I EMBARK ON A FOOL'S ERRAND
I was sitting on the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel on the evening of my
arrival there. I was finding life flat, as one must who can discover no
fascination in Cairo's appeal to the eyes, nostrils and ears. Before me
was the olla-podrida of touring fashion and fellaheen squalor; the smell
of camels and attar of roses; the polyglot chatter of European
pleasure-seekers and the tom-toms of Arab pilgrims.
Then once more I saw her. But still I did not see her face. I suppose
there were other persons with her. I did not notice. I did notice the
salient thing. She was boarding a motor 'bus, presumably for the
Alexandria train, and was followed by the usual Cairene retinue of
tarbooshed porters and luggage-bearers.
My glimpse of her was again only in exit. My baggage had just been
unpacked, and I also could not catch the Alexandria train. I had been
foolish enough to announce my coming by postcard from Jerusalem to an
acquaintance at the Turf Club and had found awaiting me at Shepheard's
on my arrival a note informing me that George Clann, a friend of past
days, had invited a few army officers and native men for dinner that
evening to meet me. The note added that no excuse would be accepted. I
had called up the club and signified my acceptance. That was before I
had seen the departing goddess, but I was due in the Sharia el Magrabi
an hour hence and so was once again completely anchored.
Had I seen her in entrance instead of in exit only, I should perhaps
have remained in Egypt and fanned into rebirth a languid interest in
sarcophagi and cartouches and camel-riding and scrambling up the
comfortless slants of pyramids.
As it was I began to subscribe to the Oriental idea of an inevitable
destiny. I admitted to myself that it was written that for me this lady
was to remain as unseen as though she belonged to the latticed and
veiled seclusion of some pasha's harem. I told myself that had my first
glimpse been a full one I should have gone on my way with prompt
forgetfulness and that a curiosity so strange and fantastic must
influence me no further.
I sought out an empty place on the terrace where unintentionally enough
I overheard an earnest conversation between a fair-haired and
enthusiastic young Englishman and a grizzled fellow in middle life. They
were talking business in one of the writing-rooms which give out through
open windows upon the terrace, and the enthusiasm of the younger gave a
carrying quality to his voice.
He was, it appeared from his solicitude, seeking a billet which it lay
in the power of his elder vis-a-vis to bestow. From the discussion which
neither of them treated as confidential I learned that there is
somewhere in the Pacific Ocean a perfectly useless island from which
certain ethnological data and exhibits might be obtained. It further
appeared that the British Museum was deficient in these particular
curios and that the glass cases were yearning to be filled. The youth
had been employed in Soudanese excavations and research. Now that work
had ended and with it the pay, the necessity for other work and pay had
not ended.
"The billet down there," suggested the elder man, "will be no end
beastly, I dare say. A tramp steamer sails from Port Said in three days
for Singapore, Sandakan and the South Seas. The pay will be one hundred
and fifty pounds for the job. The fare will probably be maggoty
biscuits--still, if you feel game to have a dash at it----" The speaker
finished with a shrug which seemed to add, "It's never difficult to find
a fool."
But the young man laughed with a whole-hearted enthusiasm, that
entirely missed the under note of contempt in the manner of his
benefactor. "Well, rather," he declared. "And I say, you know, its jolly
good of you, sir."
Later I made the acquaintance of the young Briton in the American bar
where over Scotch and soda we discussed the project, to the end that I
nominated and elected myself an assistant forager for the British
Museum, serving at my own expense. There was something likeable about my
new and naive acquaintance, who was so eager to shoulder his futile way
across a third of the globe's circumference in search of crudely
inscribed rocks and axe-heads and decaying skulls. My own experience in
life had been even more futile. I had learned to speak five languages
and had completely failed of gaining a foothold in five useful
professions: Art, Law, Literature, Music and Contentment. Possibly the
appeasement of my Salatheal hunger, the curing of the curse, did not
after all lie along the routes of Cunarders and Pullmans. Maybe I was
still nibbling at travel as the school-girl nibbles at chocolates.
Perhaps his method of taking the long and empty trail was the heroic
medicine my itching feet required. At all events, I sententiously quoted
to myself, "I think It will kill me or cure, and I think I will go there
and see."
When I informed young Mansfield, for that proved to be his name, that I
meant to be his traveling companion, his almost childlike face took on
an incredulous expression. He was a great two-hundred-pound chap whose
physique should logically have been the asset of a pirate or a pugilist,
but the visage which surmounted it had a rosy pinkness and his blue eyes
wore the guileless charity of essential innocence. With his physical
power went a long-suffering good nature, and as he talked of the widely
scattered places he had seen and the things which should have made him
wise in his generation it seemed to me that his soul must have worn a
macintosh, from which the showers of experience had been shed off
without leaving a mark. I have seen mastiffs with eyes full of
wistfulness because Nature has denied their affectionate temperaments
the gentle lives of lap dogs. Mansfield struck me the same way. Why a
man, by his spare and simple standards as rich as Cr[oe]sus, should care
to ship with him on a voyage promising maggoty biscuits, was quite
beyond his mental process. He confessed, in all frankness, that he did
it merely for the money--the pitiful hundred and fifty. There was a girl
back in England, probably as devoid of surprises and complications of
character as a lane-side primrose. I pictured her to myself as a
creature of pink and shallow prettiness. The day to which his ambition
strained as the ultimate goal was the day when he could become a curator
in the British Museum and transplant her to decent London lodgings. He
longed to placard and arrange scarabs in a plate-glass case and to
classify Chimbote pottery and on bank holidays to push a go-cart in the
park.
