THE “RUSSIAN CASTLE” IN THE “LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE”(Photograph by Goldwyn Pictures Corporation)
THE “RUSSIAN CASTLE” IN THE “LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE”
(Photograph by Goldwyn Pictures Corporation)
It is a new world to me, and I have to admit a great admiration and a great respect for it.
I dined, a small party, at the house of Gouverneur Morris. We had a Chinese dinner, especially prepared by his Chinese cook. All through dinner the conversation was of Charlie Chaplin, his looks, his individuality, incidents in their friendship, and what I had missed. Never a word of criticism did I hear, everyone talked of him with appreciation and affection, almost with pride. He had talked of me, they said. He had distributed “Mayfair to Moscow” among his friends, and most people thought we knew one another intimately. Finally I found myself too calling him “Charlie.” From all accounts he is cultured, thoughtful and attractive, and I wonder to myself whether I am never to know but the mirror’d reflection. I feel like one who does not personally know the great, butknow someone who does and writes home about it! After dinner we left the men, and went on a voyage of exploration round the house, which is bungalow in type, and very attractive and then in the bathroom we paused to powder our noses. In the bathroom we remained, three of us, perched on the baths’ edge, forgot the men, and drifted into conversation which was all absorbing.
One girl was a film actress with bobbed straight glossy henna hair. Her face was much made up, her mouth might have been of any other design than the painted one. She was decorative and futuristic and I liked looking at her. She intrigued me. The other girl was a vivacious and restless continuity-writer. Both were very young. They talked unreservedly about their love affairs, and I listened enraptured, as to a story of de Maupassant. In the end we were agreed that marriage would spoil everything and then the men, impatient of our absence, came and banged upon the bathroom door.
October, 1921.Los Angeles.
Upton Sinclair fetched me for dinner. I was surprised when I saw the author of “The Jungle,” whom I expected to be aggressive and strong-faced. Instead I found a gentle creature, rather vague, and rather shy and with a rather weak chin. We decided that our sort of background was not theAmbassador Hotel, and I asked him to take me anywhere else. We motored into the heart of the town, and went to a cafeteria. This was new to me. Never before had I been to a cafeteria. I had never even heard what they were like. I followed him and did what he did, and tried to look as if I knew what to do; he first took a metal tray from a column of trays, and passed along a row or buffet of hot dishes, selecting what he liked, and the serving woman behind the buffet placed a ration of his selection on his tray. Carrying our own trayfuls we retired to a little table. We talked until everyone else had left, until men on step ladders re-arranged the flowers on their columns, until finally the cafeteria closed and we were expelled. Most of that time we talked about “The Jungle.” I asked him a hundred questions. How did heknowabout the lives of the foreign immigrants? How did he get into their souls? Had he imagined it, or did he know it? How had he learnt so much about the details of work at the packing houses?
I learnt all I wanted to know. He had imagined nothing. The Russian family was a real family. The wedding feast was real—he was present. He had lived in Packingtown. Every story was a real story, a proven story. Everything was true ... and that was fifteen years ago, and conditions, he said, were much the same today. They had not much improved. He is a most sincere Socialist.Unrelenting, uncompromising, he is at war with all the powers that be. Don Quixote tilting at a windmill isn’t in it. Sinclair tilts at industrial kings in armor, at the octopus tendons of the newspaper kingdom—at all the mailed fists in the world in general and the United States in particular. He is in quest of truth and light. He wishes to undress the veiled spectres, and show us the naked truth beneath, the truth with all its maladies and sores, its hideousness, its terrible deformities, so ably hidden. This mild-faced man will stop at nothing. He has great courage and never fears destruction. He is unwavering in his determination. He goes crashing in where angels fear to tread.
Driven from the cafeteria into the night, we motored fast and aimless, talking as we drove, talking, never ceasing, until we could drive no more. Our road led down a hill, straight like the road of the Nazarene swine, into the sea, and so we stopped; a great long white line of breakers confronted us, we left the car, and stood for a moment undecidedly. Then a long seaside bench came crawling past me. I thought for a moment that I was in madland. I remembered in a flash the sham village, the illusions of filmland, still so near me. Really one should not be surprised by anything any more. In the dim light I again looked at the walking seat and yet again, and then I realized the man who was sitting on it was reallydriving it. The seat was a motor seat. We jumped upon it and were carried miles, as it seemed to me, along the sea walk. In the distance were bright lights, we stopped when we reached them, and this was “Venice.” I have always longed to go to Venice, but I never knew it looked like this. Over-head a network of colored lights, and from no visible location, the music of a gramaphone. Before us a square stone stately building, called a “Bath house” and in large letters over a door “check babies here.” “Check” (I have learnt) is an American word which described what people do with their hats and umbrellas when they go into a restaurant. Further on, dazzled by the lights and laughter of Venice, we stopped for an ice-cream soda, and then took shots at sham rabbits and moving ducks with a rifle. Here too I was introduced for the first time to chewing gum, pleasant to chew, but unfortunately unpleasant to taste.
