But I remember one day when we found him almost in tears. I thought perhaps he had moved himself by a recital of one of his more powerful poems (‘We Are Seven’ was another favourite); but no. ‘I’ve had a quarrel with Abdul — for the first time’ he admitted with a ludicrous blink. ‘You know what, old man, he wants to take up circumcision.’ It was not hard to understand: to become a barber-surgeon rather than a mere cutter and shaver was a normal enough step for someone like Abdul to want to take; it was like getting one’s Ph.D.
But of course, I knew too Scobie’s aversion to circumcision. ‘He’s gone and bought a filthy great pot of leeches’ the old man went on indignantly. ‘Leeches! Started opening veins, he has. I said to him I said “If you think, my boy, that I set you up in business so as you could spend your time hyphenating young children for a piastre a time you’re wrong,” I said to him I said.’ He paused for breath, obviously deeply affected by this development. ‘But Skipper’ I protested, ‘it seems very natural for him to want to become a barber-surgeon. After all, circumcision is practised everywhere, even in England now.’ Ritual circumcision was such a common part of the Egyptian scene that I could not understand why he should be so obviously upset by the thought. He pouted, tucked his head down, and ground his false teeth noisily. ‘No’ he said obstinately. ‘I won’t have it.’ Then he suddenly looked up. and said
‘D’you know what? He’s actually going to study under Mahmoud Enayet Allah — that old butcher!’ I could not understand his concern; at every festival or mulid the circumcision booth was a regular part of the festivities. Huge coloured pictures, heavily beflagged with the national colours, depicting barber-surgeons with pen-knives at work upon wretched youths spread out in dentists’ chairs were a normal if bizarre feature of the sideshows. The doyen of the guild was Mahmoud himself, a large oval man, with a long oiled moustache, always dressed in full fig and apart from his red tarbush conveying the vague impression of some French country practitioner on French leave. He always made a resounding speech in classical Arabic offering circumcision free to the faithful who were too poor to meet the cost of it. Then, when a few candidates were forthcoming, pushed forward by eager parents, his two negro clowns with painted faces and grotesque clothes used to gambol out to amuse and distract the boys, inveigling them by this means into the fatal chair where they were, in Scobie’s picturesque phrase, ‘hyphenated’, their screams being drowned by the noise of the crowd, almost before they knew what was happening.
I could not see what was amiss in Abdul’s wanting to learn all he could from this don, so to speak, of hyphenation. Then I suddenly understood as Scobie said ‘It’s not the boy — they can do him for all I care. It’s the girl, old man. I can’t bear to think of that little creature being mutilated. I’m an Englishman, old man, you’ll understand my feelings. i won’t have it.’ Exhausted by the force of his own voice, he sank back upon his pillow and went on. ‘And what’s more, I told Abdul so in no uncertain terms. “Lay a finger on the girl” I said “and I’ll get you run in — see if I don’t.” But of course, it’s heartbreaking, old man, ‘cause they’ve been such friends, and the poor coon doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m mad!’ He sighed heavily twice. ‘Their friendship was the best I ever had with anyone except Budgie, and I’m not exaggerating, old man. It really was. And now they’re puzzled. They don’t understand an Englishman’s feelings. And I hate using the Influence of My Position.’ I wondered what this exactly meant. He went on.
‘Only last month we ran Abdel Latif in and got him closed down, with six months in chokey for unclean razors. He was spreading syphilis, old man. I had to do it, even though he was a friend. My duty. I warned him countless times to dip his razor. No, he wouldn’t do it. They’ve got a very poor sense of disinfection here, old man.
You know, they use styptic — shaving styptic for the circumcisions. It’s considered more modern than the old mixture of black gunpowder and lemon-juice. Ugh! No sense of disinfection. I don’t know how they don’t all die of things, really I don’t. But they were quite scared when we ran Abdel Latif in and Abdul has taken it to heart. I could see him watching me while I was telling him off. Measuring my words, like.’ But the influence of company always cheered the old man up and banished his phantoms, and it was not long before he was talking in his splendid discursive vein about the life history of Toby Mannering. ‘It was he who put me on to Holy Writ, old man, and I was looking at The Book yesterday when I found a lot about circumcision in it. You know? The Amalekites used to collect foreskins like we collect stamps. Funny, isn’t it?’ He gave a sudden snort of a chuckle like a bull-frog. ‘I must say they were ones! I suppose they had dealers, assorted packets, a regular trade, eh?
Paid more for perforations!’ He made a straight face for Melissa who came into the room at this moment. ‘Ah well’ he said, still shaking visibly at his own jest. ‘I must write to Budgie tonight and tell him all the news.’ Budgie was his oldest friend. ‘Lives in Horsham, old man, makes earth-closets. He’s collected a regular packet from them, has old Budgie. He’s an FRZS, I don’t quite know what it means, but he had it on his notepaper. Charles Donahue Budgeon FRZS. I write to him every week. Punctual. Always have done, always will do. Staunch, that’s me. Never give up a friend.’ It was to Budgie, I think, the unfinished letter which was found in his rooms after his death and which read as follows:
‘Dear old pal, The whole world seems to have turned against me since I last wrote. I should have’ Scobie and Melissa! In the golden light of those Sundays they live on, bright still with the colours that memory gives to those who enrich our lives by tears or by laughter — unaware themselves that they have given us anything. The really horrible thing is that the compulsive passion which Justine fit in me was quite as valuable as it would have been had it been ‘real’; Melissa’s gift was no less an enigma — what could she have offered me, in truth, this pale waif of the Alexandrian littoral? Was Clea enriched or beggared by her relations with Justine? Enriched — immeasurably enriched, I should say. Are we then nourished only by fictions, by lies? I recall the words Balthazar wrote down somewhere in his tall grammarian’s handwriting: ‘We live by selected fictions’ and also:
‘Everything is true of everybody….’ Were these words of Pursewarden’s quarried from his own experience of men and women, or simply from a careful observation of us, our behaviours and their result? I don’t know. A passage comes to mind from a novel in which Pursewarden speaks about the role of the artist in life. He says something like this: ‘Aware of every discord, of every calamity in the nature of man himself, he can do nothing to warn his friends, to point, to cry out in time and to try to save them. It would be useless. For they are the deliberate factors of their own unhappiness. All the artist can say as an imperative is: “Reflect and weep.” ’ Was it consciousness of tragedy irremediable contained — not in the external world which we all blame — but in ourselves, in the human conditions, which finally dictated his unexpected suicide in that musty hotel-room? I like to think it was, but perhaps I am in danger of putting too much emphasis on the artist at the expense of the man. Balthazar writes: ‘Of all things his suicide has remained for me an extraordinary and quite inexplicable freak.