Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 6
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 aeroplanes 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 Theater 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, like 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.
She was now a gorgeous white blonde, with huge eyelashes and a delicious cupid’s bow, even more beautiful in all her pink English flesh than she was upon the screen. She wore pale blue silk and pearls. She was drenched in Mitsouko. I was again entirely intoxicated, hypnotised by her exquisite beauty, her aura of glamour. She listened with few comments, eating as I told her my story, every so often urging me to elaborate or continue. She was horrified at what had happened. ‘I just thort you an’ yore bint ‘ad decided America wasn’t good enough fer yer and orf yer went, back to wherever it was. Cor, you poor littel bugger! I can let yer ‘ave a few dollars, if yer like.’
I told her that I was provided for at the moment, though I did ask discreetly for the name of a reliable cocaine supplier. I felt it was high time I refuelled my brain. She put me in touch with a well-known actor who, down on his luck, was supplementing his income working as an agent for a big-time dealer and meanwhile told me her own story, which explained much of what had been mysterious. The very day she had left me at the airfield she had met a handsome young man who, like Hever, was a partner in a film company. ‘The only difference is, Ivan, that this feller was also bloody good-lookin’, in a sleazy sort of way. Like old Trotsky used to be before ‘e started takin’ ‘isself so fuckin’ seriously. I ‘ear ‘e’s in France now, by the way. Them blokes was orlways squabblin’ amongst themselves. Gord, it got borin’ towards the end!’ And then she smiled, remembering some comic incident of those terrible Civil War years when she had helped me out of more than one difficulty. She did not know what had happened to Hever or my steam car. ‘It only larsted a fortnight an’ then I met me Swede, Wolfgang. ‘E sounds like a kraut, but ‘e ain’t. Well, ‘Ever was bitter, I’ll say that much. Very bitter reelly. Took against me an’, I suppose, you. ‘E wrote this stuffy note, talking abart breach o’ promise an’ rubbish like that. Said ‘e wasn’t bloody surprised we’d skipped and we was bofe a pair o’ blackmailin’ scoundrels and he didn’t give a damn ‘oo said wot abart ther fuckin’ KKK, ‘e was buggering off ter Europe and after that he was goin’ ‘untin’ in Africa. Innit amazin’ ‘ow many poor bleedin’ animals get killed jes’ ‘cause some bloke don’t get the rumpo ‘e’s after!’
‘He said nothing of my car?’
‘Not in as many words, Ivan. But I’d guess yer can forget abart that one.’
‘It would have made him millions,’ I said. ‘And me, too, of course.’ I would go to Long Beach tomorrow, gain access to my invention, and perhaps drive it away. Technically, according to our contract, the car was our joint property, but with Hever abroad I must quickly find a new backer. I explained this to Mrs Cornelius, who said I should do what I liked. She’d mentioned, she said, my name as a script-writer and actor to her friend Wolfgang Sjöström, the famous Swedish ‘Sex Director’ who had arrived in Hollywood just as Hays came into office and had, ever since, been gloomily frustrated by what he called ‘the bourgeois kinema’.
He was interested in employing me. I was grateful for her kindness but explained my destiny lay with the conquest and harnessing of the forces of nature for the greater benefit of mankind. Only necessity had made me a play-actor.
She seemed a little disappointed, even sceptical, but she said the chance was always there if I wished to take it. Sjöström had a contract with Goldwyn Studios to make two pictures a year, but he also was a partner in DeLuxe. He could put plenty of small parts my way. I could earn some money while I worked on my inventions. I promised her I would consider this idea.
An hour or two after we had finished the meal and the black servants had cleared it away, ‘Wolfy’ Sjöström came in. I was surprised at his weight. I had visualised someone altogether slimmer and more romantic. Yet clearly Mrs Cornelius saw in this bulky Norseman a hero! I must say I did not care for him much myself. His features had fallen into the deep lines of anxiety neurosis and even when he smiled one had the impression of a man in the throes of indigestion. He seemed condescending and over-eager to me and I suspected that Mrs Cornelius had exaggerated my artistic achievements, especially when he made reference to my books and expressed the breathless piety that some day the American public would be ready for the Philosophical Novel. Of course, my natural frankness made me want to tell h
im that I was no writer but a practical engineer who merely needed a little financial backing to astonish the world, but, not to embarrass Mrs Cornelius, I remained silent, and soon he had left for another room with my friend. She came back alone about ten minutes later and slipped a few screws of paper into my hand. She had found me the cocaine. Now I understood everything and was grateful. The chauffeur would take me back to the Hollywood Hotel. She would telephone me in a day or so, to see how I was settling, she said, but she evidently did not understand how baffled and unhappy I was concerning Esmé. Unenthusiastically she promised to ask around and find out where Meulemkaumpf, at least, might be discovered.
In greatly improved humour I returned through dreaming groves and gardens to my hotel and spent the night drawing up fresh plans. In the morning I would visit my old landlord to reclaim the belongings Mrs Cornelius told me he was retaining in lieu of rent. Then I would take a Red Car down to Long Beach and gain access to my steam auto. In all justice the Pallenberg Flyer was mine. Let Hever raise what devils he dared, I would take possession of her come what may!
Next morning I arrived at the Long Beach docks where our machine sheds were. Stretching almost to infinity along the concrete quays and bays, the pumps, cranes and oil-derricks were like skeletal dinosaurs, the salt air was crazy with the screech and growl of labouring machines, thick with the stink of a blue industrial haze mingling with the harbour’s cool December air, drifting over water as blue and flat as new-forged steel beneath the winter California sun. Our own sheds had scarcely changed save for a board now advertising something other than Golden State Engineering Developments. Inside the main shed a few mechanics were repairing a little seaplane whose floats had evidently struck the water at the wrong angle. One of the young men, whose overalls bore a profound stratum of stains, had a familiar look to him. Politely I hailed him from just inside the doors. It was Willy Ross, the bright-eyed foreman who had done so much to help get the PXI ready for the road. He looked up, squinting in the light, and then grinned as he recognised me. He came forward, wiping his fingers on a rag, and put out an almost clean hand for me to shake. ‘We all thought you were dead or gone back to Europe, Mr Pallenberg. It’s good to see you. What’s the story?’