The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  I make no claims to be a great prophet. I was never certain of doom. Indeed, I was optimistic in those days; I sought confirmation of my own faith in civilisation. It was easy enough to find. I believed if people of good will banded together justice must ultimately triumph. The wave of hedonism sweeping the West would eventually subside as people forgot the War. Was there much wrong with that? How could I guess the ramifications, the complexity of a conspiracy aimed at nothing less than the total subjugation of the White Race? Some understood, of course. I read reports about growing strength amongst the Knights of the Fiery Cross. I was attracted by the romance of their costume and their gatherings, but had assumed the movement a legendary one from Reconstruction days, used by Griffith to give colour and meaning to his marvellous allegory. To find it still alive fired my imagination. In Washington there were not many who openly shared my enthusiasm, but quite a few privately wished the Klan well. Those ivory tower politicians were more than happy to let other men don the battle hoods, mount war horses and do the real fighting. Since they had just given the vote to women (who were notoriously short-sighted and tolerant) they were now unwilling to speak out. They feared losing votes and, consequently, their soft lives in the corridors of power.

  Meanwhile, spurred on by my young comrades’ enthusiasm, I conceived a notion involving broadcasting radio waves on directed bands to control flying machines from a central station. By beaming electrical impulses to the engines the power supply would be all but limitless. With no need to refuel, planes could fly easily from New York to Los Angeles carrying a hundred or more passengers and never having to land. It was even conceivable a plane could travel completely around the world without a single stop! After leaving my companions in the evenings, I would work in my hotel room until the small hours. Sometimes I hardly slept, constantly reviving myself with cocaine and other stimulants. I had plenty of female company to numb the terrible sense of loss which came whenever I let myself think of Esmé. There had been no word as yet from Paris. I think this drove me to work so hard. My Memphis friends were making progress, they said, in interesting Congress, as well as private financiers. Strings had to be pulled, palms greased, but they would soon have what they wanted. Moreover, if I grew bored with Washington, I was welcome in Memphis. They travelled between the two cities constantly. For the moment, however, I was content to remain in the capital. Jimmy and Lucius had found a circle of politicians who enjoyed playing cards, so had decided to stay. They were always ready to introduce me to young women from the offices and stores, bored married ladies, delicious harlots. I had a plethora of lewd partners willing to enjoy the most imaginative sexual excesses. The great truism, I learned, of a puritanical nation is that its private gratifications exist in direct proportion to its public morals. I spent Christmas, for instance, in a little hotel near Arlington, stark naked in the company of six other men and over a dozen young women, two of them quadroons. By that time my patents were confirmed and registered (but the Interior Department had sent only polite notes and I had heard nothing from the Secretary of Commerce). To finance particular needs, not covered by my backers, I sold commercial rights to one of my minor inventions, a wireless oscillator for the cure of rheumatism. This went to a Northern businessman who was later to put my machine on the market and make his fortune, but I had left America by the time his advertisements appeared. (I saw one by chance in an old magazine.)

  The day after Christmas I accompanied Lucius and Jimmy to a Ziegfeld show. They were worried I might be impatient with the slowness of developments. I reassured them. I had learned how to wait. I privately saw the aviation company as the first step in my ambition to eclipse Edison as America’s most famous and successful inventor. Jimmy asked if my hotel were comfortable enough and everything else to my satisfaction.

  I did not wish to seem too infatuated, ‘It is all perfectly satisfactory. I’m a man of simple tastes.’

  ‘And of course you have no financial problems.’

  Lucius laughed at this. ‘That must be the least of Max’s worries!’

