A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (26 page)

It was not an auspicious response to his sexual awakening. Submitting to the care of his new landlady, Irene, he settled into an attitude of poetic resignation. On his birthday he copied out a passage describing the unquenchable longing of Marcus Aurelius for an Ideal City. To achieve the Beloved Republic, Plato demanded virtue, wisdom, and beauty. But Marcus Aurelius yearned also for tenderness and pity. From Irene, Morgan received both.

Irene had been Aida’s housemaid. Another Alexandrian “bastard,” she was Greek by ancestry but raised on Corfu, where Morgan’s beloved Italian was the lingua franca. She retired early from domestic service to buy two small boarding houses and “shifted about the sandy wastes that lay east of the city with the intention of making money.” Unwilling to impose upon Furness’s largesse any longer, Morgan rented a cheap room from her, and got more than he bargained for: vigorous nursing to a stream of Italian chatter, a
cat and kittens, and frequent unannounced decampments to her other property. “Wherever she went she took me,” he wrote, “remarking
‘Lo porto con me’
as if I was a doll.”

Cautiously he resumed his hospital duties, the commute on the tram line halved by his move to the suburbs. One cold night in late January, Morgan rode back from Montazah alone in the dark. In the tram three young Egyptian conductors casually chatted, riding on the footboard. The youngest approached Forster. Would he mind standing up, so he could retrieve his coat from under Morgan’s seat? The man spoke good English, “charming and polite, I said yes, cold, and we smiled.” Like a melody that becomes palpable only after being heard again and again on a distant radio, Forster’s sense of this man as an individual swelled into focus slowly. For several weeks the Egyptian half saluted him as he stood at the terminus when the tram came in. Morgan half responded. “Each knew the other wasn’t someone else. No More.”

Soon Forster began to realize that he had been looking
through
this face for more than a year. He reconnected scattered impressions. Looking up as the young man rode past, thinking, “‘nice’ and the morning was fresh and sunny.” Smiling when the conductor laughed broadly with a soldier. Remarking on his playful caress of each button on the soldier’s tunic as he said goodbye. This was the handsome boy with “some African-Negro blood” he and Furness had admired the previous spring! He began to discern the beautiful dark face, with its full lips and wide-set black eyes, from the thousands of anonymous faces that streamed by each day.

Discovering this genuine, bright young Egyptian—who introduced himself as Mohammed el Adl—seemed a prophetic answer to a pressing question. “Often as I let myself in at night, so safe and dull, I wondered ‘Will this go on forever?’ Seeing you”—he wrote to Mohammed in a private memoir—“I felt it would not, and determined not to be afraid until I was obliged.” Since 1909 when he wrote
Howards End
Morgan had believed, without much evidence in his own life, “that to be trusted and to be trusted across the barriers of income race and class, is the greatest reward a man can receive . . .” The prospect of real friendship galvanized his theory into practical courage. He recognized the dangers, but felt curiously unmoved by them, confiding to Florence:

I have plunged into an anxious but very beautiful affair. It seemed to me—and I proved right—that something precious was being offered
me and that I was offering something that might be thought precious . . . I should have been right to take the plunge, because if you pass life by it’s jolly well going to pass
you
by in the future. If you’re frightened it’s all right—that’s no harm; fear is an emotion. But by some trick of the nerves I happen not to be frightened.

Sangfroid and determination were all very well, but finding the right tone for such a friendship proved rather difficult. For one thing, he had to find el Adl without giving the impression that he was stalking him. The night after the encounter with the coat, Morgan tucked a copy of
Punch
intended as a gift for Mohammed under his arm. With studied casualness he waited unsuccessfully for hours. Not knowing the young man’s schedule, for several weeks he loitered at the terminus of the Bacos line, hoping for a glimpse of Mohammed’s attractive head stooped over the accounting book as the tram “c[a]me up into the swirl,” all the while pretending each encounter was accidental. “God knows how many hours I stood waiting . . . that April and May,” Morgan ruefully wrote Florence. Once Mohammed realized he was sought, he laconically said “second car,” where they met on the sly while Mohammed explained his work schedule. He, too, was attracted by this strange blossoming friendship.

