by John Masters
Isabel said nothing. Dear God, how she missed Christopher, her lover and preux chevalier; and that was a deeper and longer-lasting hurt than Susan’s; for all she knew, it might last to her death.
Soon they were bowling northward on the Rockland bank of the great river. Richard leaned back between the two women, his gloved hands resting on his knees. ‘Just driving through New York City was exciting,’ he said. ‘What energy … everyone working, hurrying, not wasting a minute! I could almost feel the city throbbing with electricity. As though it might generate a tremendous flash at any moment.’
‘Mettlesome, mad, extravagant city,’ Isabel quoted – ‘We’ll spend the day there the day after tomorrow, if that suits you.’
‘Wonderful!’ Richard said. ‘I want to see Wall Street, the Stock Exchange …’
Susan said, ‘The Statue of Liberty … the Metropolitan Museum …’
‘Macy’s … the Brooklyn Bridge …’
‘A theatre … dinner at Luchow’s, if the mob hasn’t burned it down for being German …’
Richard said, ‘Stephen will be back this evening, won’t he? I’m very eager to find out what he has arranged about our visit to the Ford factory. I do hope to meet Mr Ford himself, if it is possible.’
‘It has all been fixed,’ Isabel said. ‘Stephen knows Mr Ford quite well.’
‘I also hope to see the Jones & Gatewood plant … and Armbruster’s.’
‘Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Columbus, Ohio, respectively. You’ll visit Columbus on your way to Detroit by train. You’ll visit Bridgeport by car. It’s only two hours’ drive from here, or less if the traffic isn’t bad. Now that the war’s over more and more people are buying cars, but the roads aren’t keeping pace. When summer comes, the roads to and from the beaches will be a nightmare, on weekends.’
‘What a country,’ Richard said dreamily. ‘What a market! And all the capital you need … all the skilled labour … all the resources. Already England seems like a quiet little backwater in a forgotten continent.’
‘Yet England still holds the world’s sea trade … insurance … international banking,’ Isabel said.
‘America is the future,’ Richard said. ‘Everything’s so big, so forward-looking.’
‘We have our problems,’ Isabel said. ‘Some of them we can cure, with money. Some we’ll have to cure with things we seem to find more difficult to come up with … patience, sympathy …’
The car was running along the bank of the river. ‘Grandview,’ she said. ‘About two miles to go … That was Piermont we went through just now. That little stream we crossed was where Henry Hudson got fresh water for his crew, in 1609.’
The Hudson was as wide as the sea here, and Richard gasped again, stretching out his arms as though to embrace the great river and the spreading land – ‘America,’ he murmured. ‘America …’
‘History is bunk,’ Henry Ford said, tapping one of his long, strong, bony fingers on the desk top.
Richard gazed with awe at the thin face with the clear, wide-set eyes. This was one of the richest men in the world, richer perhaps than even the Nizam of Hyderabad, or the Aga Khan. But he had made it all himself, by producing. He had almost single-handedly changed the face of the world, not by waging war, but by producing. Others had invented the internal combustion engine; Henry Ford had put it in the reach of the common man. In doing so he had created more work at better pay, more leisure, and more things you could do with that leisure. These benefits had gone not merely to the workers in the car factories, but – as Isabel had pointed out one day when they were driving down to New York – to road builders, which meant to a mass of unskilled labour; to all who produced and refined oil; to the whole recreation industry … to the makers of beach towels, bathing costumes … to house builders, for many would now keep beach or lake houses, which could easily be reached by car, but before would have been inaccessible … The chain went on endlessly, ascending ever higher into the clouds, of light and gold.
Henry Ford said, ‘You people in Europe look back too much. What does it matter what King George IV said or did? It don’t apply now. But it’ll take years, centuries perhaps, for those Europeans to understand that, because their feet are in the mud … in history … And if we’re not careful, we’ll get stuck down there with them.’
‘So you are against the League of Nations?’
‘Sure thing!’ Ford said. ‘No foreign entanglements, that’s what George Washington said, and he knew what he was talking about, which is more than I can say of President Wilson.’
