They push at you from all sides, these young barbarians, these worshippers of pagan images, in the costumes of comic-opera gypsies. But the gypsies have an old knowledge, a knowledge of God, which made them a people apart. I have always found a fellow-feeling with them. They too were doomed to wander, to be reviled and humiliated, to be refused the comforts and rewards of the securely privileged.
But these are not gypsies who come to Portobello to sell their coloured candles and their beads where once an honest cabbage could be bought for less than a beggar now demands for tea. They have set up ranks of Indian silks, rows of perfumed oils and spices, in frank acknowledgement of their nation’s conquest by the Orient. The sons and daughters of Surrey stockbrokers importune you like carpet-sellers in some Marrakshi souk. They jeer at me. I know the names. I speak all languages. But I refuse to be silenced by their mockery. We are on the brink of what the Chinese call Luan. I have seen the famous ruins of the world. I have seen the end of the Enlightenment. I have earned the right to speak. They use words whose meaning is lost to them. The true fascisti, the self-disciplined heroes of modern Italy, had no part in taking this world to war. They were against it. Is Christ a villain because some self-proclaimed Christian kills a child? My feelings are of the noblest kind. My emotions are profound. I have nothing but love in my heart, yet they take my actions and distort them and pervert them and call me that creature who personifies what they most fear and despise in themselves! They put me in jail. They try to shoot me. They shudder at the idea of sharing their land with such a creature as myself. One look is enough to show that I am a criminal. And yet what are these crimes? In Japan, in India - even in parts of America - they are ordinary practices. They know this really. What they hate is the cunning and malice in their own souls. I am an innocent mirror - this, of course, is typical. But it is not pleasant to be Billy Budd. I have fought prejudice all my life. The young Cornelius girl says I have an overdeveloped sense of sin. She says I am blaming myself too much. Though I appreciate her interest I laugh at this. I am not blaming myself at all, I tell her! And I doubt very much if God is blaming me, either! After all, even in His dotage He knows how much I have suffered and for what end. Even when I did not realise it, I was doing His work. Even in Egypt.
It is neither here nor there, at any rate, how on November 21, 1924, circumstances brought me, in a good-quality three-piece suit of the latest ‘jazz’ fashion, with matching Derby hat and spats and smoking a Havana cigar almost a foot long, once more to Hollywood, my ‘home town’. Only, I need hardly say, to be denied my triumph.
I had no intention of accepting Miss Davies’s offer of work and was confident that I would soon be back in harness, married to Esmé and my vocation in an exhilarating harmony. I had no doubt, just then, that Science was my true master. From a rather substandard room at the Hollywood Hotel still commanded by Mrs Hershing combining the styles of the Madam of a high-class bordello and a somewhat puritanical Mother Superior, I telephoned my erstwhile backer only to be told that ‘Mucker’ Hever was out of town. I called Information, but could locate neither Meulemkaumpf nor Esmé’s surname, Bolascu. Even Mrs Cornelius was unlisted. Finally, on visiting my bank, I discovered that my retainer had not been paid for months and I had little more than four hundred dollars in my account. But at least I was soon to discover what had happened to Mrs Cornelius. I left the hotel restaurant that night and idly wandered down towards Grauman’s Chinese Theater to take my mind off my obsessions and spend an hour or two comparing the feet, hands and hooves of the famous. Instead, after a couple of blocks, I was confronted by an enormous floodlit billboard in vivid, almost Oriental colour. I at once recognised my guardian angel, my greatest friend, my conscience and my confidant. It was Mrs Cornelius. Of course, she was not billed as Mrs Cornelius. Instead, here she was at last as she had always longed to be (though she also was no longer Charlene Chaplin). As Gloria Cornish she had shed about a stone in weight, but her warm beauty was unmistakable. It began to seem that whenever I was lost, whenever I was in despair and did not know where to turn, I received just a vision of my old amie-du-chemin, as they say in France.
I made a note of the film company, Sunset Motion Pictures. I would write to her.
The movie itself was one of those jazz-baby pictures got up to look as if it possessed a social conscience. I hate such hypocrisy. It was called Was It A Sin? and I went to see it purely so that I could have something to say when we met. Actually, the film was not without merit in its tragic story of a woman who commits adultery and is ultimately forced into prostitution, drugs and worse by cynical young opportunists who buy and sell women like meat at a cattle market. Mrs Cornelius played the fallen woman with a mixture of pathos and ‘It’ which comprised some of the finest acting I had ever seen upon the screen. And yet, at the same time, heimisheh. But that was Mrs Cornelius au naturel. It was how she always was. Unspoiled by any of life’s vicissitudes. She was purity personified and I would fight a duel to the death to that effect. A lady, through and through, and a great artiste in every sense of the word.
She alone has stood by me through all my ups and downs. She is the only one who really knows me. In Kiev when I flew so high above the Babi gorge my mother and Esmé loved me. Since then, only Mrs Cornelius has acknowledged my achievements and understood my soul. If I go out now there is always some smirking embryonic gangster leaning on the corner of the bed-shop at Colville Terrace, across from the Midland Bank. ‘Hello, professor,’ he says. I ignore his mocking challenge and march straight to Stout’s, the grocers. They at least have some old-world courtesy. They all wear white coats and put on gloves to serve the biscuits, even the women. It is a tradition of service long since lost, even as a notion, to that jeering lout. As I return up Portobello Road Mrs Cornelius waves to me from the ironmonger’s. She lives in the basement of Number Eight and, like me, is plagued by the unsympathetic young. But she continues to resist, to challenge anyone who seeks to reduce her, either by virtue of her age, her sex, her class or her appearance. This is her quality of resilient courage. She has always had it. At once she dismisses the youth with a rude gesture. ‘Come in for a minute and ‘ave a cup o’ tea, kernel.’ When feeling sympathetic she always addresses me by my title.
I enter the warmth of her moist abode, down below the level of the road, and there she comforts me with conversation almost wordless, a kind of croon. She is all there is and all I need now, my good old compadre. The world was ours once. We enjoyed it freely, that Olympus. I cannot regret those days. They are what they will never take away. Better to have such memories and no future than to have a future with no memories.
These children reject history. To them the past is merely passé. How can they learn not to make the same mistakes if they fail to accept the nature of time? Now they even insist the nature of time has changed. If so, surely we must still develop a morality so that we may not descend again to feral brutes? Mrs Cornelius tells me I worry too much about such things. She reminds me I can do nothing. But a man must try, I say, if his conscience demands it. In Inglewood I gave a note to the studio concierge at his little kiosk by the main gate. Sunset Moving Picture Company seemed a thriving concern, not one of the fly-by-night little movie businesses which so proliferated in those days, frequently under high-sounding titles hiding the real names of familiar shysters. My fears that Mrs Cornelius had become entangled in some shady operation dispelled, I boarded the No. 5 Yellow Car back from Manchester to downtown Los Angeles where I changed for Hollywood. The journey through the suburbs accounted for the best part of the day but it was pleasant enough and my time was well rewarded, for when I returned to the Hollywood Hotel Mrs Cornelius had already telephoned to say that her car would arrive at seven to take me to dinner with her. At last I had some sense of my burden’s lifting a little. I knew fresh confidence. If I was being tested by God, clearly I had done enough for the moment to merit His mercy, for by that evening I was in Beverly Hills dining tête-à-tête with my old friend, in a room overlooking a pool and palms which might have been anywhere in the romantic East. Had I not known better, I should have assumed a determination on her part to seduce me.