El Adl’s insouciant air, unusual among the “servile” Egyptians, was refreshing. He was young (perhaps only seventeen) and bantam (five feet six and about 130 pounds), but carried himself with the quiet authority of an ambitious self-made man. At just the same time Forster arrived in Alexandria, he had come to the city alone to seek his fortune, leaving his parents and brother in a sleepy village in the Nile Delta. And he was resplendent in his khaki uniform, with a dark red tarboosh and blue silk tassel. With his eager idiomatic English and his charm, Mohammed seemed potentially a stock character—the colonial gigolo—but he proved surprisingly generous and human: prickly but honest, willing to risk a great deal for friendship.

Linguistically and culturally Mohammed had the upper hand. Riding side by side, talking softly, they always spoke English. (Forster expressed a wish to learn Arabic, to read
The Thousand and One Nights
.) Mohammed understood only too well what the British were saying sotto voce. Riding with Morgan out to the hospital, he abruptly asked “a question about Mohammedans which please answer truly, sir.” Why did the English hate Muslims so, he wondered? Forster protested, but Mohammed pressed back; he had
overheard a soldier say to another, “There’s a Mosque for fucking (I beg your pardon) Mohammedans.” There was no answer for this but the most personal. Forster confided his great love for his Muslim friend Masood, telling Mohammed he had gone all the way to India to see him, and would again. That must have cost a lot of money, Mohammed commented drily. But the gesture impressed him.

Sensing Forster’s earnest vulnerability, Mohammed reciprocated by taking a bold risk of his own. In late March, grandly and impulsively, he refused to allow Morgan to pay the fare. Unused to being treated as a human being by the British (he had been upbraided and even struck by imperious riders), he warmed to Morgan’s impeccable courtesy. This episode would work itself poignantly into a scene in
A Passage to India
when Dr. Aziz, having paid for every ticket on the train, informs his obtuse English guests that seats on the Marabar line are always free. But Morgan understood that “the reprehensible habit of joyrides” was a shared transgression. Slowly, they were building their own separate world.

Yet even their mutual efforts to connect could not forestall a cascade of small misunderstandings. Excessive generosity seemed to exacerbate them. Once Forster offered a cigarette only to be rebuffed: “I seldom smoke—my ministry of Finance does not permit it.” Mohammed’s reply puzzled Morgan—was he asking for baksheesh, or repelled by the notion? The small change from the fare became a currency of intercultural squabbles—the older man insisting on punctilious payment and asking Mohammed to keep the change, the younger refusing. This drama reached its point of bathos when Mohammed emphatically closed his fist and the coins fell to the floorboards, sending Forster to his hands and knees to recover them. Forever overshooting or undershooting the mark of proportion, Forster persisted gamely, telling Florence that in retrospect “I can only say I have been less stupid than most people.”

It was soon evident that the Egyptian had as much to fear as Morgan himself. When a tram inspector discovered that Forster had not paid his fare, Mohammed quickly replied with a pretext in Arabic: “It had blown away or that I had a Pass—anyhow something that wasn’t true.” But the ruse was discovered. This precipitated a crisis, enacted in the familiar dance of colonial racism. “No suspicion or blame attached to” Forster, who “was far too important a personage,” but after a terrific scene Mohammed’s job was
imperiled. “With a sort of regal detachment,” Mohammed shrugged off the threat, saying simply, “I have performed a good action.” Desperate moments followed. The tram idled while the inspector spoke darkly with headquarters by telephone. Mohammed stood quietly beside Morgan, making small talk to defuse the tension. Then, just as Forster was to be left on the verge, Mohammed urgently turned to him: “‘Please answer me a question. When you went to India, how many miles was it?’ ‘I don’t know or care’ I cried. ‘Whenever shall I see you again?’ He replied ‘I might try to meet you one evening in my civil clothes perhaps.’ Then I got off.”

Stunned, Forster turned to the machine of privilege he so abhorred. He pulled strings. Luckily, the station manager knew Furness, and owed him a favor; by noon the next day—just as with the Bombay censor the year before—the King’s College network came through. All was well. But Furness was willing to go only so far. In a welter of protectiveness, he warned Forster not to see Mohammed again, playing both sides of the game: “most sympathetic and helpful” but “harp[ing] on about general conditions, onlookers, etc.” Years later, Forster was able to see that he had been “an awful nuisance” by approaching Furness in this way. But at the moment his defense of Mohammed was “the thing I am proudest of in all my life,” in part because it represented the triumph of friendship over fear. Morgan found the young man, told him his job was secure, and asked if they could meet again. “He replied vehemently ‘any time any place any hour,’” and their great friendship commenced in earnest.

