Occasionally I raised enough money to visit a movie. They were all that remained of my lost reality. I watched that other Gish, Dorothy, in The Beautiful City, a wonderful tale of racial misunderstanding and reconciliation with William Powell and Richard Barthelmass as the Italian, and it reminded me of my ideals, my own faith in humanity. Mostly however I could not afford the first-run, full-orchestra, theatres and went to houses where Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson were the biggest attractions and Colonel Tim Holt’s adventures were considered too ‘up-market’. This was where I saw Tom Mix and observed how he represented all that was noblest in the Anglo-Saxon race. He truly was a Knight of the Prairies! Now at last I understood the value and influence of the modern kinema. Griffith remained my ideal - I watched, borne away from all my misery for two hours, while Lillian and Dorothy Gish performed the harrowing story of Orphans of the Storm, and Broken Blossoms had me in tears in an old Kansas City mission hall lined with painful pews, where I saw it three times, my own hardships seeming as nothing to the tragedy of ‘The Chink and the Child’ so marvellously played by Richard Barthelmass and Lillian Gish. I went to see her the other day in a horror film by the fat actor, Laughton. She was the only redeeming feature in the whole thing. We all have to compromise occasionally. I did not blame her. My own compromises were many through the summer of 1924.
I got a lift as far as Silverado. By now the September nights grew chill and my yearning for Esmé had become a constant familiar ache. Like the hunger, thirst and sleeplessness it was familiar enough so that I was no longer always conscious of it. I am used to hardship. I have survived many kinds. It has helped me to encourage in myself a kind of mental hibernation. I put my brain to sleep, save for those functions absolutely necessary for day-to-day living. Anyone who met me in those days would have considered me merely another young bum. I was superficially no more nor less coherent and wretched than any of the other derelicts in the 20s who spread in increasing numbers across the North American continent. But there too I did not become a Musselman. Unacknowledged, I kept that little secret spark alive. My spirit remained my own.
What was the point of making a tararum about it? Some things are best forgotten or, if not forgotten, not spoken of. Some things only bring back trouble. A person must survive as best they can. Nobody blames them. Certainly one has a duty to others, but how can one help others if one has not helped oneself? You see, this is what they refuse to make allowances for. It is the socialists who force me to silence on the matter.
Red tsu der vant. I am not ashamed. Are we to rely upon the word of some worthless hasidim? Some stemwinder? What happened in Sonora was never proved. It was a beautiful town. I was against the idea but the others were committed. The fence was black iron and the shrubs were cedar. That is what I remembered. That is what I told them. Neat little lawns rolled where once forty-niners had brawled in their own vomit. Northern California was never a lucky place for me. Even my bargain with William Randolph Hearst’s agents in the matter of the Thomas Ince affair emanated from the Southern half of the State although I am sworn to remain discreet on all matters involving the Hearst family so in honour say no more. I would only add that I had become desperate to have my old life restored and was no more than a tool in the matter having no moral involvement. That was on November 20, 1924. I had a full pardon and an assurance of work, should I ever require ‘an honest job’, at Cosmopolitan Studios.
I do not think it worth describing the degradation of my journey across the sub-continent. Sometimes one cannot afford a conscience. Sometimes one must sell whatever is valuable. I am not ashamed of this. I retain my Cossack soul. I survive so that my people, those Slavic heroes who wait to be awakened in all our menfolk, shall also remember how to survive. And the day is not too far off when our final battle is to be fought. That is the important battle. Nothing else is worth dying for. Love - mutual love - what else have we to comfort us against the cold terror of Entropy? Only human love increases, constitutes itself, intensifies - it is our only antidote to Entropy. We do not value enough our capacity to love. For love alone will save us, in the end - not ideologies, not even religion - but love, decent, honest, human love of one for another, all for one and one for all! Pah sah?
If one cannot change society one can at least hope from time to time to remind it of its virtues. The Moslem does not do this. Under the Tsar, under Christ, the Moslem came to see the virtues of conversion. Not so, of course, under the godless Bolsheviks who offered him no alternative. Thus he remains barbaric, backward, unenlightened. Civil War is the only future for him, when Mahomet’s servants decide the time is right to support their co-religionist! God has spoken to me and I to Him but I told Him I could do His work without His comfort. When I am old and weak, God, I said, then I shall come to deserve and ask for Your comfort. Now I am old. I am weak. And God is gone, a drooling dotard, with only His son and His prophets and saints to help us. They are not strong enough. Sometimes, in those grey, despairing hours, I wonder if the Devil is indeed our rightful master and I am half-tempted towards the Synagogue, to the House of Loss itself. Hopelessness, powerlessness and death lie there. You do not know whose side I am on. It is probably yours.
Willst du ruhig sein, du Judenschwein? Ci ken myn arof gain in himl araan, ju freign bas got, ci sy darf azoi zaan? But is this not how Sexton Blake addressed the Jews?
In a horse-box shared with a stallion of uncertain disposition I invented, in the early winter of 1924, the jet engine. Jet reaction and gas turbine propulsion was always theoretically possible. I was remembering an article I had read as a boy in one of my English periodicals about Hero’s Alexandrian steam engine, which, some 250 years bc, he called an Aerophile, and which is thought to be the first machine to convert steam pressure into jet force. My mind wandered on to Newton’s third law of motion, his never-built steam carriage. The power/weight ratio was of course the chief problem for aeroplanes in those days, since a bigger plane always required a more powerful, and therefore bigger, engine. A jet turbine could deliver considerably more power for its size and therefore lift much larger machines at greater speeds. It occurred to me that some sort of high-velocity fan could be operated to draw in air which could be compressed and used in the powering of a turbine. For a few minutes I longed for my instruments and blueprints, still waiting, with my steam car, in Long Beach, California. Years later, when I heard about Whittle’s work in England, I realised I had hit upon his solution some ten years earlier. But of course this is not an unusual experience for me. In other circumstances I should probably today be the richest man in the world. If my vision of the jet engine had come to me while seated in some plush study lined with old brass instruments, like Sir Francis, then indeed, I might today be strutting the corridors of Buckingham Palace with a garter on my knee and a knighthood in my pocket, destined to rest in Westminster Abbey, to lie through the centuries and hear the blessed mutter of the mass. And this is the man who gave the world the sub-machine-gun! Blessed mutterings indeed!