‘Esmé!’ I was sure she would hear me somehow through the voices of the departing travellers, the squeal of the pistons and the clatter of the metal. ‘Esmé!’
A loud commotion from the other side of the station, a sudden yell from a stall-holder, made the policemen hesitate. I saw Mr Mix signalling to me from the far exit and I dashed towards him. How ironical, I reflected, that I, Colonel Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, late of the Don Cossacks, perhaps the last scion of an old and aristocratic Russian line, should find as his only friend in New York a humble darkie. I knew a little humility myself at that moment. God speaks to us in strange ways, sometimes, and sends us help in even stranger guises. If nothing else, this is what I have learned over the years.
‘How are we to get to Chicago, Mr Mix?’
‘There’s only one way I know,’ ironically responded my dusky comrade.
So, in Jacob Mix’s company, I plunged again into that seedy wilderness, that unmapped land of despair and hopelessness which is home to the railroad bum. Three nights later, as we neared Chicago, with my beard and my chills, a nose that would not stop running and no means of finding a little cocaine to take away the worst of the symptoms, I was not to be recognised as the gifted teenage genius whose final dissertation in Petersburg had brought an entire college to its feet applauding my precocious and sophisticated vision of an Earthly Paradise which, with a little sense and good will, could so easily have been made a reality. Instead, what is this? I have become a gendzl again. Gey vays . . . ? Es dir oys s’harts. Es dir oys s’harts, Esmé. That meshuggeneh hint!
I am back in the cattle car!
THREE
HOW RICHLY IS CONFORMITY and mediocrity rewarded! I am reconciled now, but as a youth I was constantly shocked by examples of that truism. Reduced to nothing, I was again forced to rely on my wits. I am not ashamed of this. I have nothing to hide. This does not mean I never valued my privacy. Dame Gossip makes such capital of a few sensational speculations! Who can afford to offer her so much as a thimbleful more material? Only once, after we had reached Chicago and learned from a newspaper that, irony of ironies, Meulemkaumpf, and doubtless my darling, had already left for Los Angeles, did Jacob Mix ask what I considered to be an impertinent question about my fiancée. I was forced to silence him immediately. I was in no doubt that Esmé had prevailed upon Mr Meulemkaumpf to escort her to California, trying to find me at the address I had given her before she took ship. This irony did not outweigh the urgency of the situation. I had to get to her as soon as possible. What would they tell her? That they had last heard of me being arrested for bootlegging and that my bits and pieces had been discovered amongst the effects of a few vagrants? She might think me dead, run over by a freight train as I desperately sought to reach New York. What would she do in her grief? The thought was horrifying. I was reminded of what my other Esmé had done. Lost, believing herself betrayed, she had become the whore of anarchists too depraved to dignify by the noble name of Cossack. She had been fucked so many times, she said, she had calluses on her cunt. She had become the plaything of my worst enemies. I could not force from my mind the picture of my sweet child innocently seduced by the evil words of some neo-Klansman, the kind who had already sworn to be revenged on me. What sweeter revenge is there than to rape the victim’s most treasured possession? I already knew much of human evil. I had seen virtually every aspect of it, especially during the war against the Bolsheviks. I did not think my sanity would stand another experience of that kind.
Some of this I confided to Mr Mix, who seemed to suggest that the chances of a situation recurring so exactly were remote. ‘Because a brick once dropped on your head don’t mean you’re the kind of man who has bricks drop on his head.’ I must admit I found his simple wisdom calming, and perhaps my liking for the negro was based on the man’s peculiar ability to help me regain my reason when, as many highly-strung creative people find, I temporarily lost control of myself.
Further attempts to telephone Mucker Hever collect or else to borrow the fare for Los Angeles failed miserably and we were arrested. Those few days in jail are not the worst I have spent. At least there was adequate food and no beatings. But of course I was hard put to quell my panic. I spent a day in the infirmary but the doctors there were unsympathetic. They determined I was merely suffering drug-withdrawal symptoms. At this foul lie, I did not help my own case by shouting my outrage and trying to strike the orderly who conveyed the quacks’ ridiculous diagnosis. They would not accept that my release might well be a matter of life and death. Of all places, California was where Esmé most needed protecting. Like any city which has attained the status of a myth, Hollywood was full of predators ready to pick up all unconsidered trifles, human or financial. Thousands of young girls were sacrificed each day to a dream of Fame.
With Mr Mix’s help I began to make some sort of fresh plan. On the morning of our release, we headed directly for the highway. Eventually, in the company of three lambs’ carcasses and a somewhat introspective ewe, we got all the way to Valparaiso, Indiana and the railroad yards. After sunset we climbed into a west-bound box-car, closing the doors with all the emotion of returning home. Our long journey begun, there was little to do but talk. Jacob Mix was fascinated by all I had to tell him and frequently exclaimed that I was the best education he had ever had, but all was not one-sided. Mr Mix was a skilful modern dancer - foxtrot, Charleston, even tango were all familiar to him, picked up either from an earlier mentor, a down-and-out music-hall performer who had learned his trade with Cohan, or books and films. He had seen The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse twelve times. Many a night we would step carefully to the rhythm of the swaying freight car while he instructed me in the steps of the waltz, the polka and the cakewalk. Then somewhere in Kansas one evening we found an empty grain truck. Sweet-smelling as it was, and with enough grain still remaining to make us both comfortable, the truck carried us eventually to Hannibal, Missouri, where an attempt to kill us by pouring new grain onto our sleeping bodies barely failed. We found ourselves promptly jailed, this time in separate ‘tanks’ while we served our profitless time and were released. After we had begged unsuccessfully for food at the back door of Huck Finn’s Original Catfish House we fled and were separated. I became familiar with the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee, where I worked as a slave-labourer for a month on a ‘chain-gang’ building up the levee after the flood. By that time I had lost all my ambition and a good deal of my identity and was merely grateful that none of my old acquaintances passed by and recognised me. I had left Memphis under something of a cloud, in Major Sinclair’s airship, and was now especially glad I had given the name of Paxton to the arresting policeman. My guess was that Boss Crump, undisputed ruler of Memphis, would think nothing of ordering the death of a man he regarded as his arch-enemy. I prayed daily that he would never know I was at that moment working on the river wall not half a mile from Mud Island, but my time passed without event and, released, I had lost all contact with Mr Mix. I heard from another bum that he had headed for New Orleans, but my own destination remained Los Angeles.