To my immense relief I discovered, in a waistcoat pocket, my packet of cocaine. Soon I would be able to banish much of the pain. Determined to put myself in the hands of this good-hearted darkie (whose name, he announced, was Mr Jacob T. Mix), I already planned to offer him in Los Angeles a permanent job as my body-servant. Through no fault of his own he had fallen on hard times, a victim of prejudice in a world which had been happy to use his services in its negro regiments but had no use for him in peace. This, of course, was the hard lesson of ‘emancipation’. What use is freedom without the dignity of work?
In a daze, I was limping rapidly down the track, jumping over ties and rails, until I had reached a slow-moving box-car and was almost thrown into it by the strong arm of my new friend. I landed heavily on oily timber and banged my head again. Rolling over, I saw Mr Mix, his great tattered overcoat flying around him so that he resembled Doré’s Ancient Mariner, appearing to expand and fill the entire doorway. Then he had turned and banged shut the sliding door. ‘We’ll sit here in the dark until we’re through the town,’ he said. This suited me well enough, for I could now make surreptitious use of my cocaine. I did not offer him any, nor would he have expected it. There is a great difference between what happens to a white man under the influence of cocaine and the effects produced in the typical negro ‘hophead’. Besides, I heard the sound of a bottle being opened. ‘You’d better take a drink until you can get those bruises fixed up,’ murmured my concerned Man Friday, but I refused. I was already feeling considerably better, knowing that I was en route for the city and Esmé.
When Jacob T. Mix lit a tiny pocket oil-lamp the car was suddenly illuminated by a wonderful radiance which turned every blade of straw to gold, every strand of wire to silver, made the walls glow like the warm, old wood of a comfortable cabin, while everything swayed gently, a huge, reassuring cradle, with Mr Mix’s enormous, scarred, kindly face peering down at me, enquiring with rough good will if I was sure I would not take a pull on his bottle and try to get some sleep.
‘How long will it be before we reach New York?’ I asked him.
‘Five or six hours, I’d reckon. She’s slow, this old train, but she’s steady. Then we have to look out for the bulls. In that early light they can stay hidden until they’re right up on you. But stick with me, Max. I’ll get you to your boat. Your girl promised to you, is she? From the old country?’
In essence he was right so I did not correct him. While Mr Mix began to tell some story of a Nigerian sailor he had once known and the stories of Africa the Nigerian had told him, I drifted into a half-sleep where I consoled myself with a vision of Esmé and myself, a prince and princess of Hollywood, driving through the hills and valleys of California, the harbingers and personification of an inevitable and glorious Future.
How cautious they were, those fools! Was ist Originalität? asks Nietzsche. I can tell him. It is what the majority would instinctively destroy. And how they have tried to destroy me! Yet I survived. I still survive! They cannot bear that.
Even then, I knew that I could not perish. Mrs Cornelius told me this, only a week or two ago, when she came into my shop in search of a new jumper for her boy. ‘Yore bloody indestructible, Ivan!’ Perhaps that is why I have always had this particular relationship with her. We have in common the not unenviable achievement of surviving the greater part of the twentieth century.
Adjusting the wick of his miniature lamp so that it should offer only the minimum necessary light, Mr Mix opened a book, remarking with some surprise at my stoicism and my powers of recovery. ‘You don’t complain much for a white boy.’
‘We Petersens,’ I told him, ‘are a hardy breed.’
TWO
THESE CATTLE CARS have always depressed me. They smell and look much the same in Russia, America, North Africa or Germany and it is demoralising, whatever the circumstance, to travel in them. Inevitably, there will always be at least one bully-boy to terrorise you, even when you are on board and moving. Jacob Mix and myself were spared the sound, that night at least, of steel-shod boots pausing with invisible menace on the roof overhead. How they loved to piss on us! And we were grateful if that was all they did. Those who mourn the passing of the Age of Steam mourn a romantic myth, not the squalid reality so many experienced.
Mr Mix proved to be a fellow of some intellectual ambition. He had educated himself in a rough and ready manner and, as such, proved a far more enjoyable companion than I had expected.