Throughout the summer, the two men inched toward physical intimacy. Forster’s carnal feelings grew as he took greater and greater risks. He wrote in a memoir that “sensuality . . . came violently when you first agreed to meet me. I got off your tram at Sidi Gaber and stumbled home in the dark.” The location is telling, for Sidi Gaber was well short of Irene’s lodgings. Danger and excitement had taken hold; Morgan had to walk off the feeling of triumph and cool down.

Only in public spaces could they have privacy. Chastened by Furness’s response and keen to Mohammed’s concerns, they sought a neutral ground for their first assignation. Mohammed set the terms. He christened the location “Chatby Gardens,” using the name of the closest tram stop as an orientation
point. But he gravely counseled Forster to get off at “Mazarita not Ramleh, up the road by the column.” This way each man would debark at an anonymous, “dark and unfrequented” station. Morgan inscribed Mohammed’s directions on the back of the ticket stub, and kept it for the rest of his life.

The Ptolemaic column at the mouth of the Municipal Gardens was a tall shaft of pink granite visible and beckoning all along the road. Celebrating an earlier conquest, it had been reerected in honor of Lord Kitchener’s capture of Khartoum in 1898. The gardens themselves were edged by an old city wall and the Farkha Canal. Though their margins were picturesque and ancient, like much else in Morgan’s Alexandria, they were a modern invention styled to “look mediaeval by moonlight.” By day the highlight was an artificial pond—“an abode of ducks”—surrounded by benches. This was where the men arranged to meet.

The encounter began like an O. Henry story. Forster brought another hapless gift, the kind of expensive sticky cakes he had heard were a particular delicacy for Egyptians. He did not know that el Adl’s mother had warned him against taking sweets from strangers. Though we know Forster to be an unimposing and sincere personage, el Adl later told Forster he feared they might be drugged. For his part, el Adl stood beside Forster for some time, unrecognized. Morgan didn’t see him because he came in an unexpected disguise: in complete tennis whites, right down to the gutta-percha-soled shoes. For ten full minutes, the sensitive Red Cross searcher had been looking past him, unconsciously seeking the familiar uniform. But Mohammed came disguised as a British gentleman.

The conversation was not propitious. Acutely aware of his low social status, Mohammed came off as familiar and contemptuous: “I do not care for cakes. What did you pay for them? . . . How many centuries ago did you buy them?” Then he shifted tactics. To this “gentleman” he confessed to being “only a boy,” and the son of a butcher at that. When Morgan called him “gentle boy,” he relented, and smiled. Suddenly, unaccountably, the two men broke through mutual suspicion into something more volatile and vital. Mohammed invited Forster back to his room. “Would you like to see my home of misery? It will be
dreadful
.” With comic grandeur he disposed of the cakes on the tram, passing them out to the startled riders on the long ride home.

Mohammed lived in Bacos, a working-class district east of the central
town. His house was not dreadful, but quite ordinary. It comprised a single stark room, more spare than shabby: the only furnishings were a platform bed and a small wooden trunk, which he impulsively flung open and emptied to Morgan’s astonishment. He “showered everything in the room down to ‘This is lip salve’ and . . . flung all that he had in his trunk to the bottom saying ‘Very little, all clean . . . Now I have shown you all there is to show.’” Perhaps because he sensed that the British believed Arabs were unclean, Mohammed overcompensated. But his “immaculate” clothes and his guileless self-exposure spoke expressively. Morgan told Florence, “I remember thinking at the time that the man who did that would also hide no secrets in his heart if he decided to open it.” The caveat was a telling bit of projection, for Morgan had not yet told Mohammed his name.

At that moment, it turned out, Mohammed made the decision to trust this odd Englishman. He showed Morgan a photograph of his fiancée, a young woman waiting back in the countryside. He told him about the missionary school where he received his rudimentary education. Significantly, he confided to Morgan that though he was very close to his mother, he had always felt like a stranger in his own family: “I have always ate apart and lived apart, and thought apart. Perhaps I am not my father’s son.” It was clearly exciting, and a great honor, to be treated as an equal by a British man. As Forster left later that evening, Mohammed told him quietly, “This is the very happiest evening of my life.”