by John Jakes
The colonel bounded to the stage, flourishing his sombrero. He took the spotlight and began another time-wasting speech. He lauded the virtues and benefits of the living pictures, as well as his personally designed and constructed camera and projector. He expressed his strong opinion on the worth of “actualities”—films of real people, real events—as against fanciful story films. By now there was a good deal of grumbling, coughing, and foot-shuffling. Shadow ignored it and introduced his “ace camera operator.”
By prior agreement, Paul merely stood at his seat while the arc light sought him and bleached and blinded him. He waved and sat down to applause and a few whistles.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen—my fellow citizens of this great city, and this great land—”
“Get it on, damn you,” a man yelled from the rear. There was more hooting, clapping, whistling.
With unruffled aplomb, Shadow bowed and made a sweeping gesture with the sombrero. His voice boomed from the stage apron. “Prepare yourselves for the most remarkable, the most thrilling and—yes, honesty compels me to say it—the most harrowing and soul-stirring living pictures you have ever seen, or ever will—”
The curtain began to part to reveal the screen again.
“Conquest of the San Juan Hill!”
Fanfare and drumroll from the pit. Paul sank low in his seat, fairly twitching with nerves. The screen began to glow and flicker with scratchy, jerky images of the war he remembered too well.
During the last sequence, the stark views of the Spanish dead in the trenches, the bugler in the pit blew “Taps.” Although the dead belonged to the enemy, they had belonged to the human race as well. There were no outcries against the Spaniards, only silence.
Paul glanced from the corner of his eye. Uncle Joe’s profile was silver and black as the images changed. He sat motionless, gripping the arms of his seat. Paul heard Aunt Ilsa and Fritzi weeping, then the commotion of a woman fainting somewhere in the rows behind.
On the screen there was an abrupt cut, to a great billowing American flag with forty-five stars whipping in the wind. Paul had photographed it on the roof at Shadow’s request, and patched it to the end of the war footage. It rescued the audience from grim scenes of death, and brought them to their feet in a thundering ovation. Uncle Joe was among the first to stand.
During the pictures Shadow had sneaked into the seat beside Mary. Now he jumped up and leaned over to hug Paul and slap his back. “They loved it. Even that grisly stuff—” He kept pounding. “God damn it, kid—Dutch—you brought home the goods, you’re a God damn genius.” He was incoherent. He was crying. The base, crude, dishonest R. Sidney Shadow III was crying.
The aisles filled with spectators equally overcome, Uncle Joe among them. The family milled, everyone trying to talk at once.
Aunt Ilsa: “Paul, you were in such danger, I didn’t realize.”
Carl: “Swell stuff. Exciting as the devil.”
Fritzi: “I thought I’d expire with fright. Oh, we’re so proud of you!”
And Uncle Joe, holding onto his arm, ignoring the buffeting of those trying to get past. There was a strange look on Uncle Joe’s face. He was ashen; shaken. “It was so real. I have never seen anything so real, except the battlefield itself. I was transported, I felt I was there again. Climbing the hill with Roosevelt’s men. Smelling the smoke. Hearing the guns, the cries of the wounded. Walking among all those dead. It moved me very much.”
He turned away, took a starched white handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.
“Come, Ilsa. Children.”
He stayed beside Paul as they slowly ascended the crowded aisle. “This isn’t the low trash I thought it to be, it’s honest, important work,” he said. “History lives in those pictures. Before you leave us, you must tell me how the process works. The mechanics—every detail.”
“I will, Uncle, certainly.” He was euphoric over the vindication. Astonishingly, then, came a wave of remorse about parting from the Crowns.
But his ticket was purchased. Lord Yorke was waiting to meet him in London. The whole world was opening. The world he’d never thought he’d see.
The sluggishly moving crowd brought Ilsa, Fritzi, and Carl to the doorway. Fritzi dropped her program. Everyone stopped while she bent to find it. Outside, Iz Pflaum was waving his hands like semaphore flags. “Dutch, hurry, we have journalists waiting to speak to you. Mr. LeGrand of the Tribune, Mr. Wickwire of the Daily News, Mr.—”
Paul couldn’t hear clearly in the hubbub. Just to his left, the last row of the center section was empty save for one person still seated. A woman in a coat with a black fur collar, gloves, a large hat with a gossamer gray veil. While he was taking notice of her, she stood up. She lifted the veil.