The good-hearted, self-improving negro is the best type in the world. What he lacks in the more sophisticated intellectual functions he more than makes up for with his virtues of loyalty and integrity. He has time neither for black loafers nor ‘white trash’. Thus, unable to sleep and anxious to divert myself from anxieties concerning Esmé, I was more than happy to engage Jacob Mix in conversation. He had been born in Alabama, he said, but had come North, to Philadelphia, to work in the mills during the War. The War over, the white men had wanted their old jobs back. He did what menial work he could to stay alive and had just today made up his mind to put all that behind him and see if he could get work on a ship out of New York. I was delighted by the coincidence. ‘So all along we were heading in the same direction!’
‘I guess so,’ said Mr Mix and again grinned his indescribable and savage grin. I had found a friend and a guide in the urban jungle, a beast finely tuned to modern-day survival. It was only fair that I should let him know what sort of man he had befriended. As briefly as possible I told him a little of my own life and my plans. I do not remember falling asleep.
A great shudder shook the train and I awoke feeling horribly chilled. Still asleep, Jacob Mix rolled a little until his face was in line with mine, then he opened his eyes and winked at me.
‘We should be in Jersey City.’ He peered through the slats at the grey, pre-dawn sky then climbed to his feet, brushing straw from his aged flannels and adjusting the shirt beneath his waistcoat. When he teased the door open I saw only cloud and a few gulls but the sound of an early-morning port was unmistakable. I knew it from Odessa and from Constantinople. It made my heart beat with fresh optimism. We were at the docks! Now all we had to do was find the Icosium’s assigned pier. I wanted to burst through the doors and run towards the water. I could smell the salt, the motor oil, the sea-wind. Esmé, meyn bubeleh. Es tut mir leyd. Esmé! Esmé! I looked at my watch. If on time, the ship had already docked, but would not yet be disembarking. I had forgotten the pier number, but some official was bound to help me.
‘Okay, colonel.’ Suddenly Mr Mix opened the door and beckoned me through. ‘Make for that stack of crates straight ahead. And go fast, man!’ I jumped easily to the concrete of a busy marshalling yard, surrounded by cranes, great locomotives and goods wagons of every description, quickly reaching the crates and a small gap created by careless stacking. Mr Mix joined me almost at once. ‘You can run good, too,’ he said. ‘You’ve had about as much practice as me, right?’ (I remember these questions because they struck me as so mysterious. I have never fathomed them. Sometimes I believe my companion was doing nothing but parrot phrases he had heard or read, without any real sense of meaning.) He took hold of my left foot and inspected it. There were some blisters, and the sock was a ruined mass of blood and cotton. Mr Mix said something about seeing to my foot before continuing, but I was anxious to reach the Icosium. ‘How are you going to do that, without no dough?’ he asked quietly.
‘I don’t need money to approach a ship’s pier, my dear fellow.’
‘But you need three cents to get on the ferry.’ Mix pointed across a stretch of dirty water in which every description of garbage floated. ‘That’s the Hudson, man. I guess the Cunarders dock over there, on the Manhattan side.’
I had imagined the train would take me directly to the docks, as it would have done in Odessa! Foolishly I had made a too obvious assumption. I had no money. And all my papers were in my stolen wallet. But at least I had a companion who knew where we were. ‘I shall have to pawn my
watch,’ I said. ‘We had best get out of here and seek the necessary Jew.’
‘It’ll take too long and it’ll be too risky.’ Jacob Mix dug his hand along the back of his trousers and removed something wrapped in the tail of his shirt. It proved to be a ten-dollar bill which he brandished at me as if he had discovered the Koh-i-Noor diamond. ‘I’ll take the watch as a pledge.’
I argued that I would get far more in a pawn shop. ‘Maybe, but you ain’t in a pawn shop and you ain’t got time to find one.’ Mr Mix added, ‘Besides, I’m sticking with you for a while. I’ll get my ten bucks back, I know.’
‘Within hours,’ I promised. ‘You are wise to trust me, Jacob Mix.’ And with that I accepted the exchange.
‘First, we get the ferry.’ He led me in a zig-zag course between stacks of cargo. ‘And then we find a pharmacy. We’ve got to clean you up, man, if you’re going to make a good impression on that girl.’
Suddenly I realised how I must look. ‘I shall get another pair of shoes,’ I said. ‘And some flowers. And perhaps another suit and a shirt.’