  While grateful for their hospitality I had decided to let them believe I had ready means of my own. Even the fairest minded businessman is easier to bargain with if you do not seem short of assets. My occasional lack of funds I explained vaguely as something to do with the problems of negotiating cheques drawn on foreign banks. From this they concluded I kept my money chiefly in Switzerland. I refused to disillusion them. This information doubtless reached their Memphis friends. When the time came to agree salary and shares I would be in a strong position. Everyone has heard the story of the steel company which decided to sell to J. P. Morgan for five million, planned to ask ten, then were told he would give them twenty before they could open their mouths. As a matter of necessity I studied the subject of business while in Washington. One wished to be accepted, and it was therefore a vocabulary one could not afford to ignore. The Pilgrim Fathers equated godliness with material wealth. To admit to a Yankee you are poor is almost as bad as admitting to a Catholic you have been excommunicated. Also a rich foreigner, in almost anyone’s eyes, is very different to a poor one. Perhaps because of my understanding and my caution, and through the good offices of Messrs Roffy and Gilpin, I had no trouble extending my visa.

  New Year’s Eve and my birthday were celebrated in one continuous party somewhere in Maryland. My companions were a group of well known socialites and political and army people. I remember very little of it, save that I made love to one lady in a blue lace dress behind a settee and to another in yellow on the library carpet. Because of President Harding’s recent broadcast from the Arlington Cemetery everyone was interested in my radio ideas. There had also been something of a passing reaction against air travel since the crash of the ZR-2 in England, when she had collapsed in flames killing, among others, sixteen Americans. People now said commercial flight was a thing of the distant future. It was currently too dangerous. I argued with them. So advanced were my designs such an accident was impossible. Radio steering would improve my plane’s safety even further. In those weeks surrounding the New Year of 1922 I explained the principles of radio waves to dozens of eminent people. I became a familiar figure in Washington, being frequently asked to parties or small dinners to present my views on science and its promise. As ‘Max Peterson’ I was quoted in gossip columns. I was used as an authority in the proliferation of articles about the Future which always seem to appear in newspapers at the beginning of the year. Usually I was described as Professor Max Peterson, the well known French aviator and inventor. I still have the articles. They appeared in The Jackson Examiner, The Washington World, The Delaware Despatch, The East Texas Defender and many other leading journals. I was not always accurately quoted, my name was occasionally misspelled, but it proved to me, and others, that I had established myself firmly in America. When Charlie Roffy and Dick Gilpin arrived back from Memphis at the end of the month they were delighted by my growing fame. It would help them considerably. They, too, had suffered a setback with the loss of the ZR-2. But a monoplane flight by Stinson and Bertaud, setting the new continuous flight record of over twenty-six hours, had improved the atmosphere, as had the new altitude record. We were now ‘steaming at full speed’ towards completion, said Roffy. Word would arrive from the Capitol at any time. I must seriously think about packing up here and planning to base myself in Memphis.

  I was more than pleased to put Washington behind me. I still had a few hundred dollars left from the sale of my patent, but Jimmy Rembrandt had found himself short earlier and I had lent him $500. Moreover a certain married woman, wife of a New England Senator, had begun to pester me at the hotel, telephoning at inconvenient hours, threatening to charge me with rape and have me deported unless I accommodated her. I resented being blackmailed into the position of a stud stallion to be used at will. If I left the city I should have no more trouble. She would cease to interfere with my work which was nearing completion. I had finished the specifications and diagrams for the direct
ional transmitter. When Charlie Roffy next came to see me he asked if I could leave for Memphis by February 3rd. I was at his disposal, I said. He seemed extremely excited. Everything was settled apart from a little paperwork. Our aviation enterprise could be off the ground in less than a month.

  It did not take me long to put my affairs in order. I registered my new invention. I wrote once more to Esmé and Kolya. It was dangerous to contact me directly, but a message could be passed through Mrs Cornelius. I wrote to my cockney friend, telling her what I needed, wishing her luck. My star was about to ascend in Tennessee; before long I should doubtless have my own mansion and plantation. She could contact me, under the name of Colonel Peterson, at the Adler Apartments, Lindon Street. Memphis, Tennessee, where Dick Gilpin had rented me rooms.

