Quelch professed boredom with it, but for me Egypt was unique, almost a different planet, forever astonishing me with her gentian waters, her gashes of ochre vivid against the deep canary of the rocks, the lush emerald and jade of her palms and fields, her pale old stones worn by the winds of centuries, staring out of her unimaginably distant past, the tall, triangular white of bellying felucca sails, her little grey-brown donkeys and her creamy amber camels on the banks, her healthy children, the colour of cafe au lait, who ran along the river path calling out to us, her brightly veiled women who stopped to wave; her smiling men in tarboosh or turban. Quelch saw all this as squalid, boring or irritating and spent most of his time on deck reading a pocket edition of Simplicissimus in the suppressed Wheldrake translation which he had found in Cairo. He had a taste, he said, for the knockabout school of German romance, its men dressing up as women, its frequent whacking of servants, its impossible coincidences and extraordinary urinations. That this antiquated form of humour still had an appreciative audience was demonstrated from time to time by the peculiarly strained noises escaping my travelling companion, even at night in the dark, when he recalled some particularly hilarious episode, frequently involving a peasant girl, a pistol, a common domestic animal (usually a pig) and occasionally a Jew. Unlike most people, Quelch declared, his appreciation of German culture did not stop at Beethoven and Goethe.
We each of us now had cheques in our pockets drawn on Sir Ranalf’s Anglo-International Moving Picture Company account, and gone was any suspicion from our minds that our new producer was not a gentleman.
‘Sir Ranalf,’ Seaman insisted one afternoon as we sat under the awning drinking bitters and soda, ‘is your grand Old English squire. We have them in Sweden, too. The kind of well-bred yeoman who, disturbing a nesting partridge in a cornfield, allows her, as a consequence, to lead him away from her eggs. Having reassured her that he has been thoroughly deceived, he will lift his hat and say “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, madam,” and continue his way by a different route. I made a film on the subject before I came to America, but they said it was too long. They cut it to ribbons.’
‘Quite a step from rural symbolism to smart society.’ Professor Quelch lifted his nose against the breeze from our punkah.
‘Not quite so different, you know. I am telling the same stories, the same morals, but in a slightly different context.’
‘Wiv more sex.’ Mrs Cornelius leans luxuriously across the top of his lounger to take a sip from his glass. She is lightly swathed in apple-green silk, with an apple-blossom border, a Gainsborough hat and a great wave of ‘English Garden’. ‘More love interest, as they corl it.’ She kissed his small, but distinct, bald spot. ‘It’s wot they pays ter see, eh, Wolfy-boy? A flash o’ this, a hint o’ that.’
‘They get a strong, uplifting moral.’ Gradually he resumes that cool manner which always comes when his dignity is offended. Seaman hates any questioning of his artistic motives. Mrs Cornelius does little else but mock them. She is moved, she admits privately to me, chiefly by boredom from having to listen to his monologues in the bedroom when she would, if she had not felt paralysed, have flung herself from a window rather than hear another note of his trumpet-blowing. His genius, his mission to the world, his early brilliance, his prizes and his fine reviews were familiar to Mrs Cornelius not, she said, so much in the words but in the way you remember a particularly horrible noise, like a neighbour’s creaking mangle. I sympathised with her. We have many such windbags in Russia. I have spent my life avoiding them.
‘Besides,’ she says. ‘ ‘E’s such an easy bloody target, i’n’ ‘e?’
I feel rather sorry for him and hasten to tell him I think our story will have all the moral uplift possible to pump into a modern motion picture, yet it must speak to the hearts of a popular audience. We will give them romance, spectacle, tragedy, laughter, tears, a story that cannot fail to engross them, ‘a message that celebrates modern love, that champions understanding and rationality!’ This more than placates him and he even smiles a little when Mrs Cornelius pats his hand.
Esmé returns from the forward deck where she has been sitting under her sunshade. Never prettier than now, she is the epitome of my childhood sweetheart. ‘We were saying how wonderful our film is going to be.’ I kiss her lightly on the forehead.
Seaman turns to leave. She stays him.
‘Oh, yes, Wolfy, dear, it will make us all marvellously rich and we will become millionaires. I was thinking, just then, what to spend my money on when we get back to Hollywood. A big house first, yes?’
‘Our own Pickfair,’ I promise. And so extraordinary are our surroundings that I immediately visualise, even to the smell of our roses, the home we would build in Beverly Hills. My ship is called Der Heim. She is a city of 100,000 people - artisans, artists, professionals, intellectuals, academics of all kinds. Her delicate towers shine bright as gold, bright as silver, bright as new-tempered steel. Meyn shif ist meyn sheyvet, meyn shtetl. My ship is my monument to God, my expression of His Will, my understanding of our ultimate purpose upon the Earth, which is to rise, in every sense, above the Earth. Let their skeletal arms lift and fall in the mud and blood of their ruined planet, where they gasp for air and beg for a quick death as they slaughter anything that lives and with such great enthusiasm do the work of their master, Satan. Our pain distracts Satan from His own. Satan it is who makes us suffer, not Christ. They will not accept this.
Mrs Cornelius says I should not brood so much on these things. She insists on my accompanying her to The Blenheim Arms where she meets her friends, the schoolmistress and the clergyman. Then, while I drink their inferior vodka, she proceeds to demonstrate how I should be forgetting my grievances in a Knees-up. I have no instinct for the Knees-up. It is not my national dance.
The temperature increases noticeably as we move up-river. It is dry, desert heat and does not greatly inconvenience the men but the ladies find it irksome. They are not allowed to wear sun-suits or swimming-dresses on deck because of the disturbance so much naked European femininity will cause amongst the crew (not to mention any passing native boat or spectator from the shore). We would attract, Professor Quelch assures us, the very worst sort of Arab attention, from the filthiest catcalling to imanic fulminations against the spawn of Jezebel. The imans, already causing a great deal of trouble in the rural communities, supporting Wafdist extremists whose policy of murder and terror works well in more remote settlements.
The weather irritates Mrs Cornelius in particular. ‘It makes me sweat like an effin’ pig, Ive. I need ter be in somefink cooler - like a bar seat at the Oyster Room in Piccadilly Circus. English people weren’t meant ter take so much roastin’.’
I suggest she will not notice the heat once we are working again. Our desultory rehearsals, usually in the vacated dining-room when not occupied, had been more a means of passing time than a means of perfecting what was, we felt, already perfect. Contemplating the muscular subtlety and strength of our ‘photoplay’, I knew I was on the brink of creating a film D.W. Griffith himself would recognise as great. Coming home to Hollywood I could display it with pride and then there would be no more ‘trousers’! Other directors would fight for our services. We would be a force as great as United Artists. Douglas Fairbanks had been made a star overnight by Anita Loos. There is no reason why I should not make Mrs Cornelius and ‘Irené Gay’ stars. The power of the director in these matters is always overestimated. Those elevated studio-hands have convinced the gullible public that they alone are responsible for all that is wonderful on screen, that the producers and the rest are responsible for all that is bad! That was never my own experience. For one thing producers usually have a great deal more common sense, while writers and set designers hate to waste time or money.