaving the
General to drag out the burning summer at Wady Halfa in such heat as I
never had had to suffer. While at Halfa I made many sketches in oil for
my picture, “A Desert Grave,” out in the desert across the river. It is
very trying painting in the desert on account of the wind, which blows
the sand perpetually into your eyes. With that and the glare, I took two
inflamed eyes back with me to Europe. The picture should have been more
poetical than it turned out to be, and I wish I could repaint it now. It
was well placed at the Academy. The Upper Nile had these graves of
British officers and men all along its banks during that terrible toll
taken in the course of the Gordon Expedition and after, some in single
loneliness, far apart, and some in twos and threes. These graves had to
be made exactly in the same way as those of the enemy, lest a cross or
some other Christian mark should invite desecration.
The World War has thrown a dreadful cloud between us and those old war
days, but the cloud in time will spread out thinner and let us look
through to those past times.
My next experience was Brittany. Thither we went for a rest, and to give
the children the habit of talking French. At Dinan, in an old farmhouse,
we ruralised amidst orchards and amongst the Breton peasantry. Very nice
and quiet and healthy. There our youngest boy was born, Martin William,
who was immediately inscribed on the army books as liable for service in
the French Army if he reached the age of eighteen on French soil. During
that part of our stay at Dinan I painted the 24th Dragoons, who were
stationed there, leaving the town by the old Porte St. Malo for the
front, a great crowd of people seeing them off. I had mounted dragoons
and peasants for the asking as models.
My husband was knighted--K.C.B.--in this interval, at Windsor. We went
to live in Ireland from Dinan, in 1888, under the Wicklow Mountains,
where the children continued their healthy country life in its fulness.
The picture I had painted of the departing dragoons went to the Academy
in 1889, and in 1890 I exhibited “An Eviction in Ireland,” which Lord
Salisbury was pleased to be facetious about in his speech at the
banquet, remarking on the “breezy beauty” of the landscape, which almost
made him wish he could take part in an eviction himself. How like a
Cecil!
The ‘eighties had seen our Government do some dreadful things in the way
of evictions in Ireland. Being at Glendalough at the end of that decade,
and hearing one day that an eviction was to take place some nine miles
distant from where we were staying for my husband’s shooting, I got an
outside car and drove off to the scene, armed with my paints. I met the
police returning from their distasteful “job,” armed to the teeth and
very flushed. On getting there I found the ruins of the cabin
smouldering, the ground quite hot under my feet, and I set up my easel
there. The evicted woman came to search amongst the ashes of her home to
try and find some of her belongings intact. She was very philosophical,
and did not rise to the level of my indignation as an ardent English
sympathiser. However, I studied her well, and on returning home at
Delgany I set up the big picture which commemorates a typical eviction
in the black ‘eighties. I seldom can say I am pleased with my work when
done, but I _am_ complacent about this picture; it has the true Irish
atmosphere, and I was glad to turn out that landscape successfully which
I had made all my studies for, on the spot, at Glendalough. What storms
of wind and rain, and what dazzling sunbursts I struggled in, one day
the paints being blown out of my box and nearly whirled into the lake
far below my mountain perch! My canvas, acting like a sail, once nearly
sent me down there too. I did not see this picture at all at the
Academy, but I am very certain it cannot have been very “popular” in
England. Before it was finished my husband was appointed to the command
at Alexandria, and as soon as I had packed off the “Eviction,” I
followed, on March 24th, and saw again the fascinating East.
My journey took me _viâ_ Venice, where the P.& O. boat _Hydaspes_ was
waiting. Can any journey to Egypt be more charming than this one, right
across Italy?
Oh! you who do not think a journey a mere means of getting to your
destination as quickly as possible, say, if you have taken the
Milan-Verona-Padua line, is there anything in all Italy to surpass that
burst on the view of the Lago di Garda after you emerge from the Lonato
tunnel? On a blue day, say in spring? If you have not gone that way yet,
I beg you to be on the look-out on your left when you do go. This
wonderful surprise is suddenly revealed, and almost as quickly lost.
Waste not a second. I put up at the “Angleterre” at Venice, on the Riva,
because from there one sees the lagunes and glimpses of the open sea
beyond, and the air is open and fresh.
“_March 28th._--Took gondola for the big P. & O. S.S. which is to be my
home for the next six days. I at once saw the ship was one of their
smartest boats, and all looked very festive on board. Luncheon was
served immediately after my arrival, and I found a bright company
thereat assembled, with Sir Henry and Lady Layard at their head; some
come to see friends off and others to go on. We amalgamated very
pleasantly, and great was the waving of handkerchiefs as we slowly
steamed past the Dogana and the Riva, our returning friends having gone
on shore in gondolas whose sable sides were hidden in brilliant
draperies. The sashes of the gondoliers’ liveries flashed in coloured
silks and gold fringes; the sea sparkled. I rejoiced. The Montalba girls
gave us a salvo of pocket handkerchiefs from their balcony on the
Giudecca. What a gay scene! Lady Layard, on leaving, introduced Mrs. H.
