The Laughter of Carthage

FIFTEEN

THERE IS A WIND from Tatary which blows the spoors of decadence across the world. In palaces ferociously isolated from reality languid Sultans conjure wicked and fantastic abstractions affecting the concrete destinies of millions. Trained houris, forever nibbling and sucking at their masters’ private parts, confirm them in their illusion of absolute authority. Many who inhale this Oriental wind are immediately drugged; its perfumed currents permeate the world’s richest merchant cities, making men believe they have only to speak of fortunes to become immediately wealthy, only to invent fanciful plots to be themselves at once possessed of political power. Hundreds of others can be convinced by these fantasies; thus providing spurious confirmation of authenticity. In Washington I began to walk on air.

Jimmy Rembrandt and Lucius Mortimer were themselves some feet above the ground, so made no attempt to hold me down. Even Charlie Roffy and Dick Gilpin encouraged me to talk first in thousands, then in millions, then in billions. Bills were either ‘on expenses’ or ‘on the house’. My money, they would tell me frequently, was no good. It was in Washington, a place so unreal as to seem hardly a city at all, I learned that the ‘grand’ had become a unit of currency; one always referred to so many ‘grands’ and ‘half grands’. The grand is beyond money. It is used in the purchase of dreams and to impress others with the glory of those dreams. So common was this currency it seemed almost vulgar to think in terms of ordinary dollars and cents. As an official of the Mississippi & Tennessee Cotton Consortium I was given my own bank account, but did not have any immediate use for it: almost everything was done on someone else’s credit.

Washington is more mirage than city. Her dignified monuments are so carefully preserved, her cosmetic appearance so deeply important to her that little else seems to matter. The politicians and the public they are supposed to represent set enormous store by appearances. Sometimes Washington seemed less substantial than Griffith’s Babylon. Here I learned the true meaning of political hypocrisy for while federal agents hounded the makers of homebrewed wine, jailed the farmer unable to pay his taxes, laid siege to houses of ill fame, America’s senators, congressmen, generals and industrialists, her financiers and entrepreneurs, drank themselves stupid on the best quality whisky and fucked a different girl twice a day. To one another they signed over innumerable grands while in public they praised thrift and hard work, common sense, a fair day’s pay. They filled the palaces of government with sonorous rhetoric, giving the vaguest euphemism the ring of reasoned truth. In the evenings they boasted of friendships with madams and bootleggers and sold their votes to the highest bidder. Meanwhile Warren Harding, soon to be murdered for his dawning realisation of their corruption, smiled blindly with innocent pride at the purity and nobility of his country’s institutions.

Washington is white marble and grandiose architecture whose chief function is to impress and overawe those innocents whose money went to build it. It is as much a denial of democracy as it is a testament. For all the richness of her building materials, her weight of granite and alabaster, she is insubstantial. One sometimes felt she would take to her heels, vanishing at any moment.

I was, temporarily at any rate, successfully seduced. The chorus’s rounded calves kicked up in a line from tiny, tossing skirts; bobbed hair bounced above the bright, perfect smiles; the music of saxophones, syncopated, raucous, set the place; and flivvers sped from Montreal and runners cruised off Maine. Americans had learned from Europe there was money in contradiction; a killing could be made in a climate of ambiguity; where there was abstraction, there, too, was credit. Talk was cheap and paid huge dividends. The wind from Tatary had reached the New World. In Germany the mark inflated to the point of disintegration and Washington was dismissive: it was the price a country paid for its own folly. We were watching Rudolph Valentino’s enlarged lips curl around a cigarette; singing Second-Hand Rose in tones of whining sentimentality, pretending to a sorrow and despair most of us had not earned. Nothing had been earned. Hardly aware of the fact herself, America had become a Great Power, yet refused the consequent responsibility. Her exports went abroad and her capital stayed at home, so it was Europe who paid for America’s pleasures while at the same time she was dismissed as feeble and worn out. It would be almost ten years before America’s bill came in. And twenty years or more before it was paid.

Within their enormous temples, erected in imitation of the Greeks but to Egyptian scale, those politicians played at Romans but practised the habits of Carthage. Their city is a central core of privilege surrounded by outer rings of diminishing wealth, the rings broadening the further they are from the centre, until one reaches the great mass of negroes inhabiting broken down nineteenth-century houses, shacks and shanties situated so far from the lawns and monuments they become in a strange way entirely invisible. The negroes were like an army without a purpose, laying siege to a city they had neither the courage nor the means to attack. They could not be employed, bought off or turned away. They remained entrenched, lost in drink and drugs, whining their dreadful blues, sometimes sending a few cripples or women and children into the centre to beg. Most of them, I learned, had left good employment in the South with the idea they might be better off here. Having discovered their mistake, they were too cowardly to return to the work they were happiest doing, which is manual and mechanical, such as picking cotton or building cars. Like baffled Huns, abandoned by the main horde, they lived off the charity extended by those too good-hearted or too nervous to drive them away. These lazy creatures have always mystified me as a race. They are amiable enough when not inflamed by lust or the rabble-rousing words of some cynical white using them to his own ends. If any further sign were needed of Washington’s growing narcissism and blindness to reality it was in this refusal to do anything about the growing negro problem. (Eventually they were to become the advance troops of Carthaginian conquest; the cannon fodder of their Oriental commanders. The few genuine patricians left, scions of older Southern families, warned of this consequence but the mood of the times was against them and like me they were mocked, driven into obscurity, their heritage plundered, their visions denigrated and destroyed.)

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 directional 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.