“Paul.”
Julie held out her arms to him.
“I made a vow to find you.”
She had a large suite at the Palmer House. Paul spent the night. They made love hungrily, and talked.
Every drape was drawn against the hammering rain. A single dim table lamp in the sitting room had been left on. Its light fell through the elegant archway and enabled them to see and feast on each other. While they talked, they sprawled, or sat with arms around drawn-up legs, naked and innocent as children.
She explained that she had left the Long Island mansion for a flat already rented in New York. There she had done exactly what Paul’s uncle and aunt had done, but with greater success. Hired detectives. The firm’s Chicago bureau made inquiries in the Crown neighborhood. No one had seen or heard of Paul in some time. The chief of the bureau was ready to approach Ilsa Crown when he noticed one of the many advertisements for Pflaum’s special showing. There was the name Paul Crown.
“I rented the Manhattan flat to have a place to hide after I left Bill. I found the courage to do that because you and Aunt Willis always said I had it, if only I could call it up. It didn’t work out quite as I planned. Bill was shot to death right in front of me. Then I quarreled with my mother because I wouldn’t do what she asked. There was terrible guilt. The old trouble started to recur. The sadness—wanting to hide forever. But I fought it. I had something to help me this time. You. Knowing you were alive somewhere. Knowing I could find you if I tried hard enough, took enough time, spent enough money—heaven knows there’s plenty to spend. Elstree was one of the richest men in America.”
“And you’ve inherited all of it. I will never make a tenth as much in my entire life.”
“It won’t be a problem, I won’t let it.” She kissed his mouth; caressed his cheek and let her eyes rove his face. “I couldn’t let the sickness defeat me—keep me from you. I promised myself that if I did find you, and you had someone else, I’d go away. But not without telling you once more that I love you, I’ll never love anyone else.”
He took her in his arms. The rain beat on the curtained windows. He bore her down gently and joyfully to the bed.
Shortly after dawn, he awoke to feel her leaving their warm nest of blankets. Her flanks shone in the dim light from the sitting room.
In a dark corner of the bedroom, a drawer slid in and out. She returned with something in her hand. She was between Paul and the lamp; he couldn’t see the object.
He was puzzled when she clambered onto the mussed bed and knelt next to him. Her black hair cascaded to her waist. The lamplight falling on it made it shine.
“Paul dearest, I swore that if we were ever reunited, I’d ask you to do something. I hope you won’t think it too strange. It’s very important to me.”
“Of course I’ll do it, you know I will.”
“And not ask why?”
“You’re making me curious. I may ask someday.”
“Fair enough.” Her hand rose. Metal flashed. He saw what she’d brought from the drawer.
She leaned down to his face, pale dark-tipped breasts touching the flat of his chest. She kissed him gently, yet with ardor. Then she laid the silver scissors in his hand. “Cut my hair.”
; Late in the morning, at the telegraph desk downstairs, he wrote a cable to Michael Radcliffe at the London Light in Fleet Street.
REGRET WILL NOT BE COMING TO LONDON. SITUATION COMPLETELY CHANGED. PLAN TO STAY WITH PRESENT EMPLOYER. AM MARRYING YOUNG WOMAN I SPOKE ABOUT. WILL SEND NEW ADDRESS SOON. ALSO TICKET REFUND. FULL DETAILS WHEN WORK BRINGS ME TO EUROPE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR KINDNESS AND GENEROSITY. YOUR FRIEND ALWAYS. DUTCH.
Part Ten
Homecoming
1900-1901
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
1917
THOMAS HARDY, Moments of Vision
116
Dutch
MONDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1900; the eve of the new year. Germans called it Sylvesterabend.
