by John Jakes
The most flamboyant woman in the cold and drafty room was Julie’s aunt. Over her flared skirt Miss Fishburne wore a short, snug coat of bright red—a Parisian automobile coat, she called it—set off by a plumed black hat and rolled black umbrella. She’d thrown her expensive coat of black Baltic seal fur over the next chair.
Perhaps the most special visitor, at least for Paul, was Wexford Rooney. Wex had sat up on a train all night, in company with his stout, blunt-jawed wife Lucille. This was the former widow Suggsworth of Charleston, West Virginia. She’d sold her boardinghouse in order to finance her husband in a new Temple of Photography in Lexington, Kentucky. Wex said his studio was highly successful, though how this could be in a place where horseflesh abounded and sporting gentlemen wagered on everything from the speed of two-year-olds to the accuracy of their watches, Paul couldn’t imagine. Nor had Wex enlightened him.
Wex did look prosperous. His green suit was finely cut and sewn. He was shiny of cheek, merry of eye, grinning like an elf alongside Lucille, who was a full head taller and considerably wider. So far Uncle Joe had said very little to Wex or Shadow or their consorts.
Paul stood up. He opened the gate in the railing; stepped through to the judge’s side and looked at the empty dais, then the clock. He reopened the gate and sat down again. Julie put her gloved hand on top of his. “He’ll be here, don’t worry.”
He gave her arm a gentle pat, to thank her. She was the absolute joy of his life. The only trouble was, because of his work he didn’t see enough of her. She had adjusted.
They were living on the sunny first floor of a two-story apartment building on tree-lined Paulina Street, in the pleasant neighborhood of Ravenswood. The house was just two blocks from the Ravenswood depot of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, which ran frequent trains to and from the central city. It was an ideal location for a young family whose breadwinner worked in town.
Julie had sold Belle Mer at a large profit, and Elstree’s Chicago townhouse as well. She’d kept a small cottage in a summer colony on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, but Paul, traveling so much, had never been there.
He was proud of her because she was slowly and thoughtfully giving away the Elstree millions. It would take years, perhaps decades, since huge profits from the department stores annually spilled back into the estate.
In philanthropy Julie was a novice. So she’d worked up her nerve, written, and then, by invitation, called on an American eminently qualified to guide her giving, Andrew Carnegie. While Paul was in Texas this past autumn, she’d traveled by steamship across the Atlantic, then out of London by train, to the one home of several he owned that Carnegie loved best. This was Skibo Castle, on Dornoch Firth in the wild and beautiful north of Scotland.
The monumentally wealthy “laird of Skibo” spent two days advising Julie. “He told me he feels strongly that any rich man who dies with all his money is a sinner. A bad citizen of this world. He devotes himself to many causes, but the two most important are the movement for world peace and building libraries. When he was a bobbin boy in Scotland, he and the other factory boys were allowed to use the private library of a nobleman. It was there he began a passion for self-education, and books. He and his family immigrated to America almost fifty years ago. And look what he made of himself. When I left, he escorted me to the carriage personally, kissed my hand, and called me a wiselike girl. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘in Scots it’s a girl who is sensible, proud—and self-reliant.’ Perhaps I really, really have come out of the dark at last, and become a person.” Paul assured her it was true.
Julie never saw her mother, nor heard from her. Nell Vanderhoff had come back from her California “nerve cure” more than a year ago. Shortly after, a letter from the Vanderhoff family attorneys informed Julie that a new will had been drawn, eliminating her.
Wex had moved over to conduct an animated discussion of photography with Shadow. A door at the side of the dais opened. Paul jumped up as a pudgy man with a pink turnip nose came in, carrying a paper folder, a Bible, and a ledger. He wore an ill-fitting suit, not judicial robes. Just a courthouse hack. Deflated, Paul sat down again.
The man reached up to place the folder on the judge’s dais, then sat at a table in front of it. He opened his ledger and inked his pen. Finally he deigned to notice those on the other side of the railing.