Richard thought, but George Washington is history; was that part of it not ‘bunk’ because it was American? He held his tongue. Mr Ford was probably right; he was seldom wrong, and in any case it would be rude and tactless to argue the point now. Ford said, ‘Go take a look round now. Hindle is waiting outside.’ He stood up and held out his hand. Richard grasped it and winced. The automobile magnate was in his high fifties, but his grip was that of a strong young man, a mechanic.
Richard returned to their hotel in downtown Detroit at half-past six. Susan met him with an anxious look – ‘Are you all right, dear? I thought something must have happened to you …’
Richard flung himself into a chair saying, ‘Ring for room service, Susan. I need a large whisky and soda. Mr Ford wouldn’t approve, but …’ He jumped up and started pacing the room with an almost febrile energy – ‘Something has happened to me. I’ve seen … I was about to say, the future, but that’s not right. I’ve seen the “now” as it is and ought to be … five thousand men in certain, exact places, each doing a certain exact task, all arranged so that there is no possibility of mistakes … no one moves from his place, because the tools and materials he needs are brought to him, and placed precisely where he wants them at the precise instant that he is ready to deal with them …’ He paused to draw breath, and Susan said, ‘But you saw this in Manchester, just before the war, didn’t you, when you went up to look at Mr Ford’s English factory?’
‘The small, pale shadow of this!’ Richard exclaimed. The door opened and a waiter brought in a tray, ice, glasses with whisky, club soda. ‘I don’t want any ice,’ Richard said impatiently. ‘Why must we ruin the taste of good whisky … oh, leave it. Here.’
When the waiter had gone he drank deep and said, ‘The plant out here is the greatest thing on earth, Susan. Mr Ford’s making a new world, and he’s not making it at a conference table, or at the point of a gun, but there, in that factory, turning out good cars for less than fifty pounds apiece. It’s unbelievable! The place where the employees keep their cars – the parking lot, they call it – is incredible. Thousands of cars belonging to the men who work on the production line! Because he pays them enough so that they can afford to buy a car. Of course they get the sack on the spot if they buy any car but a Ford … I am beginning to feel that I can never live in England again without going mad at our slowness, our backwardness, our inefficiency.’
‘But they don’t put ice in your whisky there,’ she said.
‘Oh, that …’
‘There’ll be lots more of the same … I don’t know very much about production lines, but surely it must be very boring for the workmen. Can they possibly find their work satisfying if they don’t make anything, but merely make small parts of something, over and over, and never see the end product?’
‘They’re not educated men,’ Richard said. ‘Or they wouldn’t be on the production line. They don’t have the imagination to be bored. All they look forward to is their pay, and a pub afterwards.’
‘Not a pub, Richard, a saloon. They’re rather different.’
‘Or jump into the car and go to the lake, or a dance hall, or a cinema … it can be twenty miles away, that’s nothing nowadays. I tell you, the whole face of society will change. It is changing … and here, America, is at the front edge of that change.’
She said quietly, ‘I know, Richard. I’m American, and I see that very clearly. But in spite of what Mr Ford s
aid about history, there are many things from our own American past that I shall be very sorry to see go … and I am afraid that Mr Ford’s revolution will do just that.’
‘But … but this is a foreign country!’ Richard exclaimed.
‘It is,’ Susan said, half-smiling.
They were standing on the corner of Washington and Grant in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The smells of savoury rices, of roasting duck, of scallions and sesame seed oil and thousand-year-old eggs were mingled in a single brew with the smells of the people, the peculiar odour of the pipes and little cigars many of the men and women were smoking, the smell of the sweat of the coolie struggling up the steep hill, a huge basket of vegetables on his back, his feet bare; and the sounds mingled with the smells – the high-pitched guttural voices speaking a dozen of China’s dialects, the cries of street vendors, the rumble of the trams grinding and squealing on the steep tracks, the honk of an occasional motor horn and the growl of its engine as it faced the slope …
To Susan, all this was familiar, but not Richard. He was agape, aghast. ‘But this is not America!’ he cried, almost shouting to be heard above the din.
‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘This and all the rest – Nyack, Columbus, Detroit, Bridgeport, and Daddy’s house here on Nob Hill.’
They started slowly back, easing cautiously through the crowds. ‘It’s so unsanitary, for America,’ Richard said, as they began to leave Chinatown behind, heading for Nob Hill. ‘It’s so incredibly different from Nyack, and New York, and those other places.’
‘And they were all different from each other,’ Susan said.
Then they said little more till they reached the big comfortable house with the view over the Golden Gate, Alcatraz, and the distant Marin shore. There, in the empty drawing-room – Susan’s old parents were out – they picked up the Chronicle and glanced at the front page. ‘Hoggin,’ Richard chuckled, pointing at the lead article – ‘Hoggin’s making his presence felt.’ The heading over the brief article read BRITISH PEER PRAISES YANKEE GET-UP-AND-GO. The article related details of Lord Walstone’s visit to a refrigeration plant. His Lordship, it appeared, was hoping to introduce similar plants in his chain of food stores in Great Britain, to retard spoilage and increase the shelf life of many foods. ‘And cut down on waste, in things like bread and green-groceries,’ Richard said. ‘There are no flies on Hoggin … but I wonder if the British will accept frozen foods?’
‘Fishmongers use a lot of ice,’ Susan said. ‘And no one minds.’
‘This will be different.’ He put the paper down – ‘Susan, I’ve been thinking. All the way here on the train … what a journey, what great spaces, what mighty rivers … I was thinking, why shouldn’t this be our home? America. It was yours, why shouldn’t it be Sally’s, Tim’s, Dicky’s … mine? The idea wasn’t really formed until we got on the ferry at Oakland. Then, coming across the Bay, approaching San Francisco, with the Golden Gate like an opening to a promised land beyond … and the sun on all the towers and roofs … it became clear to me – let us stay. Bring the children and stay … You’d like it, wouldn’t you?’
Susan got up and walked towards another window, this one looking south towards the crowded hills of the back part of the city. She faced her husband – ‘You know there are many things in England that I have never agreed with … the class system … the insularity … the way you are all so sure that everything English must automatically be best … insensitivity to foreigners’ feelings and opinions, which really stems out of the insularity … I have often thought that we would all be better off over here. You would be in your element. Here, the business man, not the aristocrat, is king. You want to produce things – cars, aeroplanes, whatever. Here you’ll be given the chance and the money to do it. But …’
‘But what?’
‘It’s not your home and I don’t think it ever can be. It could be some people’s … Louise would settle here easily, become a Quaker perhaps … Virginia could have, she hates the class thing, and she might just as easily have married an American artisan as that sergeant-major … Naomi could – she is self-contained and isn’t really attached to or rooted in any place … But you can’t. Suppose Dicky married a Chinese girl …’
‘He wouldn’t do that!’
‘He might, easily. Or a negro.’
‘But … but Stephen Merritt wouldn’t be happy if Betty were to marry a Chinaman or a Negro, either. He’s absolutely horrified that Stella should have let a brown or black man make love to her, even under the influence of drugs, however frantic to get more. And he’s American.’
‘He’s old-fashioned … and prejudiced. Stephen would be very unhappy, but as an American he has no right to be. We are all supposed to be born free and equal. A Chinese American or a Negro American should expect to be able to become president as much as a white Protestant like John Merritt, It’s not the case now, but it should be.’
‘One would never be Prime Minister of England,’ Richard said.
‘Exactly … Let’s discuss it later. After we’ve finished our tour. On the ship on the way home, eh?’
‘I’m fed up with England,’ Richard said. ‘People like Bert Gorse, Ramsay MacDonald, Snowden … those are our masters now. They’ll bankrupt the country, and tax us out of existence.’
‘Let’s talk about it on the ship,’ she urged again. ‘Daddy and Mommy are back …’ She went to the door and opened it – ‘What did you buy? Ah, an Easter bonnet! Let’s get it out of the box and have a look at it.’
