C.
2. ANZAC IN ALEX
I hardly think old Benci’s little wineshop in Alexandria will be known to many of the A.N.Z.A.C., or to many Alexandrians for that matter. But in case any of you find yourselves ever in Alexandria again, this is how you will discover it:
Standing at the head of the Rue Cherif Pacha—everyone in Alexandria knows the Rue Cherif Pacha who knows anything at all about the place—with the Kodak Company’s fine shop on your right hand and His Britannic Majesty’s fine Caracol on your left, you could reach it in three bomb-throws, if the last of the three happened to be a “googly” and swerved in from the off, just round the corner into the Rue Attarine. So, you see, it is right opposite the Attarine Mosque; and as you sit of an evening at Benci’s doorway, smoking his cigarettes, with his wine at your elbow, and watch the motley, polyglot crowd ceaselessly passing, you have your eyes always coming back to the carved and inlaid door of the old temple, and up the graceful minaret into the great lift of a night sky glorious with such liquid gold of stars that memory of herself will take you back to many a mellow night when stars of even more melting loveliness bent above you in your own homeland down South.
But you never saw such a restless crowd in an Australian or New Zealand street as this double line of dapper Europeans and of sallow Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians and hungry-looking Greeks, threading the low swirl of khaki tunics and Arab rags. And ever and anon the stream ebbs before your “garry-driver’s” long-drawn “Haa-sib” (mind out), to let pass some official dignitary or some riotous party of Kangaroos, or some handsome, red-tabbed officer of the regular staff, or maybe ’tis an even more handsome and stalwart private of the ranks, beside some dear, dainty, winsome thing under one of those little fly-away hats, with that dark kiss-curl clinging close to her cheek—you know exactly the kind of maid and the kind of curl I mean.
And still the tall, quiet minaret and the broad, quiet heaven seem to lean together; and one grows pensive sitting at Benci’s narrow door of a summer evening.
Old Benci himself is a brisk little Italian, doubtless of middle age. I think it must have been as a mark of affection that we called him “Old Benci,” for his hair still keeps something of its youthful brown. He has not a word of English and about two of French, but you know at once from his open, sunny face that, like most of his compatriots, he has a heart of gold; and, at a price to fit a ranker’s pocket, he keeps a Chianti that is first-rate.
It was Tillett who found him for us. Tillett is a New Zealand Medical Corps man, grey-headed, full of years and the experience they have brought him; equally at ease in French, Italian and Spanish from his early life on the Continent, and a dabbler in Greek and German by way of diversion; but so quiet and unassuming withal, and so rarely confidential about himself and his affairs, that we knew little of him beyond that he was at that time doing odd jobs of healing for the drivers of a New Zealand battery withdrawn from the Peninsula. For us he was a most likeable chap, an excellent interpreter when our mediocre French failed, and—his chief merit—the discoverer of Benci and his tavern. With a palate tormented by stewed tea and the heavy canteen beer beloved of the yokels of Old England, he had traversed wellnigh every quarter of Alexandria in vain quest of the cheap and honest draught wine that he knew must be there somewhere, and yet must be neither that so very “ordinaire” red wine of France, nor yet the wretched “health wines” of Greece, that carry in their tang memories of the physician and the sick-bed of our pre-war days. And between him and Old Benci there had grown up quite a sincere affection, apart altogether from Chianti at P.T. 1 per glass.
It was delightful, the pantomime that went on whenever any of us arrived without Tillett. With a countenance full of anxious solicitude, Benci would point vaguely out into the night, carry his forefinger to his own grey head, and then up would go his eyebrows in interrogation. This we knew to mean, “Where is our friend of the grey hair that you are here to-night without him?” And one of us would answer by laying his face to the table and snoring heavily or in mimic sentry-go along the passage. Oh, but it was good to see the smile that broke and beamed across his honest face, with his pleasure at finding himself intelligible to his country’s allies.
The rest of these allies, so far as our coterie was concerned, were a sergeant of the Ceylon Tea-planters, back from Gallipoli in charge of his company’s horses, and a Maori of that gallant, reckless band whose “Komaté! Komaté!” rang along those hills in August—well-born and well-educated, in physique strong and solid, but with movements as quick and sure as a cat’s. In this tanned army only the full lips and the slightly flattened nose betrayed his origin.