IV
The beauty of the Gulf of Suez—and surely it is most beautiful—has never received full appreciation from the traveller. He is in too much of a hurry to arrive or to depart, his eyes are too ardently bent on England or on India for him to enjoy that exquisite corridor of tinted mountains and radiant water. He is too much occupied with his own thoughts to realize that here, here and nowhere else, is the vestibule between the Levant and the Tropics. Nor was it otherwise in the case of Mrs. Fay. As she sailed southward with her husband in the pleasant autumn weather, her thoughts dwelt on the past with irritation, on the future with hope, but on the scenery scarcely at all. What with the boredom of Alexandria, what with her fright at Cairo, what with the native dress that fanaticism had compelled her to wear (“a terrible fashion for one like me to whom fresh air seems the greatest requisite for existence”), and finally what with Suez, which she found “a miserable place little better than the desert which it bounds,” she quitted Egypt without one tender word. Even her Biblical reminiscences take an embittered turn. She forgets how glad Jacob had been to come there and only remembers how anxious Moses and Aaron had been to get away.
Content to have escaped, she turns her gaze within—not of course to her own interior (she is no morbid analyst) but to the interior of the boat, and surveys with merciless eyes her fellow-passengers. The letter that describes them exhibits her talent, her vitality, and her trust in Providence, and incidentally explains why she never became popular, and why “two parties,” as she terms them, were at once formed on board, the one party consisting of her husband and herself, the other of everyone else. The feud, trivial at the time, was not to be without serious consequences. “You will now expect me, my dear friends,” she begins, “to say something of those with whom we are cooped up, but my account will not be very satisfactory, though sufficiently interesting to us—to being there.”
The grammar is hazy. But the style makes all clear.
The woman Mrs. Tulloch, of whom I entertained some suspicion from the first, is, now I am credibly informed, one of the very lowest creatures taken off the streets in London. She is so perfectly depraved in disposition that her supreme delight consists in making everybody about her miserable. It would be doing her too much honour to stain my paper with a detail of the various artifices she daily practises to that end. Her pretended husband, having been in India before and giving himself many airs, is looked upon as a person of mighty consequence whom no one chooses to offend. Therefore madam has full scope to exercise her mischievous talents, wherein he never controls her, not but that he perfectly understands to make himself feared. Coercive measures are sometimes resorted to. It is a common expression of the lady, “Lord bless you, if I did such or such a thing, Tulloch would make no more ado, but knock me down like an ox.” I frequently amuse myself with examining their countenances, where ill-nature has fixed her empire so firmly that I scarcely believe either of them smiled except maliciously.
As for the captain he is a mere Jack in office. Being unexpectedly raised to that post from second mate by the death of poor Captain Vanderfield and his chief officer on the fatal Desert, he has become from this circumstance so insolent and overbearing that everyone detests him. Instead of being ready to accommodate every person with the few necessaries left by the plundering Arabs, he constantly appropriates them to himself. “Where is the captain’s silver spoon? God bless my soul, Sir, you have got my chair; must you be seated before the captain’s glass?” and a great deal more of this same kind; but this may serve as a specimen. And although the wretch half starves us, he frequently makes comparisons between his table and that of an Indiaman which we dare not contradict while in his power.
Food is a solemn subject. Eliza was not a fastidious or an insular eater and she would gladly sample the dishes of foreign climes. But she did demand that those dishes should be plentiful, and that they should nourish her, and loud are her complaints when they do not, and vigorous the measures she takes.
During the first fortnight of our voyage my foolish complaisance stood in my way at table, but I soon learned our gentle maxim, catch as catch can. The longest arm fared best, and you cannot imagine what a good scrambler I have become. A dish once seized, it is my care to make use of my good fortune; and now provisions running very short, we are grown quite savages: two or three of us perhaps fighting for a bone, for there is no respect of persons. The wretch of a captain, wanting our passage money for nothing, refused to lay in a sufficient quantity of stock; and if we do not soon reach our port, what must be the consequence, Heaven knows.
Mr. Hare, Eliza’s chief gentleman enemy, was not dangerous at meals. It was rather the activity of his mind that threatened her. Whenever she writes of him, her pen is at its sharpest, it is indeed not so much a pen as a fang. It lacerates his social pretentiousness, his snobbery, the scorbutic blotches on his face, and his little white eyes. Poor young Mr. Taylor once showed him a handsome silver-hilted sword. He admired it, till he saw on the scabbard the damning inscription, “Royal Exchange.” “Take your sword,” said he; “it’s surprising a man of your sense should commit an error; for fifty guineas I would not have a city name on any article of my dress.” She comments: “Now would anyone suppose this fine gentleman’s father was in trade and he himself brought up in that very city he affects to despise? Very true, nevertheless.”
How, by the way, did she know that? Who told her? And, by the way, how did she know about Mrs. Tulloch? But one must not ask such dreadful questions. They shatter the foundations of faith.
And so his studied attention to me in the minutest article effectually shielded him from suspicion till his end was answered, of raising up a party against us, by the means of that vile woman, who was anxious to triumph over me, especially as I have been repeatedly compelled (for the honour of the sex) to censure her swearing and indecent behaviour. I have, therefore, little comfort to look forward to for the remainder of the voyage.
Then she reckons up her allies, or rather the neutrals. They are a feeble set.
It is only justice to name Mr. Taylor as an amiable though melancholy companion, and Mr. Manesty, an agreeable young man under twenty. Mr. Fuller is a middle-aged man. He has, it seems, fallen into the hands of sharpers and been completely pillaged. He has the finest dark eyes I ever met with. Mr. Moreau, a musician, is very civil and attentive.
Small fry like these could be no help. They can scarcely have got enough to eat at dinner. Her truer supports lay within.
Having early discovered the confederacy, prudence determined us to go mildly on, seemingly blind to what it was beyond our power to remedy. Never intermeddling with their disputes, all endeavours to draw us into quarrels are vainly exerted. I despise them too much to be angry.
And the letter concludes with a moving picture of home life in the Red Sea:
After meals I generally retire to my cabin, where I find plenty of employment, having made up a dozen shirts for Mr. Fay out of some cloth I purchased to replace part of those stolen by the Arabs. Sometimes I read French or Italian and study Portuguese. I likewise prevailed on Mr. Fay to teach me shorthand, in consequence of the airs Mr. Hare gave himself because he was master of this art and had taught his sisters to correspond with him in it. The matter was very easily accomplished. In short, I have discovered abundant methods of making my time pass usefully and not disagreeably. How often, since in this situation, have I blessed God that He has been pleased to endow me with a mind capable of furnishing its own amusement, despite of all means used to discompose it.
Admirable too is the tone of the postscript:
I am in tolerable health and looking with a longing eye towards Bengal, from whence I trust my next will be dated. The climate seems likely to agree very well with me. I do not at all mind the heat, nor does it at all affect either my spirits or my appetite.—Your ever affectionate E. F.
She was to date her next not from Bengal but from prison. Here, however, her Alexandrian audience must really have the decency to retire. Eliza in chains is too terrible a theme. Let it suffice to say that though in chains she remained Eliza, and that Mrs. Tulloch was enchained too; and let those who would know more procure “The Original Letters from India of Mrs. Eliza Fay,” published by the Calcutta Historical Society. The book contains a portrait of our heroine, which quite fills the cup of joy. She stands before us in the Oriental robes she detested so much, but she has thrown back their superfluities and gazes at the world as though seeing through its little tricks. One trousered foot is advanced, one bangled arm is bent into an attitude of dignified defiance. Her expression, though triumphant, is alert. She is attended in the background by a maid-servant and a mosque.