The huge 4-8-4’s whistle chimed out over the red rocks, the desert, and the huddled houses as the Grand Canyon Limited began to glide out eastwards, facing the long climb to the Continental Divide, the Rio Grande, and Albuquerque; but for now, as the train drew away under a drifting cloud of dense black smoke, they were standing on the low platform at Gallup, New Mexico, their suitcases piled beside them. The platform was slowly emptying – half a dozen Indians in bright blankets, another in a big black hat with many turquoise and silver ornaments on his arms, two white business men, some Mexican-seeming women and children …
‘Good God, look!’ Richard exclaimed. ‘That poor man there …’ They stared at the shape sprawled flat at the far end of the platform, arms outstretched. ‘Perhaps he’s been taken ill,’ Susan said. ‘Or had a heart attack.’ A railway servant in a blue peaked cap passed, and she said, ‘That man there … perhaps he’s in trouble.’
The railway man glanced over his shoulder – ‘No, ma’am, he’s just drunk … We’d’a moved him out sooner only it don’t pay to fool with drunken Indians. They’re crazy any time, but when their bellies are full of whisky … look out!’
He moved on. Richard pulled out his watch – ‘A quarter to eight,’ he said. ‘How can anyone be drunk at a quarter to eight in the morning?’
‘He hasn’t had time to sleep it off, perhaps,’ Susan said. ‘He must have been drinking late last night … but why here?’ She looked across the rail lines at the road beyond and exclaimed, ‘Look, there are more … I can see four, five lying in the gutters or in front of the stores. And it’s Sunday!’
Richard said, ‘Last night was Saturday, then … Our car should have come by now. Your father swore they were a reliable company.’
The Indian at the end of the platform was struggling to his feet. Swaying, he propped himself against a lamp post for a while, then came down the platform, at first staggering, gradually regaining his balance. He passed them, reached the far end of the platform, and, scooping up water from the overflow from the station’s water tank and tender feed hose, that lay in puddles among the ash and clinker, dashed it on his face. Then he found a cigarette in his pocket, lit it, and came back. He passed them again, then turned, and stood before them, swaying, a short, dark, strongly-built young man whose exact age they could not tell. His dark eyes were bleared, and he was unshaven, but the stubble was very short. He said, ‘Are you Mr and Mrs Rowland? Friends of Johnny Merritt?’
‘Why,
yes,’ Richard said. His heart sank – ‘You aren’t the man from the motor car hire people, are you?’
The Indian shook his head – ‘Chee Shush Benally,’ he said. ‘John write, tell me you come … I got letter yesterday, came in …’
‘But,’ Richard exclaimed, ‘we were coming out to see you! We understand there’s a place where we can stay in Fort Defiance, and from there we were going to drive out to you at Sanostee.’
The Indian said, ‘I come with you … Here’s driver.’ He pointed to the exit from the station, where a young man was hurrying towards them. ‘Mr Rowland?’ the latter said agitatedly. ‘I’m from the Gallup Automobile Livery … I’m sorry to be late but we found a slow puncture in one of the tyres just before I was due to set out, and we had to fix it. You need all your spares in the Navajo country.’ He picked up two of the suitcases and Benally picked up the others.
Richard thought, what can I do? John Merritt particularly asked me to go and see this man, in his home. He swore he was a wonderful fellow, once you got to know him; though, he warned, all Indians are very reserved … And the fellow turned out to be a drunkard!
He said to the chauffeur, ‘Mr Benally is coming with us.’ The young man looked astonished, but said nothing. Soon they were all seated in the big Buick, and heading north towards Fort Defiance. The air blew fresh and keen, for they were 7000 feet above sea level; and they were glad of it, for Chee Shush Benally smelled of stale liquor.
He pointed out places and things as they went – ‘Those sheep belong my grandfather’s brother … that’s his daughter on the horse … That hogan built by my uncle and me, just before I went army … You got any whisky on you?’ he turned to Richard.
Richard said stiffly, ‘No … and don’t you think you had enough last night?’
Chee smiled, a sudden warm, wide smile that in that moment wiped away the blear from his eyes, and the grimness out of his face – ‘Just about,’ he said. ‘Bottle and half … tequila.’