“Folks, Judge Müller will be here any moment. He’s in the building. He encountered terrible traffic after dining out at noon. Mr. Crown, where are you at?”
“Here,” Paul said, standing.
The clerk gestured commandingly. “Step in here, if you please. We need to handle this right quick—”
“After forcing us to wait twenty minutes,” the general grumbled to Ilsa.
“—the court closes at four, for the holiday.” The clerk sat back, fingering his lapels and enjoying his authority.
Paul was in this courtroom on this bitter afternoon because of Julie. She was in her third month of carrying their child.
They’d been trying to conceive a child since the very night of their marriage in a civil ceremony in October, two years ago. Paul’s frequent, often abrupt departures, and his long absences, didn’t improve their chances. Also, Julie had a history of trouble with pregnancy. She’d lost the only child conceived with her first husband. Finally they were successful.
On a snowy night early in December, they had been sitting in front of a fire in their parlor while snow drifted down outside a great bay window overlooking Paulina Street. They held hands and talked softly of the marvelous prospect of parenthood. The parlor was quite large, but it had a snug feel because, in the proper Victorian way, Julie had crowded it with furniture.
One of the important pieces was a rosewood étagère whose shelves displayed the growing collection of souvenirs from Paul’s travels. And the globe, which now bore many more dots of dark red enamel. Tampa, Cuba, Egypt, the Suez Canal, South Africa, Texas, Paris, London—it was beginning to look as though the world had a case of measles.
One special souvenir hung on an otherwise uncluttered section of the wall, between the hearth and the display shelves, where the eye was drawn to it naturally. The left half of the stereopticon card, which Julie had framed and presented to Paul for his twenty-third birthday in June.
The flames danced, consuming the fragrant apple wood. Paul had drunk two bottles of Crown lager and was feeling warm and mellow. Behind them, the Victor Gramophone brought from Belle Mer softly played one of Julie’s favorite pieces, the gentle and compelling Negro spiritual theme from Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony.
“Paul.”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t like to ask for things. I don’t do it often.”
“No, the last time, as I recall, it was a simple request involving a pair of scissors.”
“This would require a little more of you. Once again, it’s important to me.”
“Name it.”
“Wait till you hear.” She took a breath. “I know your feelings. I know the offer from that British peer tempts you. But if we’re to stay here, I’d like our son or daughter to have American parents. Two of them.”
While the impact settled on him, he looked at the framed picture of the ship’s bow and the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World …
Now here he was in the courtroom.
The clerk filed his nails.
The noisy Regulator clock ticktocked.
Carl folded his arms and let his eye wander, whistling the piano piece called “Ragtime Rose” that was a hit all over the country.
“Please don’t, I’m reading,” Fritzi said without looking up from her copy of When Knighthood Was in Flower.
Uncle Joe complained loudly about people who weren’t punctual. “And he’s German. It’s true! He lives on die Nordseite.”
Aunt Ilsa murmured soothing monosyllables.
The courtroom grew steadily colder.
At 2:35 the private door opened and the Honorable Jacob M
üller of the circuit court roared in, damning Chicago’s vehicular traffic in a voice that could have been heard at the Stock Yards.
The judge flounced into his high-backed chair between the American flag and the flags of the state and municipality. He took a full half minute to adjust his robes. He didn’t look at Paul, who stood in front of the dais, curiously tight with anxiety, suddenly unsure that this was the right step.
From Müllerstrasse in Berlin to Judge Müller’s chambers in Chicago. From Pauli to Dutch. What a long journey …
Marriage to Julie, settling down in their flat, hadn’t quite ended the journey, as he’d expected and hoped. He still needed a sign; the sign of which old Frau Flüsser in Berlin had spoken. He didn’t know where it would come from, or how he’d recognize it. But he needed it, to banish the deep and haunting questions of childhood; put a clear mark at this journey’s end, even though he surely had many others ahead in a lifetime of his chosen work.