M., who was to join her husband at Brindisi for a long trip in the big
liner from England, and I was very happy at the prospect of her pleasant
and intellectual companionship thus far.”
And so we passed out into the early night on the dim Adriatic, after a
sunset farewell to Venice, which remains to me as one of the tenderest
visions of the past. That voyage to Alexandria is more enjoyable, given
fair weather, than most voyages, because one is hardly ever out of sight
of land, and such classic land, too! The Ionian Islands, “Morea’s
Hills,” Candia. But what a pleasure it is to see on the day before the
arrival the signs that the landing is near at hand. The General in
Command will be waiting at sunrise on the landing stage, perhaps the
light catching the gold lace on his cap, appearing above the turbans of
the native crowd. Of course every one who has been to Egypt knows the
feeling of disappointment at the first sight of its shores, low-lying
and fringed with those incongruous windmills which the Great Napoleon
vainly planted there to teach the natives how better to make flour. In
vain. And so were his wheelbarrows. The natives preferred carrying the
mud in their hands. And the city, how it fails to give you the Oriental
impression you are longing for, with its pseudo-Italian architecture,
its hard paved streets, and dusty boulevards and squares. Government
House on the Boulevard de Ramleh was comfortable, roomy and airy, but I
missed the imagined garden and palm trees of the Cairo official
residence.
“_April 3rd._--We have a view of Cleopatra’s Tomb (so called) to the
right, jutting out into the intensely blue sea, but the other arm of the
bay (the old Roman harbour) to our left, covered with native houses and
minarets, is partly hidden by an abomination which hurts me to
exasperation, one of those amorphous buildings of tenth-rate Italian
vulgarity and dreariness which are being run up here in such quantities,
and rears its gaunt expanse close behind this house. To cap this
erection it has received the title of ‘Bombay Castle.’ Never mind, I
shall soon, in my happy way, cease to notice what I don’t like to see,
and shall enjoy all that is left here of the original East and its
fascinating barbaric beauty. Will took me for a most interesting drive,
first to Ras-el-Tin, during which we threaded a conglomeration of East
and West which was bewildering. There were nightmarish Italian
‘_palazzi_’ loaded with cheap, bluntly-moulded stucco; glaring streets,
cafés, dusty gardens, over-dressed Jewish and Levantine women driving
about in exaggerated hats, frocks and figures; and there also appeared
the dark narrow bazaars and original streets, the latticed windows, the
finely-coloured robes of the natives, the weird goats, the wolfish dogs,
straying about in all directions. Mounds of rubbish everywhere; some
only the leavings of newly-built houses, some the remains of the
bombardment’s havoc, others the dust of a once beautiful city whose
loveliness in old Roman times must have been supreme.
“Only here and there was I reminded of the charm of Cairo--a tree by a
yellow wall, a group of natives eating sugar cane, a water-seller with
his tinkling brass cups and a rose behind his ear, and so on. We then
had a really enjoyable drive along the Mahmoudieh Canal, which was balm
to my mind and eyes. All along the placid water on the opposite bank ran
Arab villages with their accompaniments of palms, buffaloes, goats,
water jars, native men and women in scriptural robes; water wheels;
square-shaped, almost window-less mud dwellings, so appropriate under
that intense light. On our bank were the remnants of Pashadom in the
shape of gimcrack palaces closed and let go to ruin, on account of
fashion having betaken itself to the suburb of Ramleh. These dwellings
were, however, so hidden in deep tropical gardens of great and rich
beauty that they did not offend.
“Beyond the Arab villages on the other bank appeared Lake Mareotis, and
there was a poetical feeling about all that region. It was so strange to
have on one side of a narrow band of water old Egypt and the life of the
East going on just as it has been for ages past, and on the other the
ephemeral tokens of the sham and fleeting life of to-day, and this all
the way along a drive of some two miles. This is the fashionable drive,
and to see young Egypt on horseback, and old Jewry in carriages, passing
and repassing up and down this cosmopolitan Rotten Row is decidedly
trying. My admired friends, the running syces, though, redeem the thing
to me. Their dress is one of the most perfect in shape, colour and
material ever devised. The air was rich with the scent of strange
flowers, some of which billowed over entrance gates in magnificent
purple masses.”
I must be excused for having shown irritation in my Diary at starting. I
soon adapted myself to the entourage, and I hope I “did my manners” as
became my official responsibilities. I liked the Greeks best of
all--nay, I got very fond of these handsome, sunny people.
