Further attempts to telephone Mucker Hever collect or else to borrow the fare for Los Angeles failed miserably and we were arrested. Those few days in jail are not the worst I have spent. At least there was adequate food and no beatings. But of course I was hard put to quell my panic. I spent a day in the infirmary but the doctors there were unsympathetic. They determined I was merely suffering drug-withdrawal symptoms. At this foul lie, I did not help my own case by shouting my outrage and trying to strike the orderly who conveyed the quacks’ ridiculous diagnosis. They would not accept that my release might well be a matter of life and death. Of all places, California was where Esmé most needed protecting. Like any city which has attained the status of a myth, Hollywood was full of predators ready to pick up all unconsidered trifles, human or financial. Thousands of young girls were sacrificed each day to a dream of Fame.
With Mr Mix’s help I began to make some sort of fresh plan. On the morning of our release, we headed directly for the highway. Eventually, in the company of three lambs’ carcasses and a somewhat introspective ewe, we got all the way to Valparaiso, Indiana and the railroad yards. After sunset we climbed into a west-bound box-car, closing the doors with all the emotion of returning home. Our long journey begun, there was little to do but talk. Jacob Mix was fascinated by all I had to tell him and frequently exclaimed that I was the best education he had ever had, but all was not one-sided. Mr Mix was a skilful modern dancer—foxtrot, Charleston, even tango were all familiar to him, picked up either from an earlier mentor, a down-and-out music-hall performer who had learned his trade with Cohan, or books and films. He had seen The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse twelve times. Many a night we would step carefully to the rhythm of the swaying freight car while he instructed me in the steps of the waltz, the polka and the cakewalk. Then somewhere in Kansas one evening we found an empty grain truck. Sweet-smelling as it was, and with enough grain still remaining to make us both comfortable, the truck carried us eventually to Hannibal, Missouri, where an attempt to kill us by pouring new grain onto our sleeping bodies barely failed. We found ourselves promptly jailed, this time in separate ‘tanks’ while we served our profitless time and were released. After we had begged unsuccessfully for food at the back door of Huck Finn’s Original Catfish House we fled and were separated. I became familiar with the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee, where I worked as a slave-labourer for a month on a ‘chain-gang’ building up the levee after the flood. By that time I had lost all my ambition and a good deal of my identity and was merely grateful that none of my old acquaintances passed by and recognised me. I had left Memphis under something of a cloud, in Major Sinclair’s airship, and was now especially glad I had given the name of Paxton to the arresting policeman. My guess was that Boss Crump, undisputed ruler of Memphis, would think nothing of ordering the death of a man he regarded as his arch-enemy. I prayed daily that he would never know I was at that moment working on the river wall not half a mile from Mud Island, but my time passed without event and, released, I had lost all contact with Mr Mix. I heard from another bum that he had headed for New Orleans, but my own destination remained Los Angeles.
Occasionally I raised enough money to visit a movie. They were all that remained of my lost reality. I watched that other Gish, Dorothy, in The Beautiful City, a wonderful tale of racial misunderstanding and reconciliation with William Powell and Richard Barthelmass as the Italian, and it reminded me of my ideals, my own faith in humanity. Mostly however I could not afford the first-run, full-orchestra, theatres and went to houses where Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson were the biggest attractions and Colonel Tim Holt’s adventures were considered too ‘up-market’. This was where I saw Tom Mix and observed how he represented all that was noblest in the Anglo-Saxon race. He truly was a Knight of the Prairies! Now at last I understood the value and influence of the modern kinema. Griffith remained my ideal—I watched, borne away from all my misery for two hours, while Lillian and Dorothy Gish performed the harrowing story of Orphans of the Storm, and Broken Blossoms had me in tears in an old Kansas City mission hall lined with painful pews, where I saw it three times, my own hardships seeming as nothing to the tragedy of ‘The Chink and the Child’ so marvellously played by Richard Barthelmass and Lillian Gish. I went to see her the other day in a horror film by the fat actor, Laughton. She was the only redeeming feature in the whole thing. We all have to compromise occasionally. I did not blame her. My own compromises were many through the summer of 1924.