‘You got my only ten dollars,’ said Jacob Mix. ‘How you spend it, mister, is up to you. But there ain’t no more.’ By now we were creeping along the side of a dock, with the river, sluggish and filthy, directly below us. ‘Pick up that plank. The other end.’ Mix took hold of the nearest part of the plank which we shouldered as he led the way across a wide, unprotected stretch of dock, towards green iron railings, behind which a small, sturdy steamboat rode at her moorings in a choppy sea while her passengers filed aboard. As we approached the end of the queue we dropped the plank and joined the line of working people paying their three cents at the turnstile before boarding the ferry. I was a little nervous of producing my newly acquired ten-dollar bill and Mr Mix seemed to anticipate this, because he pushed ahead of me when our turn came and gave the man six cents. ‘Make sure you stick to the back of the boat,’ commanded the ticket seller as we moved towards the gangplank. He thought we were bums and did not want his respectable passengers bothered by us. It was no use arguing with him, said Jacob Mix quietly to me. It was easier to let him think what he liked. At least that way he wasn’t alarmed and wouldn’t become aggressive. I saw sense in this advice. After all, it was only what I had already learned during the Bolshevik War.
There was a clammy mist on the leaden water and the far bank was not clearly visible. I glimpsed a few bulky shapes rising from the fog like the Ice Giants of the Slavic epics. The sounds from the invisible ships were melancholy voices bewailing the defeat of their supernatural power. The high-pitched little ferry answered tremulously, baffled and a trifle afraid. Then, detail by detail, the buildings began to form familiar outlines, the elegant towers of Woolworth and International Telephone, legendary hotels like the slender Sherry-Netherlands or the exquisitely classical Savoy-Plaza! Living monuments to American enterprise, to Hecksher and Flatiron, the Straus, the Paramount and the Union Trust! That splendid blend of Gothic and Egyptianate styles which is so characteristically New York! That soaring, almost delicate beauty of her famous ‘sky-scrapers’ was revealed to me again as the sun burned away the last of the fog to display the city’s million blazing windows! The glinting granite and marble of her towers were soaring optimistic tributes to the very latest futuristic architectural ideas. Here was the consummate city in those wonderful days before the forces of Carthage flowed out of their sewers and occupied her streets, before she became the capital of polyglottal mongrelism. A melting-pot indeed! I call it a witches’ cauldron which the world allows to bubble and brew until it creates a poison strong enough to threaten the extermination of everything fine and noble and human. But this morning, blazing with the purity of silver, it was a New York which, I believed, could only grow more marvellous and more beautiful. Of course I was optimistic. The little steamer was bearing me steadily towards my darling. My adventures had indeed only served to give extra piquancy to our reunion. I felt, as it were, that I had earned the happiness I now anticipated.
With the morning sun warming my skin, I looked with admiration at the great liners alongside the piers to our right—so many self-contained cities, built to survive the enormous forces of nature which ruled the Atlantic, built to ensure that their passengers would hardly notice that they had left the parlours of Kensington and Fifth Avenue. They rose above us now, those monuments to civilisation and the engineers’ art. I said as much to Jacob Mix, but the darkie was in a dream of his own. ‘I always wanted to visit Africa.’ He was as oblivious of the monsters as they were of us. ‘Just to see what it was like, you know?’
‘You’ll have to go to Europe first,’ it was my duty to inform him of the realities, ‘and then perhaps in Marseilles you’ll find a ship for Tangier.’
