In a side street in which sprawled and squalled native infants uncountable, I tugged at a bell rope protruding from a stern brick wall, and was admitted by a bare-legged Arab to the courtyard of the Asile Rudolph. The superintendent, seated before the “office,” called for my ticket. He was a sprightly Englishman, in the autumn of life, long a captain in the Black Sea service, and still known to all as “Cap Stevenson.” Around two sides of the court were the kitchen and sleeping-rooms of the male inmates. Opposite the entrance towered the Women’s Asile, a blank wall except for one window opening, through which the English matron thrust her head at frequent intervals to berate the captain, in a caustic falsetto, for the hilarity of his charges.
Among my new companions, some two score of ragged, care-free fellows who had already gathered around the tables in the open air dining-room, the German vagabond predominated. The French, Italian, and Greek tongues were frequently heard, there were two or three castaways from the British Isles; but as long as I remained at the Asile I was the sole representative of the western hemisphere.
An Arab servant bawled out from the depths of the kitchen, and, as we filed by the door, handed each of us a bowl of steaming soup and an ample slab of bread. There was no French parsimoniousness about the Asile Rudolph. Each bowl held a liberal quart—of something more than discolored dishwater, too—and down at the bottom were three cubes of meat. Never did a bowl appear during all the days that I wondered at the audacity of the society’s butcher without exactly three such cubes, of exactly the same size. To my companions they were the daintiest of morsels. The best-dressed vagabond never dreamed of tasting his soup until he had fished out this basic flesh and laid it on the table before him to gloat over until he had finished his liquid refreshment. Once gorged with soup, he sliced the cubes carefully, dipped the strips in rock salt, and slowly munched them, one by one, in his eyes the far-away look of keen enjoyment. As for myself, when I attempted to cut up my first cube, it bounded away over my head and before I could turn around to follow its flight had disappeared into the pocket of some quicker-witted guest. I dismembered the second morsel with the assistance of a fellow-boarder, and inflicted upon my teeth a piece of convenient size. An hour later, I deposited the still undamaged delicacy outside a factory gate at the further end of the city. When I turned out to renew my search it was gone.
Thoughtful guests of the Society made provision during the noon-hour of plenty for the twenty-four hours to come; for morning and evening brought only coffee or tea, and bread. There was, however, something more than bed and board in store for the lucky possessor of one of the Reverend ——’s tickets—a shower bath! It was closed during the day, but I was by no means the last to finish the evening meal, and, once inside the wooden closet, it was only the protest that the stream could be used to even better advantage among my companions that saved me from a watery grave.
I began my fourth day’s search by applying at the office of the chief owners of modern Egypt—Thomas Cook and Son. There is hardly a walk in life, from the architect to the donkey-boy, that is not represented among the employees of that great tourist agency. Somewhere in those cosmopolitan ranks, I might find my place. I proffered my services to the company as a sailor on their Nile steamers, as an unskilled workman in any of their enterprises, as a man with a trade in the Bulak factory where their floating palaces are constructed. Nothing came of it. In desperation, I struck out in a struggle directly against the economic law of labor, and, instead of dropping lower with each refusal, sought to climb higher.
It was true, admitted the manager, that the company was in need of clerks. It was still more in need of interpreters, and, to all appearance, I was qualified for either position. “But—but—I’m sorry, old chap,” and he looked sternly at my heelless slippers and ragged corduroys, “but really, you won’t do, don’t you know. I can give you a note to a well-known contractor—”
I accepted it with pleasure; for the name of Cook and Son, embossed at the top of a letter of introduction, has great weight in Egypt. The contractor to whom the note was addressed gave me—another. The addressee of the second gave me a third. Two, three, four days, I spent in delivering notes to the European residents of Cairo and waging battle against her Islamite servant body. Night after night I returned to the Asile with one stereotyped answer in my head:—
“I really haven’t anything I can put you at now. I’ll give you a letter to ——. Are you on the rocks? Well, here, perhaps this dollar will help you out. You don’t want it? Well, I’ll keep you in mind.”
The employers were divided into two classes: those who offered money as the easiest means of getting rid of an unwelcome visitor, and those who had been “on the rocks” themselves and protested against my refusal to accept alms in the words of the water-works superintendent:—“Take it, man, there is no harder work than looking for work; why not be paid for it?” The strangest fact of all, one that impresses itself on the out-of-work the world over, was the conviction of each that I should easily find employment. “Why, to be sure,” exclaimed a superintendent of shops in Bulak, “we haven’t anything to offer just now; but a man with your list of trades will certainly find work in Cairo in a few hours, without the slightest trouble.” It would have been hard to convince him that I had heard that same statement in a half-dozen languages a score of times a day for a week past. Gradually the assertion of “the comrades,” that he who would work in the Egyptian capital was an ass, took on new force.
Rich or penniless, however, he who does not enjoy the winter season in Cairo must be either an invalid, a prisoner, or an incurable pessimist. Here one does not need to add to every projected plan, “weather permitting.” The sojourner in the land of Egypt knows, as he goes to his rest at night, that, whatever misfortune to-morrow may bring, it will be lightened by joyous sunshine. Nor need the sans-sous lack entertainment in this city of the Nile. One had but to stroll to the vicinity of the Esbekieh Gardens to hear a band concert, to see some quaint native performance, or to find some excitement afoot. At all hours of the day those fortunate beings whose names graced the pages of Pia’s society papers displayed their charms to the watching throng. At frequent intervals the Khedive and his bodyguard thundered by. Now and then the bellow of Cairo’s champion saïs heralded the approach of the Khedive’s master, Lord Cromer. Nay, entertainment there was never lacking—merely food.