Saturday, October 8, 1921.
The Goldwyn Studio Co., having arranged my reservations for me, sent a car to take me to the 8 P.M. train for San Francisco.
When the hotel porter shouted down the line of parked cars: “Goldwyn Studio Car” the crowd of dinner arrivals simply stood still and stared. I had my parrot “General Baragan” on my shoulder andI stepped into the car with the self-consciousness of a recognized prominent film star!
On the train I did as directed by my hosts-to-be: I sought out the director of the train and told him “the Lark” would stop in the morning at Burlingame. I hadn’t a notion where or what Burlingame was, except that my friends lived there, and the train was to be stopped. The director looked at me, in a curious way, as though I were a poor lunatic suffering from hallucination. He had been, he said, on the train for 25 years and it never yet had stopped at Burlingame. However, the train did stop there in the morning and deposited me and Dick and Louise and the parrot with all our luggage in the middle of the track and hurriedly sped away. Then Constance Tobin, whom I had not seen for 15 years and who had been a school-mate of mine at the convent in Paris, appeared with her husband to greet me.
Six Days Later.Burlingame.
In a very short time it became evident to me that Constance had remained true to tradition and the environment from which we both had sprung. A social environment which is much the same in all countries. Meanwhile she realized that I had played truant. We had an amusing time renewing ourselves to each other. We began cautiously,but in the end, admitting totally different tastes and opinions, we have linked up a friendship that is now confirmed.
Meanwhile the social strenuousness of Burlingame cannot kill me physically, because I am a very strong woman, but it has killed me mentally. There is a pain at the back of my forehead and a void where thoughts should be. Burlingame has, collectively, the psychology of a great big girls’ school. The stranger arrives and is looked at, is accepted or ignored, as the case may be. Burlingame is independent of spirit and likes as it pleases. Like children, they seem to be care-free, happy and contented. Yes, surely these are happy people, they represent exclusively the prosperous,—they have no anxieties of life. Contentment is their most conspicuous quality—they would not be here, else.
It is a self-indulgent, happy-go-lucky community, not over-critical, the spirit of “live-and-let-live” which is rather rare in the East, thrives here. They lead an easy life in a kindly climate, they can afford to be generous. They all know each other very well, and they see one another every day. Sometimes three times and sometimes four. Their houses are close together. There are no big properties as in England to rouse one’s sense of inequality. They motor to each other’s houses andto the country club, although they are only a stone’s throw in distance, and every time they meet they are pleased to see each other.
I wonder they have anything left to say, yet they talk all the time. It is true they do not listen much, they all talk at the same time.
On Saturdays and Sundays, and at night, there are men. These love their golf, their tennis and their bridge, and they dress like Englishmen.
In their midst is one strange man who does not belong. I met him, of course, the moment I arrived. My name being somehow associated in people’s minds with Russia, I must surely meet this Russian no matter what kind of Russian he might be.
“They” said he is the Russian consul, representing the Russian government. No one seemed to know that the Russian government is not represented in this country and no one cared.
True to type, I recognized at once that he belonged to the regime that’s gone. With all the charm and arrogance, the old world manners and impenetrable smile, this blasé cosmopolitan, appreciative, yet consciously superior, stood out—a stranger in their midst. No party seemed complete without him. But I too was a stranger and watched him and I watched them, and I saw that he too watched. Sometimes I thought I knew what he was thinking and ofttimes I gave it up.
Friday, October 14, 1921.San Francisco.
I got into San Francisco early, and took Dick to Dr. Abrams where George Sterling was waiting for me. George Sterling, as I understand, is the Swinburne of California. He has an exquisitely refined head, a nose that one sees on a Greek cameo, but a voice that labels him of his country.
Dr. Abrams is a doctor whom a great many doctors call a quack, and some superficial people laugh over. He is the man of whom Upton Sinclair raved to me, declaring that he had made the discovery that was to revolutionize the world. I am far too ignorant and unscientific to attempt an explanation of this theory. Suffice to say that it is entirely based on vibration. Each disease, he claims, has its own vibratory reaction, and it is only necessary to take a blood test to discover what the disease is, and then cure it.