I got a lift as far as Silverado. By now the September nights grew chill and my yearning for Esmé had become a constant familiar ache. Like the hunger, thirst and sleeplessness it was familiar enough so that I was no longer always conscious of it. I am used to hardship. I have survived many kinds. It has helped me to encourage in myself a kind of mental hibernation. I put my brain to sleep, save for those functions absolutely necessary for day-to-day living. Anyone who met me in those days would have considered me merely another young bum. I was superficially no more nor less coherent and wretched than any of the other derelicts in the 20s who spread in increasing numbers across the North American continent. But there too I did not become a Musselman. Unacknowledged, I kept that little secret spark alive. My spirit remained my own.
What was the point of making a tararum about it? Some things are best forgotten or, if not forgotten, not spoken of. Some things only bring back trouble. A person must survive as best they can. Nobody blames them. Certainly one has a duty to others, but how can one help others if one has not helped oneself? You see, this is what they refuse to make allowances for. It is the socialists who force me to silence on the matter.
Red tsu der vant. I am not ashamed. Are we to rely upon the word of some worthless hasidim? Some stemwinder? What happened in Sonora was never proved. It was a beautiful town. I was against the idea but the others were committed. The fence was black iron and the shrubs were cedar. That is what I remembered. That is what I told them. Neat little lawns rolled where once forty-niners had brawled in their own vomit. Northern California was never a lucky place for me. Even my bargain with William Randolph Hearst’s agents in the matter of the Thomas Ince affair emanated from the Southern half of the State although I am sworn to remain discreet on all matters involving the Hearst family so in honour say no more. I would only add that I had become desperate to have my old life restored and was no more than a tool in the matter having no moral involvement. That was on November 20, 1924. I had a full pardon and an assurance of work, should I ever require ‘an honest job’, at Cosmopolitan Studios.
I do not think it worth describing the degradation of my journey across the sub-continent. Sometimes one cannot afford a conscience. Sometimes one must sell whatever is valuable. I am not ashamed of this. I retain my Cossack soul. I survive so that my people, those Slavic heroes who wait to be awakened in all our menfolk, shall also remember how to survive. And the day is not too far off when our final battle is to be fought. That is the important battle. Nothing else is worth dying for. Love—mutual love—what else have we to comfort us against the cold terror of Entropy? Only human love increases, constitutes itself, intensifies—it is our only antidote to Entropy. We do not value enough our capacity to love. For love alone will save us, in the end—not ideologies, not even religion—but love, decent, honest, human love of one for another, all for one and one for all! Pah sah?
If one cannot change society one can at least hope from time to time to remind it of its virtues. The Moslem does not do this. Under the Tsar, under Christ, the Moslem came to see the virtues of conversion. Not so, of course, under the godless Bolsheviks who offered him no alternative. Thus he remains barbaric, backward, unenlightened. Civil War is the only future for him, when Mahomet’s servants decide the time is right to support their co-religionist! God has spoken to me and I to Him but I told Him I could do His work without His comfort. When I am old and weak, God, I said, then I shall come to deserve and ask for Your comfort. Now I am old. I am weak. And God is gone, a drooling
dotard, with only His son and His prophets and saints to help us. They are not strong enough. Sometimes, in those grey, despairing hours, I wonder if the Devil is indeed our rightful master and I am half-tempted towards the Synagogue, to the House of Loss itself. Hopelessness, powerlessness and death lie there. You do not know whose side I am on. It is probably yours.
Willst du ruhig sein, du Judenschwein? Ci ken myn arof gain in himl araan, ju freign bas got, ci sy darf azoi zaan? But is this not how Sexton Blake addressed the Jews?