It was a curiously cosmopolitan society, and I, who am never good at
remembering the little feuds that are always simmering in this kind of
mixed company, must have sometimes made mistakes. I heard a Greek woman,
who had dined with us the previous evening, informing her friends in a
voice fraught with meaning, _”Imaginez, hier au soir chez le Général
Monsieur Gariopulo a donné le bras à Madame Buzzato!”_ The recipients of
this information were filled with mirth. What _had_ I done in pairing
off these two for the procession to dinner?
The British were entrenched at Ramleh. The little stations on the
railway there gave me quite a turn at first sight. One was “Bulkley,”
the next “Fleming,” then “Sydney O. Schutz,” and finally San Stefano at
railhead, and a casino with a corrugated iron roof under that scorching
sun. Oh, that I should see such a thing in Egypt! Cheek by jowl with the
little villas one saw weird Bedouin tents and wild Arabs and their
animals, carrying on their existence as if the Briton had never come
there.
The incongruities of Alexandria became to me positively enjoyable; and
the desert air, as ever, was life-giving. My little Syrian horse,
“Minnow,” carried me many a mile alongside my husband’s charger, over
that pleasant desert sand. But an occasional khamseen wind gave me a
taste of the disagreeable phase of Egyptian weather. I name, with the
vivid recollection of the khamseen’s irritating qualities, the
experience of paying calls (in a nice toilette) under its suffocating
puffs. And how the flies swarm; how they settle in black masses on the
sweetmeats sold in the streets, and hang in tassels from the native
children’s eyes. Oh, yes, there is a seamy side to all things, but it
isn’t my way to turn it up more than is necessary. Here may follow a bit
of Diary:
“_May 22nd._--We had a memorable picnic at Rosetta to-day, with thirty
of the English colony. I had long wished to visit this ancient city,
brick-built and half deserted, a once opulent place, but now mournful in
its decay. I longed to see old Nile once more. We chartered a special
train and left Moharram Bey Station at 8 a.m. I was much pleased with
the seaside desert and the effects of mirage over Aboukir Bay. The
ancient town of Edkou struck me very much. It was built of the small
brown Rosetta brick, and was placed on a hill, giving it a different
aspect from the usual Arab pale-walled villages which are usually built
on level ground. It had thus a peculiar character. Shortly before
reaching Rosetta the land becomes richly cultivated. There is a subtle
beauty about the cultivated regions of this fascinating land of Egypt
which I feel very much. It is the beauty of abundance and richness as
well as of vivid colour.
“At Rosetta dense crowds of natives awaited us and some police were
detailed to escort us through the town. I heard some of the women of our
party wishing they could pick the blue tiles off the minarets, but for
my part I prefer them under their lovely sky and sunshine, rather than
ornamenting mantelpieces in a Kensington fog. A little _musharabieh_
lattice is still left here in the windows and has not yet been taken to
grace the British drawing-rooms of Ramleh. We strolled about the bazaars
and into the old ramshackle mosques, and, altogether, exhausted the
sights. Everywhere in Rosetta you see beautiful little Corinthian marble
columns incorporated with the Arab buildings, and supporting the
ceilings and pulpits of the mosques. They are daubed over with red
plaster. Very often a rich Corinthian capital is used as a base to a
pillar by being turned upside down, so that the shaft, crowned with its
own capital, possesses two--one at each end--an arrangement evidently
satisfactory to the barbarian Arabs who succeeded the classic builders
of the old city. Almost every angle of a house has a Greek column acting
as corner stone. But the brown brickwork is very dismal, and but for the
vivid colours of the people’s dresses the monotony of tone would be
displeasing. This is Bairam, and the people during the three days’ feast
succeeding the dismal Ramadan Fast are in their most radiant dresses,
and revelry and feasting are going on everywhere. Such a mass of moving
colour as was the market place of Rosetta to-day these eyes, that have
seen so much, never looked upon before.
“At last, when we had climbed into enough mosques and poked about into
houses, and through all the bazaars (the fish bazaar was trying), we
went down to the landing stage and took boat for the trysting place,
about a mile up the broad, wind-lashed Nile. Will and the Bishop of
Clifton, sole remaining straggler from the late pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, and half our party had gone on before us; and, after a quick sail
along the palm-fringed bank, we arrived at the pretty landing place
chosen for our picnic. We found a tent pitched and the servants busy
laying the cloth under a dense sycamore, close to an old mosque whose
onion-shaped dome and Arab minaret gave me great pleasure as we came in
sight of them. I was impatient to make a sketch. I lost no time, and
went off and established myself in a palm grove with my water colours.
The usual Egyptian drawbacks, however, were there--flies, and puffs of
sand blown into one’s eyes and powdering one’s paints. On the Mahmoudieh
Canal I am exempt from the sand nuisance, and nothing can be pleasanter
than my experience there, sitting in an open carriage with the hood up,
and not a soul to bother me.