It was the cusp of the new century as well. As the newspapers repeatedly and ponderously pointed out, years ending in zero concluded a series from one to ten. Thus 1900 was the last of a series that started with 1891. The twentieth century would begin in the first minute of the first day of January 1901—tomorrow. Among people Paul knew, there were varying reactions. Uncle Joe with his passion for numbers of course had it correctly, and scoffed at those who didn’t. Colonel Shadow was irked to be told he’d lived with a misconception for years. Mary said she’d tried to explain it last New Year’s eve but the colonel had been too far gone into champagne.
In addition to this mathematical news, for weeks every paper and periodical of substance had been delivering visions of the future from pundits of large and small reputation. There were predictions of high-speed trains operating on a single magnetized rail; hemlines rising indecently; underground moving sidewalks to keep pedestrians out of the weather; more deaths from violent collegiate sports; more business degrees for “new” women; an armored, bullet-shaped, steam-driven “touring carriage” for sight-seeing on the African veldt; German “commercial expansionism” in the Orient; crowded mountain slopes as the masses discovered the new winter sport of “skeeing”; completion of a trans-Panama canal, an engineering project under discussion for years; further assassination attempts on kings and presidents; cities patrolled from above by policemen riding in the gondola baskets of gas-filled airships; mounting danger to white civilization from “the Yellow Peril” or, alternatively, “disappearing barbarism” thanks to America’s benign civilizing influence; Earth decimated and all human life destroyed by meteor showers from space.
These clashing forecasts of the twentieth century vied with the ongoing trivialities of daily life reflected in neatly boxed and illustrated advertisements for washing powders, hand soaps, fashions, memory-training courses, antiseptic hat liners (“Kill That Smell!”), machines that harnessed canines to a treadmill to drive a cream separator (“Double Dog Power!”), electric health belts with built-in battery pouches (“Quickly cures all nervous and organic disorders, whether arising from natural weaknesses, excesses, or indiscretions!”).
But on the last day of the old century, the world was pausing not only to reflect but to rest. The latest edition of the Tribune carried little more than minor news on its front page. A sleeping car quarantined in Colorado with a case of smallpox aboard. A custody fight over a child in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A weather forecast of a severe cold wave, with fair skies but temperatures plunging below ten degrees tomorrow morning. There were large display advertisements relating to the holiday. Elstree’s was featuring an End-of-the-Century China, Glassware, and Crockery Sale.
On that Monday afternoon, Paul and his family and friends went to court.
Paul had bought a new three-button cutaway sack suit for the occasion. He was damnably uncomfortable in it, because he also had to wear a tall celluloid collar and cuffs, and a bow tie Julie tied for him before they left home. The tie was already canted at forty-five degrees, and threatening to come undone.
She’d taken a comb to his hair, too, to little avail. Paul knew he was disheveled but it didn’t matter, his wife looked smashing in her tailored dove gray suit with silk-faced lapels, a winter cape of matching gray, and a simple gray felt hat with a bow of royal blue velvet.
He loved her with an undiminished passion. He loved her gentility, and her innate kindness to others. She was intelligent and good-humored. Her health was improved. She walked at least two miles every day.
Though still subject to spells of gloom, she was slowly freeing herself of them, and, in an unassuming way, developing an independence her mother would have hated. Yet Julie was entirely feminine. And she wore fine clothes well.
The same could never be said of him. Everyone except his wife and his family called him Dutch, and he was far more comfortable in Dutch’s wardrobe. He even thought of himself as Dutch now.
He was twenty-three, and with a young man’s confident egotism he considered himself worldly. And not without reason. Today, however, he was visibly nervous waiting in the courtroom with the cold slanting light of late December spearing through grimy windows. The hearing was scheduled for two o’clock. The large, noisily ticking wall clock showed ten after. God, how he craved a cigar.
A whole troop of well-wishers had come along with Paul and Julie. General Joe Crown sat on the first row of the spectators’ section, behind the railing. Beside him were Aunt Ilsa, Fritzi, and Carl.
Paul’s uncle had become the Republican Incarnate. He was still enjoying a certain elation because McKinley and his running mate, Roosevelt, had swept aside Mr. Bryan as well as the radical Socialist Gene Debs in the November election. Uncle Joe had poured a great deal of personal time into the state campaign for the Republican ticket, and he’d donated large sums to the national war chest. He was anticipating invitations to the President’s dinner table as a result of his generosity, and he was pleased that Paul was acquainted with Vice President Elect Roosevelt from the war.