I was glad, however, when I went over the rust-red side of the _Wastrel_
that Mansfield went with me. We had known that we were shipping on a
mean vessel, and one shouldered out of more orderly chartings, because
of her unworthiness. Liners did not ply the tepid waters for which we
were bound: waters ridden by no commerce save the peddling of copra and
pearl shell and beche-de-mer. Yet even the warning had not prepared me
for what I found, as I first stepped upon her unclean decks and had my
initial view of her more unclean crew. Perhaps there are other corroded
hulks shambling here and there among the less frequented ports of the
seven seas as uninviting in appearance and as villainously manned as was
the _Wastrel_, but on this point I stand unconvinced. A glance told us
that her sea-worthiness was questionable and that her over-burdening
cargo pressed her Plimsoll mark close to the water line. We were to
learn by degrees that her timbers were rotten, her plates rust-eaten and
her engines junk. Her officers were outcasts from respectable seafaring,
none too cordial in their relations with admiralty courts. They had
fallen back on the hazardous command of such a vessel as this not from
choice, but necessity, precisely as other types of unemployed and
hopeless men fall back on vagrancy and crime. Her crew was picked from
the dregs of scattered ports. They were Lascars, Kanakas, Chinese and
non-descripts from here and there; haled forth and signed from dives
where human garbage trickles down to the sea. At first they interested
me as new and roughened types of men, yet as I say, I was more than
grateful for the shoulder touch of at least one being of my own sort.
From our arrival, none of them except the captain and officers took the
slightest pains to conceal that they regarded us as unwelcome
interlopers and even the courtesy of the after-guard was short-lived
enough. In that desert of taciturnity Mansfield babbled like a brook and
overflowed with young sentimentality.
The first leg of our journey ended at Borneo, leaving us as unacquainted
with officers and seamen, save in the surface details of personal
appearance, as we had been at Port Said. Now we were dropping Sandakan
harbor over the stern. Already the sprawling, hillside town, framed in
its mangrove swamps, was lost around the buttress of the harbor's
sentinel rock. Ramparts of sandstone were burning with a ruddy glow in
the sunset.
A sense of isolation settled on us. As we had nosed our way outward
Mansfield had been leaning silently on the after rail. His eyes had
dwelt lingeringly on the green gardens and white walks of the British
Consulate which sits upon its hill. Now we had seen the last of that and
of the bay's flotilla of matting-sailed junks. Off the port bow were
only beetling sandstone and the countless gulls, flashing white as they
tilted the snowy linings of their wings into the sun. He talked for a
time, in low tones of the girl in Sussex as men will talk when they are
homesick, and then he rather shamefacedly produced from somewhere and
opened at random a much battered blank-book, written in a woman's hand.
"I dare say," he hesitantly told me, "I have no moral right to read
this. It's quite personal, yet it's unsigned. Invasion of privacy can't
apply to anonymous persons, you know." He paused for a minute and
indolently watched the screaming hordes of Sandakan birds as if awaiting
my agreement, but I said nothing.
"You see," he continued, "I've been living lately in a cheap _pension_
at Cairo and, before that, in beastly Soudan inns, so when I drew a bit
in advance I resolved to treat myself to a day or two at Shepheards. You
remember how full the house was? They had to give me a small room on the
roof. It was really a sort of servant's room in less crowded times, I
fancy. A beggar of an Arab used to pray on his rug in front of my
door.... In rummaging about I found this." He held up the blank-book. "I
looked for an address, meaning to post it to its owner but there was no
address and only given names--there's not a surname between these
covers. Some servant must have found it in a vacated room and later left
it in the one to which I had fallen heir. Seems to have been some girl's
desultory but intimate diary. Just an entry now and then, with evidently
long gaps between. You see the first writing is immature, almost
childish--and the last is dated at Cairo."
I nodded my head, but said nothing. He appeared deeply interested but
his simple punctilio required the reinforcement of my approval, before
he could quite clear the skirts of his conscience in the matter of
having sampled its contents.
"You see," he half-apologized, "my first glance was disinterested, I was
merely seeking to identify ownership. But from just a few lines, read in
that fashion, I saw that it was--" his voice became serious, almost
awed--"well that it was rather wonderful. Some girl has been putting her
heart into words here--" he tapped the blank-book--"and she's written a
genuine human document." Again he paused, drumming on the rail with the
fingers of one hand.
"From a half-dozen bits of Chimbote pottery," he reflected, "I can read
a great deal of the habits and life of the Incas. I can restore an
extinct mammal from some fragments of skeleton, but I find it jolly
difficult to understand anything about a woman. If a fellow means to
marry he ought to try to understand. That's why I'd like to have a dip
into this. Do you think I might?"
"Do you think," I countered, smiling, "that you would have the right to
read somebody's unsigned love-letters?" A certain magazine editor had
once witheringly opined that I would never succeed in literature until I
acquired some insight into the feminine riddle. But he had not pointed
me to diaries. He had bluntly advised me to fall in love with a few
variant types.
Until a man had found blond or dark hairs on his coat shoulder, said the
editor, he could not hope to write about heartbeats. If he had found
various kinds, and that often, he could write better.
Young Mansfield was giving my question a graver and more literal
consideration than it merited.
"I rather think," he said seriously, "that one might read such letters.
Unless the offense is against some definite person there is no offense
at all."
"Perhaps you are right," I admitted, with a listless avoidance of
argument, and in a moment more he had opened the book at random and was
reading aloud.