“Our return to Rosetta was lively. As we were then going against the
wind, we had to be towed from the shore, and it was very interesting to
watch the agility of our crew dodging in and out of the boats moored
under the bank and deftly disengaging the tow-rope from the spars and
rigging of these vessels. A tall Circassian _effendi_ of police cantered
on his little Arab along the bank to see that all went well with us. The
other half of our party chose to sail and progress by laborious tacking
from one side of the wide river to the other, and arrived long after we
did. We all met at the house of the Syrian postmaster, where he and his
pretty little wife received us with native politeness, and gave us
coffee and sweets. Our return journey was most pleasant, and we got to
Alexandria at 8 p.m. Twelve charming hours.
“_May 24th._--The Queen’s birthday. Trooping of the colour at 5 p.m. on
the Moharrem Bey Ground. Most successful. Will, mounted on a powerful
chestnut, did look a commanding figure as he raised his plumed helmet
and led the ringing cheers for the Queen which brought the pretty
ceremony to a close. The sun was near setting behind the height of
Komeldik, and lit up the roses in the men’s helmets and garlanded round
the standard. In the evening a dull and solemn dinner to the heads of
departments and their wives. A difficult function. We had the band of
the Suffolks playing outside the windows, which were wide open on the
sea. I went out sketching in the morning, very early. I should have been
at my post all day on such an occasion, I confess. Will said I was like
Nero, fiddling while Rome was burning.
“_May 29th._--The Mediterranean Fleet is here. Great interchange of
cards, firing of salutes, etc., etc. All very ceremonious, but
productive of picturesqueness and colour and effect, so I like it very
much. The Khedive Tewfik, too, has arrived, with the Khediviah, for the
hot season from Cairo. Will, of course, had to be present at the station
this morning for the reception of our puppet, and it was not nice to see
the Union Jack down in the dust as the guard of honour of the Suffolks
gave the salute. Our dinner to-night was to the admiral and officers of
the newly-arrived British squadron.
“_June 2nd._--To the Khediviah’s first reception at the harem of the
Ras-el-Tin Palace. I had two Englishwomen to present, rather an
unmanageable pair, as seniority appeared to be claimed erroneously at
the last moment by the junior. This reception has become a most dull
affair now that Oriental ways are done away with. Dancing girls no
longer amuse the guests, nor handmaidens cater to them with sweetmeats
during the audience, and there is nothing left but absolute emptiness.
The Vice-Reine sits, in European dress, on a divan at the end of a vast
hall, and the visitors sit in a semi-circle before her on hard European
chairs reflected in a polished _parquet_, speaking to each other in
whispers and furtively sipping coffee. She addresses a few remarks to
those nearest her, and the pauses are articulated by the click of the
ever-moving fans of the assembly. The ladies-in-waiting and girl slaves
move about in a mooning way in the funniest frocks, supposed to be
European, but some of them absolutely frumpish. Melancholy eunuchs of
the bluest black, in glossy frock coats, rise and bow as one passes
along the passages to or from the presence, and it is a relief to get
out through the jealously-walled garden into the outer world.
“I find it difficult to converse in a harem, being so bad at small talk.
I upset the Vice-Reine’s equanimity by telling her (which was quite
true) that I had heard she was taking lessons in painting. ‘_Moi,
madame?!! Oh! je n’aurais pas le courage!_’ It was as bad as when I told
her, in Cairo, how much I liked poking about the bazaars. ‘_Vous allez
dans les bazaars, madame?!!_’ So I relapsed into talking of illnesses,
which subject I have always found touches the proper note in a harem.
They say the Vice-Reine delights in these audiences, as they are
amongst the great events of her days. She is a beautiful woman, a
Circassian, and of lovely whiteness.
“Finished the delicate sketch of the loveliest bit of the canal, where
the pink minaret and the black cypress are. I wish I could do just one
more reach of that lovely waterway before I leave! There is a particular
group of oleanders nodding with heavy pink blossom by the water’s edge
against a soft blurred background of tamarisk, where women and girls in
dark blue, brilliant orange, and rose-coloured robes come down to fetch
water in their amphoræ. There is another reach lined for the whole
length of the picture with tall waving canebrakes, above whose tender
green tops appears the delicate distance of the lagoons of Mareotis;
there is--but ah! each bend of that canal reveals fresh beauties, and
often as Will has driven me there, I am as eager as ever to miss no
point in the lovely sequence.
“_June 14th._--All my days now I am sketching more continuously, as the
arduous work of paying calls has relaxed greatly. This evening we drove
again far beyond Ramleh on the old route followed by Napoleon to reach
Aboukir, and I finished the sketch there.”
And so on, till my departure a few days later. I had wisely left my oils
at home at Delgany, and thus got together a much larger number of
subjects, the handier medium of water-colour being better suited to the
official life I had to attend to.