Paul’s aunt was no longer campaigning against spirits, wines, and beers. The change had come when she discovered her husband had quietly rehired his three sales agents, and added a fourth. There was an angry confrontation, so Fritzi told Paul. This time it was Uncle Joe who gave in, permanently relocating Dolph Hix and the other three men, making them managers of agencies in Madison, Austin, Memphis, and Pierre, South Dakota. The man with the least seniority got Pierre, South Dakota.
With that issue resolved for the present, Aunt Ilsa had taken up a new cause. She had headed a campaign for money to send a Hull House observer to the first World Peace Conference at the Hague in May of 1899. Aunt Ilsa needed her causes; she was lonely in the mansion with her children gone. Paul took Julie there to dine at least once a week when he wasn’t on a trip. At other times, Julie went alone.
Carl was home from Princeton for the holidays. Aunt Ilsa had overcome her husband’s continuing suspicions of people and institutions in the East, persuading him that no finer education could be had for their son. Carl was eighteen, with enormous shoulders that suited someone who played the murderous, sometimes lethal game of football. A generous donation from Joe had somehow persuaded university admissions officers to look tolerantly on Carl’s less then brilliant academic record.
Fritzi, who five days from now would be twenty, had taken a short leave from her company and rushed from Albany, Georgia. She was on tour with Mortmain’s Royal Shakespeare Combination. The troupe’s founder-manager was an aging actor calling himself Ian Mortmain; he had been born Ezra Cooler in Montgomery, Alabama. Fritzi said this was merely her “apprenticeship,” and she’d soon move on to better companies and theaters.
Fritzi was supernumerary, assistant wardrobe mistress, part-time cook, and occasional performer. She played one of the witches in “the Scottish play” (she refused to say its title aloud, as many superstitious actors did), but her most important personation was a trouser role, Viola in Twelfth Night. Uncle Joe and Aunt Ilsa had traveled all the way to Owensboro, Kentucky, to
see her perform. Uncle Joe still disapproved of the profession, but proudly said his daughter was outstanding, and garnered the most applause at the curtain.
Fritzi said she was “insanely jealous” of Paul because he’d been to the theater in London’s West End while awaiting War Office clearance to go to South Africa in the fall of 1899. At the Prince of Wales’s Theater, he’d seen not one but three idols of the English stage, Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Gerald du Maurier, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in a new comedy.
And now here they were, all together in the courtroom even though their lives had diverged and changed markedly in the last two years. There was only one void. Cousin Joe. Paul wished he were there too, but he’d disappeared entirely, and little was said of him. It was too sad a subject, especially for Aunt Ilsa.
Spotted about in other seats were Paul’s friends and mentors. Colonel Shadow was present, smelling magnificently of bay ram and high-priced cigars. Mary Beezer had put on her best and gaudiest dress. Still unmarried, she and the colonel had left the Levee and moved into quarters more suitable for a new prince of the living picture medium. They had a six-room suite on the top floor of Allerton’s Hotel on fashionable North Michigan, above the river.
Shadow was in a transitional period. Becoming less interested in building and furnishing projectors, with operators, for a lease fee of eighty dollars a week, and more interested in producing and leasing the pictures themselves, for a price of seventeen cents a foot. But he hadn’t given up tinkering. Before Paul went overseas to film the war between England and the rebellious Boer farmers of South Africa, Shadow supplied him with a new-model Luxograph. The camera featured a mount for interchangeable lenses and a geared platform with a lever to allow smooth panoramic movement from side to side. Nicer effects were possible with the new model, but there was a price. The camera weighed thirty-two pounds more than the one Paul carried to the San Juan Heights.
Fidgeting next to Shadow and Mary was Ollie Hultgren, the assistant who had replaced Jim Daws and gone with Paul on his picture trips ever since the summer of ’ninety-nine. Ollie was Swedish, twenty years old, a slim-hipped, long-faced boy with curly blond hair and eyes of a blue that shaded toward violet. He was a gentle person, a loyal friend and a smart helper who could be a chief operator in his own right one day. Paul had already urged that on Shadow.