I asked Esmé to show me her postcards, the little treasures she had bought for a few piastres from the various sellers of antiques manufactured in Pharaonic Birmingham and the Eleventh Dynasty’s factories along the Upper Ruhr. She had a little brass ibex, the bust of some nameless queen, a black cat of lacquered stone. She handled them with the delicacy and pleasure of some Egyptologist coming at last upon the treasures of Rameses Il and for her they clearly had at least the same value. Esmé’s simple enjoyment and Mrs Cornelius’s enthusiasm were bringing me a happiness I had not experienced for some time. I began to feel that America had restricted me, that I had forgotten the attractions and advantages of Europe and, now, the Middle East. Russia became a torture-chamber and a graveyard. The Comintern butchers struggled amongst themselves for Lenin’s mantle and spilled still more blood in the process. But at least there were parts of Europe, such as Italy, which were reviving, finding new idealism and hope, new strength to continue the work so many in those days knew to be our destiny. I do not say that I condone every one of Mussolini’s actions, but he was setting an example to the rest of Europe in the hope they might decide to follow. Other nations were sinking into fashionable despair, reading self-indulgent novels and watching introspective plays, writing music no one wished to hear, poetry no one could understand, painting pictures reflecting only the hideous turmoil of their uncertain souls. For me this lassitude was generally lacking in America. But that she lacked one thing did not mean she automatically possessed another. I had found vitality there, and optimism and political courage, I had found wealth and good friends, but I had forgotten what it was to live in a land where every tree and hill bore some reference to mankind’s urge to tame its own nature and the world around it. Then America was truly called the New World and it was a new coin struck in the currency of Hope. How valuable that currency might have become! Of course it did not happen. The coin of American idealism is worthless now. America became what I most feared. Washington is no longer the capital of the United States. New York rules the entire continent. Michob Ader need no longer fear immortality. Now he has the most powerful nation on Earth to comfort him. There Christ is conquered, yet elsewhere Christ is merely sleeping. He is worshipped and remembered by the Bolshevik’s enslaved millions. Christ is simply awaiting the moment of His return. They say the Second Coming is a thousand years late, but we shall now see it in the year 2000. Then I shall be a hundred years old or perhaps dead. How is it one Power pretends to testify for God and yet is increasingly brought under the rule of Satan, while the other claims it has abolished God, yet cannot destroy the love and the need of its people for Christ? Which, I ask any of you, is the strongest Church, the true Church? Could it, after all, be the first and oldest Church, the Byzantine Church, ever closest to the Source, to the origins of our history? I will let the Baptists and the Presbyterians explain how their Church has become a tool of Carthage while the Church of Greece remains the last great challenger to Satan’s persuasions. In 1926, of course, I had not returned to the Church and remained open-minded on this subject as well as on many others. My only certainty was in my own vocation, my need to help ease the suffering of all mankind by whatever means were available to me, whether through the miracle of engineering or through the exercise of my artistic gifts. Mrs Cornelius certainly recognised this in me, just as she recognised in Malcolm Quelch a cruelly tormented human being whose love of the world had been associated, perhaps, with the love of a certain woman. Some London beauty who had rejected him, or ruined him? This is what women can frequently see in a man that another man cannot. I was to be grateful, always, for the insights of women. If they made my life both harder and easier they always enriched it. I cannot always understand the arguments of the feminists. Like them, I love women. I admire women. I believe women have many virtues which men do not, many qualities which men cannot ever possess. On innumerable occasions they have been both a comfort and an inspiration to me. Sometimes, it is true, a woman can be a burden or a nuisance, perhaps a little bit of a strain, when she wants attention at a time you cannot give it. Does that make me an enslaver of women? A monster? I hope not. I was raised to respect and honour women. Yet this somehow makes me worse than some hippy journalist who looks like an extra from The Squaw Man carrying around on his arm some ‘chick’ who looks herself like the original squaw! This is progress? I saw a great deal of similar progress in Cairo.
The luncheon tables were raised. We passed through flat, grey country which certainly fulfilled all Professor Quelch’s remarks about the dullness of Egypt. The fields were relieved by a few oxen, the occasional donkey and its driver, some brown children and women bent over their crops, a thatched hut or two and sometimes a mud village. More rarely were the modern structures of authority to be seen, for the British maintained the policy which the police today call ‘low-profile’. They were already promising the natives full autonomy and self-government within the Commonwealth. Perhaps they had to. The War had depleted their manpower. It was becoming considerably more expensive to maintain an empire.
‘We’ve gone from gunboat diplomacy to revolver diplomacy in a couple of generations.’ Malcolm Quelch demonstrated how to fill the local pitta bread with foul and take it into one’s mouth. ‘Soon all we’ll have is chocolate-box diplomacy! And we all know how far that gets you, dearie!’
Mrs Cornelius lifted the dripping pitta up to her lovely mouth. Her eyes gave him her full attention. ‘A nice box of chocolates always worked with me,’ she said. Her mouth closed over the hors d’oeuvre, some of which dripped down her pink chin. She dabbed at it with a dainty finger. ‘But I suppose you’d fink me a bit old-fashioned.’ She sucked her finger.
In another Malcolm Quelch’s gesture might have been courtly, but the professor’s muscles were unused to so much spontaneity and his bewildered spasm jerked his glass of lemonade solidly into his lap. As his white trousers spread with yellow, he slowly cranked fastidious hands to Heaven. ‘Ugh!’
‘Oh, blimey!’ Mrs Cornelius was at once ready with her napkin. ‘Pore fing! Don’t worry. It’s not a tragedy.’
Malcolm Quelch did not respond to her. Instead, arms still in an attitude of surrender, he stared hopelessly down into his water-logged crotch, where pieces of ice glinted and winked.
Then, with the air of a man who has received some unequivocal signal from an unsympathetic God, Quelch fell back with a resigned sigh as Mrs Cornelius dabbed genteelly at his lap.