In a horse-box shared with a stallion of uncertain disposition I invented, in the early winter of 1924, the jet engine. Jet reaction and gas turbine propulsion was always theoretically possible. I was remembering an article I had read as a boy in one of my English periodicals about Hero’s Alexandrian steam engine, which, some 250 years bc, he called an Aerophile, and which is thought to be the first machine to convert steam pressure into jet force. My mind wandered on to Newton’s third law of motion, his never-built steam carriage. The power/weight ratio was of course the chief problem for aero-planes in those days, since a bigger plane always required a more powerful, and therefore bigger, engine. A jet turbine could deliver considerably more power for its size and therefore lift much larger machines at greater speeds. It occurred to me that some sort of high-velocity fan could be operated to draw in air which could be compressed and used in the powering of a turbine. For a few minutes I longed for my instruments and blueprints, still waiting, with my steam car, in Long Beach, California. Years later, when I heard about Whittle’s work in England, I realised I had hit upon his solution some ten years earlier. But of course this is not an unusual experience for me. In other circumstances I should probably today be the richest man in the world. If my vision of the jet engine had come to me while seated in some plush study lined with old brass instruments, like Sir Francis, then indeed, I might today be strutting the corridors of Buckingham Palace with a garter on my knee and a knighthood in my pocket, destined to rest in Westminster Abbey, to lie through the centuries and hear the blessed mutter of the mass. And this is the man who gave the world the sub-machine-gun! Blessed mutterings indeed!
They push at you from all sides, these young barbarians, these worshippers of pagan images, in the costumes of comic-opera gypsies. But the gypsies have an old knowledge, a knowledge of God, which made them a people apart. I have always found a fellow-feeling with them. They too were doomed to wander, to be reviled and humiliated, to be refused the comforts and rewards of the securely privileged.
But these are not gypsies who come to Portobello to sell their coloured candles and their beads where once an honest cabbage could be bought for less than a beggar now demands for tea. They have set up ranks of Indian silks, rows of perfumed oils and spices, in frank acknowledgement of their nation’s conquest by the Orient. The sons and daughters of Surrey stockbrokers importune you like carpet-sellers in some Marrakshi souk. They jeer at me. I know the names. I speak all languages. But I refuse to be silenced by their mockery. We are on the brink of what the Chinese call Luan. I have seen the famous ruins of the world. I have seen the end of the Enlightenment. I have earned the right to speak. They use words whose meaning is lost to them. The true fascisti, the self-disciplined heroes of modern Italy, had no part in taking this world to war. They were against it. Is Christ a villain because some self-proclaimed Christian kills a child? My feelings are of the noblest kind. My emotions are profound. I have nothing but love in my heart, yet they take my actions and distort them and pervert them and call me that creature who personifies what they most fear and despise in themselves! They put me in jail. They try to shoot me. They shudder at the idea of sharing their land with such a creature as myself. One look is enough to show that I am a criminal. And yet what are these crimes? In Japan, in India—even in parts of America—they are ordinary practices. They know this really. What they hate is the cunning and malice in their own souls. I am an innocent mirror—this, of course, is typical. But it is not pleasant to be Billy Budd. I have fought prejudice all my life. The young Cornelius girl says I have an overdeveloped sense of sin. She says I am blaming myself too much. Though I appreciate her interest I laugh at this. I am not blaming myself at all, I tell her! And I doubt very much if God is blaming me, either! After all, even in His dotage He knows how much I have suffered and for what end. Even when I did not realise it, I was doing His work. Even in Egypt.
It is neither here nor there, at any rate, how on November 21, 1924, circumstances brought me, in a good-quality three-piece suit of the latest ‘jazz’ fashion, with matching Derby hat and spats and smoking a Havana cigar almost a foot long, once more to Hollywood, my ‘home town’. Only, I need hardly say, to be denied my triumph.
I had no intention of accepting Miss Davies’s offer of work and was confident that I would soon be back in harness, married to Esmé and my vocation in an exhilarating harmony. I had no doubt, just then, that Science was my true master. From a rather substandard room at the Hollywood Hotel still commanded by Mrs Hershing combining the styles of the Madam of a high-class bordello and a somewhat puritanical Mother Superior, I telephoned my erstwhile backer only to be told that ‘Mucker’ Hever was out of town. I called Information, but could locate neither Meulemkaumpf nor Esmé’s surname, Bolascu. Even Mrs Cornelius was unlisted. Finally, on visiting my bank, I discovered that my retainer had not been paid for months and I had little more than four hundred dollars in my account. But at least I was soon to discover what had happened to Mrs Cornelius. I left the hotel restaurant that night and idly wandered down towards Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to take my mind off my obsessions and spend an hour or two comparing the feet, hands and hooves of the famous. Instead, after a couple of blocks, I was confronted by an enormous floodlit billboard in vivid, almost Oriental colour. I at once recognised my guardian angel, my greatest friend, my conscience and my confidant. It was Mrs Cornelius. Of course, she was not billed as Mrs Cornelius. Instead, here she was at last as she had always longed to be (though she also was no longer Charlene Chaplin). As Gloria Cornish she had shed about a stone in weight, but her warm beauty was unmistakable. It began to seem that whenever I was lost, whenever I was in despair and did not know where to turn, I received just a vision of my old amie-du-chemin, as they say in France.