  That night I dined for the last time with my two young benefactors. They themselves were returning to New York on business. They would try to see me in Memphis as soon as they could. Inevitably we should be reunited in the near future, said Jimmy. After all we were still ‘the Three Musketeers’. He would send my $500 in a few days.

  On February 3rd 1922 I boarded a Pullman car in the service of the Southern Railroad Company which would take me in no more than forty-five hours to the ‘City of the New Nile’ as Mark Twain once described it. A little light snow had begun to fall. Wrapped in my bearskin coat, feeling the security of Cossack pistols against my thighs, I sat in a private cabin. I imagined myself a nineteenth-century explorer about to examine the interior of the virgin continent. I had had my fill of Washington and her decadent delights. I was looking forward to the more austere pleasures of Memphis. A bell rang. The train gasped. Later, at dusk, I walked back to the observation car. Behind me the great monuments and columns were falling away. The track became two thin black lines in blurred air which gradually grew more and more agitated. Soon all I could see was the driving curtain of the blizzard, wiping away one dream so that it could be replaced by another.

  * * * *

  SIXTEEN

  THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, as heavily used and as vast as the Volga, as important to American history as the Dniepr to our own, wide and shallow and winding through gentle hills, brought a frisson of recognition. It was as if I had never left Russia at all. As I raised myself in my bunk, peering through the gap in the blind, I could easily believe myself on a train bound for Kiev. All my experiences since 1917 might have been no more than a prolonged hallucinatory fever. Then the billboards and signs in English appeared and we shifted course in a scintillant dawn for the outskirts of Memphis: Little rows of miserable, unpainted shacks, sudden clearings in which stood grandiose Victorian houses whose carved wood imitated Gothic churches and French chateaux, all under a threadbare covering of snow. The impression of pre-Revolutionary Ukraine continued to persist. These suburban streets were low and wide. Tram cars in smart liveries of brass and primary paint moved decorously along avenues of bare trees. The brightly painted gables and shutters seemed those of a well to do small town rather than real city, even as the higher buildings of the centre emerged from a haze of sunrise. As the train took a bend I glimpsed rows of tall sternwheel and sidewheel paddle steamers moored to wharves on which stood piles of cargo. I might have been in Nizhni Novgorod, save for sharp Baptist steeples taking the place of our Orthodox onion domes. There was also far more motor traffic than was ever found in a Russian town. Consequently there were more metalled roads.

  A little dark smoke drifted in the mist. The stillness gradually gave way to sounds of a busy trading port preparing for the day. Then the illusion of familiarity was further distorted by the sight of a gang of negroes who puffed short-stemmed pipes and joked amongst themselves as they walked up towards the levee from the railroad tracks. I was by now used to black faces, but sometimes they still materialised in unexpected contexts. All servants were black in the South, from the conductor on the train to the well groomed coachman who had been sent to take me from the station to my rooms. His name, he said, was Gibson. He wore an old-fashioned brass-buttoned uniform, brown top coat and white gloves. He spoke in a low, cultured voice, a surprising contrast to the whining sing-song of the porters, paperboys and other urchins who moved everywhere with that ground-watching, half bestial lope. This was largely absent in the niggers of the North East, whom I assumed to be of different stock. The carriage took me along Main Street, through a city far more modern than I had expected, with construction going on everywhere. Although not reaching the vast heights of New York’s, some of her skyscrapers were at least fourteen storeys. Her trolley cars, overhead electric lighting, illuminated signs, automobiles, department stores, as well as her plentiful restaurants, created that reassuring blend I had missed so desperately in Washington and found at its finest in New York. Relatively small, Memphis was still a real city. The carriage stopped outside the Adler Apartments on Linden Street. To one side of the entrance was a Western Union office, which I was glad to see. Here my bags were transferred to two porters while a white manager welcomed me and showed me to my suite on the second floor. Mr Baskin wore a dark gabardine suit. He carried a hat and overcoat, explaining he had an appointment to keep. He showed me the amenities, wished me a pleasant stay in Memphis and courteously told me he was at my service if I needed anything further. By noon a maid had put away my clothes and I was able to bathe, change and lock my blueprints safely in a drawer. I decided to have some lunch.