He didn’t dare say any of this to his wife; didn’t dare tell her he was safely anchored in the happiest of marriages and yet still adrift on a wild sea, rudderless, with no chart, no light, no compass—
No sign to show him where he truly belonged.
The Honorable Judge Jacob Müller put on pince-nez, opened the folder, and examined Paul’s application. He looked down from the high place.
“You are Mr. Crown?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“I’m ready to take your declaration. The clerk will attend, please.”
The courthouse hack stumbled from his desk with the smaller book. The judge said, “Left hand on the Bible, right hand raised, if you please, sir.”
Paul obeyed. He swallowed several times but the lump in his throat wouldn’t go away.
“Paul Crown, do you declare under oath before this court that it is your bona fide intention to become a citizen of the United States of America?”
“I do.”
“A little louder, please.”
“I do. I do!”
“Do you further declare that you renounce forever all allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, or sovereignty, and particularly, in this instance, allegiance to His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, of the country of Germany, you being at this moment a citizen or subject of said country?”
“I do, yes.”
Judge Müller’s pen scratched.
“So sworn, so noted, so entered.”
The judge laid his pen aside, removed his eyeglasses, shot up from his chair, and leaned over to shake Paul’s hand.
“Congratulations, Mr. Crown. Come back in two years, we’ll make it binding.”
Since 1898, Paul’s road to this courtroom in the last hours of the last day of the old century had been colorful, convoluted, and, at times, highly dangerous. Shadow’s appetite for “actualities” had only been whetted by the Spanish war films. He had also realized that money spent traveling a camera crew to a remote location, however wasteful it seemed at the time, could yield a bonanza. No longer did Paul have to argue to justify every penny.
Whenever Paul reflected on the variety of experiences he’d had by age twenty-three, he was awestruck. The Spanish war had merely been the start. When Admiral Dewey returned in triumph in September of 1899, Paul and Ollie Hultgren photographed his cruiser Olympia from a tossing tugboat in New York Harbor. That same day, when the Admiral received a ceremonial sword at City Hall, Paul passed out dollar bills to cut a path to the front of the enormous crowd, where he and Ollie could record the ceremony on film. The admiral glared at him several times; Dewey hated all photographers.
In competition with Albert Smith of the Vitagraph of New York, Paul and Ollie sailed for Britain when the war broke out in the fall of ’ninety-nine. Great Britain and the South African Republic had been wrangling for years about control of internal affairs. But the principal motivation for the war lay in the rich veins of gold in and around Johannesburg. The mines of the Rand deposits were largely owned and controlled from London.
What precipitated the war was an ultimatum from President Paul Kruger of the Republic. All British troops had to be withdrawn by the eleventh of October 1899. Britain responded with an immediate buildup of troops on the borders. The deadline passed. On October 12, the first shots were fired.
It was in London, on his way to South Africa, that Paul at last met Michael’s father-in-law. Michael was already in South Africa for the London Light. A nasty trick of fate put him in Mafeking, an insignificant town about eight miles inside the west border of the Transvaal, where he interviewed Colonel Robert S. S. Baden-Powell, commander of the Bechuanaland Protectorate Regiment hastily moved to Mafeking after Kruger’s ultimatum. When fighting started, five thousand Boers swept down on the town and threw a siege cordon around it, catching Baden-Powell, and Michael, by surprise.
Paul learned this from Lord Yorke, in the proprietor’s immense office on the top floor of the Light building on Fleet Street. Lord Yorke explained that Mafeking had suddenly assumed strategic importance because it was a junction on the rail line to Bulawayo, Rhodesia, in the north. During the troop buildup, large quantities of military supplies had been shipped to the junction and stored. Thus a tiny town of fifteen hundred whites and about five thousand African blacks became a vital target for the Boers. Michael had the misfortune to be standing bang on that target at the wrong moment. Lord Yorke related all this sourly; he seemed to disapprove of his country’s involvement in the war.