I sat in his laboratory among a dozen doctors and watched and listened for two hours or more. I should have listened and watched for two weeks and then I might have begun to understand.
I have no right to an opinion, but I have a right to an open mind. Those two hours were among the most interesting I have ever spent.
He took a drop of Dick’s blood and tested it. “This is the blood of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” Dr. Abrams announced to the laboratory! It reactedto the malaria vibration, this he explained, might be due to the amount of quinine Dick was taking. The cure he said, had the same vibratory rate as the disease. He recommended me to stop all further quinine and bring him back in a few days. He tested him for every other kind of disease but Dick had practically a clean slate. This is very rare, for most of us have something congenital, even if we don’t know it.
I came away with one conviction at least, that Dr. Abrams is a type of genius, is perfectly sincere, and is working himself to death. The people who know more than I do can say what they like, but those facts remain. He is undoubtedly living 50 years before his time. As for sceptics, I do not see how anyone dare to be sceptical in these days of wireless telegraphy and wireless telephone, which after all are entirely based on vibratory foundations. I saw Dr. Abrams discover a cancer in one person, tuberculosis with syphilis and malaria in another and a decayed back tooth in a third. These were done from a drop of blood, the patients were not even in the room. They came in afterwards. Nebulously, in my head, I understand the process, but one has to be there to see.
My own experience with the medical profession has made me very open minded. I have received the results I looked for from the one doctor in London that the medical profession declared to be aquack, when they, the so-called best doctors in the profession, had failed to help me.
I sometimes think the medical profession is, of all professions, the slowest to accept new ideas, the most conventional. Their sense of professional etiquette seems to count before all else.
Later in the day we went to the house of a friend of George Sterling’s, a composer, who sets his songs to music. There in a half dark room, full of flowers, and baskets filled to the brim with rose petals, we drank red wine. Curled up on a sofa I listened to the playing and singing of his songs. Now and then George would read out loud some new poem not yet published.
That night we went and sipped absinthe in some low haunt. It is no use, Mr. Prohibition Agent, to come after me and ask me where that was, because I don’t know, and I’m quite sure George doesn’t remember.
Monday, October 17, 1921.
San Francisco is rather proud of being built like Rome, on seven hills, and it certainly is effective. One street was so steep that a ladder was built onto the side walk to help one up. The cable cars go slipping perilously down, or crawling terrifyingly up. But the towns in this country that I have seen vary little in the way of buildings and streets. Their atmosphere varies.—San Franciscofor instance, has that foreign cosmopolitan feeling that characterises New York. But whereas New York gets its atmosphere in ships from Europe, San Francisco brings it in from the Orient, and with it some of the mystery which New York has not.
The temptation to me to board a ship and go to China is heart-breaking, and it seems so easy, so obvious. Only I can’t, because after five months of wandering the funds are low. I must return to New York, and work and work through the winter before me, to store up for the next adventure!
Monday, October 17, 1921.Burlingame.
ONE DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO.
Today Constance motored me into town, and we fetched up at 12:30 at the Dolores Mission. It was closed, and a formidable woman who opened the priest’s house door, refused to let us see a priest. Constance, undefeated and indignant, retreated to the grocer shop across the way and telephoned to a Bishop. It was equivalent to “Open, Sesame!” On second application the female watchdog melted away, and a priest appeared in her stead. He had an Irish name, and an Irish face, and he kindly showed us over the mission. This was founded in about 1770 by the Franciscan friars, hence the subsequent name of the town, San Francisco. TheChurch was built long after Spain had ceased to erect those glories of architecture that are conspicuous in Mexico. In the 16th Century labor was cheap, and the Church was rich. In the 18th Century the glory of God was chanted in a building of adobe (dried mud-bricks) white-washed. This simple building still stands, with its little whitewashed columns outside, like the entrance to a simple Colonial house. Around the Mission sprang up the native grass huts. Then with the gold-rush evolved the rough mining town, and that was the beginning of San Francisco. Before the earthquake the town was only 70 years old. But I am not writing a guide book!