  Lacking the vibrant texture of New York or the self-conscious grandeur of Washington, Memphis had an attractive atmosphere of her own which I found welcome after the unreality of my past months in the capital. Turning out of Linden Street onto Main I strolled past cinemas, a theatre, large stores and public buildings, all of which comforted me, as did the network of signs and billboards advertising everything from tobacco to paint, drugs and electrical goods. In a pleasant, middle-class restaurant with a German name I ate peculiar local dishes which were not at all European. It was my first experience of blackeyed peas and cornbread, which seemed compulsory. A sweetish thick white ‘gravy’ was poured liberally over my chicken and potatoes. Having eaten, I felt like a ship which had taken on concrete ballast. Moving with some shortness of breath I made my way back to the Adler to be saluted by the doorman who already addressed me as ‘Colonel Peterson’. The efficiency, conscientiousness and eagerness to please of these coloured servants was remarkable. The unkindest thing anyone ever did was to make them discontented (as Griffith showed in Birth of a Nation). The status quo worked excellently for all concerned. Moreover, I experienced no prejudice from the Memphians. I had had no trouble in the restaurant, though my accent was not readily identifiable to them. Old-fashioned Southern courtesy still existed here. In the coming weeks I would find the people quite prepared to accept my accent as regional English or French and while I received occasional badinage, being told for instance that I sounded as if I held an egg in my mouth, I experienced little of the suspicion allegedly extended to foreigners in the South. They shared with other Americans an open curiosity never offended if you reply there are some questions you would rather not answer. Mainly I was happy to answer, however, even if my replies were not always strictly to the letter of the truth. I was forced to support Jimmy and Lucius in their perhaps mistaken effort to invent a more acceptable identity for me. I did not want them embarrassed.

  Back at the Adler, I stretched myself on my bed and read the local Memphis Commercial Appeal, most of which I found at that stage bewildering. I was interested to discover, however, that there was already talk of the city’s need for a permanent aerodrome. I was not quite sure what I was doing in Memphis, but decided it would be best to wait until I heard from either Mr Roffy or Mr Gilpin. The apartment was comfortable enough, though a little old-fashioned by New York standards. I had a bedroom, a sitting-room, a bathroom and a dressing-room. It had limited services, but self-catering facilities were provided. This was the first time I had experienced the phenomenon. It suited me well enough, though I was not very experienced at mak
ing tea, coffee and the like for myself. Being above all adaptable I would learn reasonably quickly. The maid, Mr Baskin had assured me, would be willing to prepare me breakfast for ‘a small consideration’.

  Now that the first excitement was gone, my spirits began to decline again. Thoughts of Esmé, Kolya, my mother and Captain Brown returned. By way of consoling myself, I began to write letters describing my journey via Knoxville to Memphis, my first view of ‘Huckleberry Finn’s own river’ and my impression of Southerners, which was good. I had written several such letters when I heard a knock on my door. I got up from the desk to answer it. Charlie Roffy stood there, full of enthusiasm and apologies, his belly rising and falling, his face red from climbing the stairs, ‘I’m real sorry we couldn’t meet you at the station, colonel. You must think us the worst kind of ill-mannered rogues. Dick and I were travelling in from Jackson and were held up. I do hope everything is to your liking.’

  I told him I was perfectly comfortable. I thought I might have a few minor difficulties adjusting to the flat and might need a few words of advice later, but was sure I would feel like a native in a day or two.

  ‘Of course you will, sir. We’ll get a boy for you, if you like. Is there anything else you need? Cash?’

  ‘I’ve adequate means at present.’ I hesitated. ‘I take it you’ll be able to direct me to a source of female company.’

  He was amused. ‘We’re not as backward as some people choose to think. One has to be discreet, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. The smaller the city the more eyes it has, eh? But certainly all that can be arranged. Now, tell me, have you brought your designs with you?’