I made a note of the film company, Sunset Motion Pictures. I would write to her.
The movie itself was one of those jazz-baby pictures got up to look as if it possessed a social conscience. I hate such hypocrisy. It was called Was It A Sin? and I went to see it purely so that I could have something to say when we met. Actually, the film was not without merit in its tragic story of a woman who commits adultery and is ultimately forced into prostitution, drugs and worse by cynical young opportunists who buy and sell women like meat at a cattle market. Mrs Cornelius played the fallen woman with a mixture of pathos and ‘It’ which comprised some of the finest acting I had ever seen upon the screen. And yet, at the same time, heimisheh. But that was Mrs Cornelius au naturel. It was how she always was. Unspoiled by any of life’s vicissitudes. She was purity personified and I would fight a duel to the death to that effect. A lady, through and through, and a great artiste in every sense of the word.
She alone has stood by me through all my ups and downs. She is the only one who really knows me. In Kiev when I flew so high above the Babi gorge my mother and Esmé loved me. Since then, only Mrs Cornelius has acknowledged my achievements and understood my soul. If I go out now there is always some smirking embryonic gangster leaning on the corner of the bed-shop at Colville Terrace, across from the Midland Bank. ‘Hello, professor,’ he says. I ignore his mocking challenge and march straight to Stout’s, the grocers. They at least have some old-world courtesy. They all wear white coats and put on gloves to serve the biscuits, even the women. It is a tradition of service long since lost, even as a notion, to that jeering lout. As I return up Portobello Road Mrs Cornelius waves to me from the ironmonger’s. She lives in the basement of Number Eight and, l
ike me, is plagued by the unsympathetic young. But she continues to resist, to challenge anyone who seeks to reduce her, either by virtue of her age, her sex, her class or her appearance. This is her quality of resilient courage. She has always had it. At once she dismisses the youth with a rude gesture. ‘Come in for a minute and ‘ave a cup o’ tea, kernel.’ When feeling sympathetic she always addresses me by my title.
I enter the warmth of her moist abode, down below the level of the road, and there she comforts me with conversation almost wordless, a kind of croon. She is all there is and all I need now, my good old compadre. The world was ours once. We enjoyed it freely, that Olympus. I cannot regret those days. They are what they will never take away. Better to have such memories and no future than to have a future with no memories.
These children reject history. To them the past is merely passé. How can they learn not to make the same mistakes if they fail to accept the nature of time? Now they even insist the nature of time has changed. If so, surely we must still develop a morality so that we may not descend again to feral brutes? Mrs Cornelius tells me I worry too much about such things. She reminds me I can do nothing. But a man must try, I say, if his conscience demands it. In Inglewood I gave a note to the studio concierge at his little kiosk by the main gate. Sunset Moving Picture Company seemed a thriving concern, not one of the fly-by-night little movie businesses which so proliferated in those days, frequently under high-sounding titles hiding the real names of familiar shysters. My fears that Mrs Cornelius had become entangled in some shady operation dispelled, I boarded the No. 5 Yellow Car back from Manchester to downtown Los Angeles where I changed for Hollywood. The journey through the suburbs accounted for the best part of the day but it was pleasant enough and my time was well rewarded, for when I returned to the Hollywood Hotel Mrs Cornelius had already telephoned to say that her car would arrive at seven to take me to dinner with her. At last I had some sense of my burden’s lifting a little. I knew fresh confidence. If I was being tested by God, clearly I had done enough for the moment to merit His mercy, for by that evening I was in Beverly Hills dining tête-à-tête with my old friend, in a room overlooking a pool and palms which might have been anywhere in the romantic East. Had I not known better, I should have assumed a determination on her part to seduce me.
Jerusalem Commands Page 6