From the church we wandered out into the sun bathed cemetery, old world, deserted and neglected. The first grave that caught my eye was engraved with the name of Arguello, governor of the County. He was the brother or the father of the girl Concha whom Bret Harte has immortalised in his poem called: “Concepcion de Arguello.” Further on, another grave known as that of “Yankee Sullivan” a prize fighter who had died at the hands of the Vigilante Society—“a native of Bandon Co., Cork, Ireland,” so the inscription ran. I repeated to myself “Bandon ... Bandon” my own little Irish village town—and my childhood up to seventeen welled up in my heart and memory. The Irish valley, and the river,woods, and hills ... my friends the poachers, and the village drunks who used to frighten me so on the lonely road on Saturday afternoons!
I remember now—that our gardener, and our keeper, and the coachman whom we children loved, had left us one by one. I used to wonder what it meant “to emigrate”—I vaguely understood they were leaving for “the States,” but what sort of state that was I did not know, but I remember how they said goodbye; big, strong men, with tears in their eyes impress a child. I stood there before the grave of this inhabitant of Bandon, and felt absurdly sentimental. It is a long way from Bandon to San Francisco. We lingered over-long, and had to hurry away, arriving at the St. Francis Hotel extremely late for lunch. Afterwards Mr. de Young took me to his museum which he has presented to the town. It has the most perfect setting, in the middle of the Park. We did a lightning rush through it for we had less than an hour. Sculptures, paintings, prints, enamels, ivories, textures, furnitures and minerals, he showed me a motley collection arranged with care and taste.
From here we rushed back to the Hotel, being arrested on the way for “speeding,” and Mr. de Young left me in the hands of a detective to see the town!
We started off first to the city gaol; I suppose agreat many people have seen the inside of a gaol, but I had not. It hit me with the full force of a first impression. We arrived there in a jocular mood, but that mood was dispersed the moment we stepped out of the elevator onto the prison floor.
There they were, humans behind bars. Pacing back and forth in the narrow caged-in alley-way. Each had his cell, more like a cage it looked, and their door opened onto this “run.” The warder showed us how the cell doors worked. One iron lever closed the entire row with one movement. The sound was exactly like the closing of doors in the lion house at the Zoo. I did not like to look too hard, I felt a great embarrassment. Whenever, at the Zoo, I have stared at lions I have always been conscious of the indignity towards them, and to stare into the eyes of caged humans is almost more than one dare. In one cell lying on the bare wood floor, in a contorted position, almost standing on his head, one man lay half dazed, and seemingly in great distress. The warder said he was a drug-fiend. “How long have you been taking the stuff?” the warder asked him—“Twenty-one years ...” the fellow answered in a strange strained voice, moistening dry lips, and opening and closing his eyes. Then with a sudden outbreak, and without shifting his position: “No prison ever stopped a man from taking dope.”
In another section, a nice looking Spanish boy was sitting writing in his cell. It looked like a cabin on board a ship. He had ornamented the wall with pictures from the illustrated papers of film-stars and English peeresses. He looked so young, so cheerful, so frank and honest. “Why are you here?” I asked. He smiled, and hesitated, and then looked shyly down: “A girl—eighteen—a minor—”
“American?” I asked.
“No—Italian.”
“In Spain or Italy that wouldn’t put you in prison!” I said, thinking of the mature Latin girls of fourteen.
“It’s like a home!” he said humorously.
We went to the woman’s section. In one big cage sat three or four, one was greyhaired, her age was 74. “Smuggling drink” was her trouble. I began to feel that it is only a crime to be found out. In the next a woman sat alone. Big, thick, middle aged, with a face grown hard from suffering—she arose and came to the iron bars to talk with us. She had at last—she told the warder—slept one hour, and felt a little better. Her indictment was that she had shot her husband. “I adored him—” she said, “my daughter didn’t want me to marry him, because of the way he drank—we married just two years ago. Yes I am American born—my husband was a Swede. He was acement-worker. His only fault was drink.—Last Saturday he bought some moonshine, mixed it up with beer,—firewater it was, it drove him crazy. He threatened to shoot me first and then himself. I got the gun off the Captain(?) who was in the house. I thought it was unloaded, and so I handed it to him as a joke, and it went off—”
“Lucky it went off on him instead of on you—“I said. She looked at me wearily through half closed eyes: “It might as well have been me—”
We left the prison.
In the basement of the building the Coroner had his office, and he invited us to see “the Morgue.” In a big room, a big table with a lamp and books gave the illusion of a salon. The four corners were partitioned off, and handsomely draped with velvet curtains. In these the bodies lie, the first few days, awaiting recognition. There were but two this day, one was completely covered over; the other partially. From beneath a sheet two stumps protruded, and a bucket hung to catch the blood. An Italian boy fishing from a raft, had drowned. His body had been rescued from man eating sharks. “We have two more in cold storage, down below,” said the Coroner. We followed him. The place was built like an aquarium. On either side were great show cases, lit up with electric light. In each a body was beautifully set, wrapped around in a sheet so that onlythe face could show. They can be preserved here for several months.