‘Marseilles seems the best bet,’ he agreed. He had read a good many travel books and memoirs and was almost as familiar as I with places I had actually visited. In his profoundly alien mind he held ambitions as important to him as mine were to me. I recognised this, and the mutual recognition bound us together in a peculiar way. I think he had begun to see me as something of a spiritual guide, an intellectual mentor who could help him achieve the vague goals he so desperately desired. He knew, I suspect, that he did not have yet either the higher mental functions nor the social standing to fulfil himself on his own; thus by attaching himself to me he might see something of that world and of society which until now had been denied him. In turn I knew the stirrings of a powerful emotion I am forced to describe as paternal. Although probably a year or two younger than the negro I was dominated by an impulse to take care of him. Perhaps again it was recognition, this time of our common humanity, that made him attach himself to me. I shall never exactly know. As the ferry docked below the streamlined buildings and gleaming machinery of the Chelsea Piers I stared almost idly at the medium-sized twin-funnelled boat which lay, hissing and sighing from recent exertion, at anchor a couple of hundred yards below. It was only as the ferry turned a point or two to come alongside the wharf that I realised I was reading the name of the vessel in bold, black letters against the white paint—S.S. Icosium, Genoa. It was Esmé’s boat! I had only to descend the gangplank and walk along the dock to where the ship waited. But then the irony struck me. I could not present myself to my darling looking as I did. Beyond the ferry buildings was an elevated stretch of roadway and through the pillars I made out a series of grubby storefronts where I was bound to find some shoes and, if not flowers, at least some candy. Again I was in luck. As Jacob Mix and I reached the busy street, we saw a quilt of colour, a flower-seller’s stall. She had set up, of course, to take advantage of the likes of myself. To Mr Mix’s wonderment, I spent five dollars on a large bunch of mixed blooms and handed them to him to hold for me while I cast my eye across the street then led him towards a store advertising Quality Apparel, where black suits were hung up like so many punished felons. I was limping rather painfully, now that the cocaine had worn off, and it was not expedient to be seen taking more. Mr Mix followed behind me, clutching the flowers and telling me he was beginning to suspect that my vicissitudes had turned my brain. I would have been irritated by his presumption had I not realised that this was his way of displaying his solicitousness. My jacket and trousers were badly torn, but my shirt and waistcoat would serve until I could get to a telegraph office and have funds cabled to me. Esmé, I was sure, would be so delighted to see me that she would scarcely notice the condition of those garments. However, I could not bear to greet her smelling of a cattle-truck and the filth of the railroad. I entered the clothing store while Mr Mix waited for me outside, studying the boots and shoes on the racks which the overly suspicious old Jew who ran the shop had ensured were not in pairs.
The Jew asked, in curt Yiddish, what he could do for me. I refused to speak that decadent patois and demanded, in English, to see one of his best suits in my size.
‘They are nine ninety-nine, any one you like,’ he told me, looking me up and down to gauge my measurements. Then
, with a long, hooked pole, he wandered down a great cavern of cloth to find the appropriate suit.
‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘you are interested in part exchange.’
‘These suits are all bran-new, my friend.’ He scratched himself under his yarmulke as he stared up at the ranks of trousers and jackets. ‘You want second-hand, you go down the street. Here it’s cash, strictly. What have you got to exchange?’ And he hooked down a suit with a swift flick of his hand and arm. ‘That’s you, mister. Do you want to try it on?’
‘My jacket and trousers are of finer quality,’ I said. ‘It must be obvious to any judge of cloth.’
‘Once,’ he agreed, ‘that was a good suit. Whoever had it made was a man of taste. But now—look at it! It would have to be repaired. It can’t be saved.’
‘Take it and five dollars,’ I offered. Whereupon the man’s mood changed and he reverted to type, shouting at me and telling me to get out of his shop and not to waste his time. Furious, I left with dignity, calling to Mr Mix to follow.
I made my way towards a sign advertising Pledges. Here, I thought, I might get what I needed. But before I went in, Mr Mix grasped my arm.
‘Put this on,’ he said softly. ‘It’ll help balance you up at any rate.’
He had taken a brogue from the rack. It was a near-match to my own and, astonishingly, an exact fit. ‘I thought it looked about right,’ he said. He steadied me on the kerb while I tied the laces. ‘You’d hardly know it weren’t a pair. Now that was lucky, wasn’t it?’
I murmured that it was more a tribute to his skill as a thief than to the intercession of any Guardian Angel and this made him chuckle. Somewhat heartened, I entered an even darker cavern than the last. This one reeked of mouldy leather and damp paper, of mildew and old dust. The clothes hung on racks on one side of the shop while the other was crowded with a miscellany of household goods, of bicycles and washtubs, of mechanical kitchen utensils, and all the gadgets bought to appease wives who had waited with growing fury while their housekeeping was poured down the throats of the feckless immigrants crowding these disease-ridden slums. Such shops were set up to exploit the likes of myself and, I supposed, sailors needing to enter the civilian world. My five dollars, I was told, was good for a jacket but ‘pants is another two-fifty’. Time was running out. I could not waste it in bargaining. At length I settled for a jacket which, although a little small for me, was a reasonable match to my trousers and at least, though stinking of camphor, was clean. I jammed the money into the Jew’s hand and ran from his premises. It would not be more than half-an-hour before I was reunited with my soulmate!
Jerusalem Commands Page 4