He changed the subject. Paul’s reputation had preceded him, he said. After a half hour of questions, Lord Yorke offered Paul a high salary if he’d come to London and organize a picture unit. Lord Yorke looked like a frog and spoke like an angel, in a sonorous voice quite at odds with his jowls and pop eyes and oiled black hair. Paul could barely withstand his blandishments, in the office, then at Lord Yorke’s regular luncheon table at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, and finally at supper at Café Royal.
“You must come over,” Lord Yorke kept insisting.
“My wife is in America. That’s where I belong, sir.”
He said it, but deep within, doubt remained. When he got home, he didn’t mention the offer to Shadow. When he told Julie, she said, “Do you want to go?”
“Part of me does. You are more important. You, and our child.”
“Your happiness is important to me, Paul.”
He smiled but didn’t reply. To this minute, even though he’d acceded to her request at the fireside and said yes, he’d make his declaration of intent, he was damnably unsure.
After receiving clearance to enter the South African war zone, Paul and Ollie had bought passage on a small Greek freighter outbound from Tilbury on the Thames. They debarked at Durban, South Africa, on December 12, 1899. The very next day, who should Paul see coming toward him on a dung-littered street, wearing polished boots and cavalry trousers, double-breasted blue jacket and cravat, tall white tropical helmet and puggaree, but Dick Davis. Davis hurrahed, and hugged Paul, and treated the two cameramen to supper. Ollie was overawed—doubly so when Davis pointed out a bewhiskered civilian dining with two Army officers.
“Dr. Conan Doyle. Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. He’s here to set up relief hospitals and at the same time write some dispatches. I’ve seen a bit of his copy. He should stick to fiction and medicine.”
Movement in the war zone was tightly controlled by the military, who also controlled and censored all copy sent out of the country by journalists. Every dispatch had to reflect favorably on the Crown and its military arm. With the appropriate permissions in hand, Davis, Paul, and Ollie hired a Cape cart drawn by two horses in tandem, and took on a pair of dark Kaffir boys—one to cook and one to tend the animals.
They reached Pietermaritzburg, the supply base of General Buller, and from there traveled northwest toward Colenso on a munitions train. Paul carried a Mauser pistol in a belt holster, bought in Durban; Davis’s suggestion.
Two hours up the line, a dozen Boer riflemen on horseback charged down fr
om the crest of some low hills and attacked the train. Davis was forward in the only passenger coach, which carried officers. Paul and Ollie were playing cards on a trunk in the baggage car. At the first shot, Ollie rolled back the door and held the tripod rigid on the bouncing, swaying floor while Paul cranked. A young Boer controlling his horse with his legs rode so close to the train, Paul could see the gray irises of his eyes. The young Boer fired his rifle directly at the camera. Luckily the train was bouncing. The bullet buzzed over Paul’s head by a matter of inches. He snatched out his pistol. The Boer saw it and galloped away. Officers returning small-arms fire from the coach ultimately drove off the attackers, at a cost of two lives.
Separating from Davis, Paul and Ollie traveled on horseback with their Cape cart and their Kaffir boys. They filmed some of the fight at Spion Kop, tallest of a chain of kopjes—hills—when Buller tried to force the Tulega River and was repulsed. There was much confusion during the action, and Paul and Ollie slipped away before it was over. Paul didn’t want their equipment confiscated because they’d filmed scenes of a British defeat in progress.
Once again they met Davis. He was coming up to the front. He told them where to find a Boer encampment by striking west. The Boers were friendly to neutral journalists; they wanted their side told. He’d visited with them and begun to change his original, unfavorable opinion.
“They seem dedicated idealists. Hard, maybe, but no harder than their enemy. They live simply and they say they want only one thing. To avoid the yoke of the Empire. The censors don’t like what I’ve written about the Boers lately. The hell with them.”
Paul and Ollie and the Kaffirs easily found the encampment, about a hundred men with half again that number of horses and a couple of small fieldpieces. It was one of many similar small bands of Boers who operated independently, moving and striking at will. Riding on the commando, they called it.