One’s first impression was “how life-like”—they seemed to be some waxen image, in the “Chamber of Horrors” at Madame Tussaud’s.
One, an old man, greyhaired, open mouthed, head thrown back and dilating nostrils, had committed suicide by gas asphyxiation. The other a little blood stained smiling boy, red haired looking at us with such wide open wondering eyes. He had been run over by a train. The announcement of a red haired boy, had brought about 50 people, but none so far had claimed him. From fifty families a red-haired boy had disappeared, it seemed incredible. But, it is midnight—I cannot go on writing and thinking of this place, with its dead below, and its dead-alive above. I will recall how I got out into God’s air, and drank the cool fresh evening in deep breaths. And so, across the square to Chinatown. Here at a street corner my detective guide hailed two strange, illdressed, square built stalwart men. These were detectives in disguise, who mingle with the Chinese crowd, and know the Chinese haunts. They seemed well-known in Chinatown, disguise is not much use! One of them joined us and we followed him. He took us into shops and eating houses, where blank faced Chinamen played their games of cards and dominos and hardly troubled to look up at us aswe passed through. Into back premises we went, and down black stairs, through secret doors and passages, where by the light of an electric torch one saw the hatchet marks where doors and walls had been hacked down when the place was raided by the police.
However anyone ever discovered the latchless secret doors that seemed so perfectly a part of the panelled wall or dared to penetrate into the labyrinths of double walls, trapdoors and secret stairways, Heaven only knows.
Our stalwart guide, who looked more like an Irish prize fighter than a shrewd detective, seemed to glory in the game. Every day and every night must seem to him a great adventure. He led us down a black unlighted alley, a cul-de-sac between some tenements, where murders are not infrequent. Suddenly he turned round, on a silent footed follower whom I had not noticed: “What are you sneaking around here for—get out!” he said and flashed his torch in the grimly smiling Chinese face. Just for a second I felt the atmosphere rather tense—the Chinaman hesitated, and then retreated.
We pushed open a door ajar. A Chinese prostitute stood smoking her pipe. Soberly dressed, in black silk jacket and trousers, her hair so neat and shiny, her face almost unpainted, she shyly grinned at us. I made a comparison in my mind,between this and the half breed Mexicans at Tampico. In comparison the Chinese was a noblewoman.
The police have their hands full in Chinatown, to prevent gambling, doping and prostitution. Though why it should be any concern of the law’s whether a Chinaman, in Chinatown, is solicited by a Chinese prostitute is more than I can understand. This country moves in a mysterious way, its wonder to perform, and one can hope that it knows best.
I motored back to Burlingame and hurriedly dressed and arrived extremely late at a dinner party. Wine flowed, and restored my jaded spirits. I looked round the table at the brilliant, cheerful, noisy company and a new thought came to me. I found myself pondering on the high moral standard imposed by the United States. Continually I ask myself this question: “Isthe United States more moral than any other country? Are the men and women human, or has legislation and public opinion extinguished the devil that lives in human frames?” I find no answer.
Wednesday, October 20, 1921.Monterey.
There is a man in Burlingame who is quite different to anyone else. He is a recluse. It is very strange to be a recluse in Burlingame. He has read more books than anyone I have ever met. Notespecially modern books, but he will suddenly tell you what Petrarch said to Laura, or recall Dante, and sometimes be as modern as Stevenson. He is difficult to meet, for he will not go out socially.
Yesterday morning he fetched me in his car and motored me to Monterey. I don’t know how far away it is, but we started at 10 A.M. and reached Monterey at sunset. A wonderful road, through miles of orchards and then winding through mountains and forests to the sea.
We lunched at Santa Cruz, and when we left the city, a placard on the boundary said that Santa Cruz bade us farewell, hoped we had had a good time, and that we would some day return.
All along the motor road even in what looked like primitive wilds, one was distracted all the time by placards on the road which hampered one’s conversation. Mostly they were directions for the motor driver who it was taken for granted must be a complete idiot. It left him no choice, no doubt whatever as to the right thing to do. “Blow your horn”—“Dangerous curve ahead” accompanied by a diagram illustrating the kind of curve to expect,—further directions as to what to do with the throttle, etc., etc., and wherever there was a flat wood fence there was inscribed a reminder that Christ loved me, and the option of deciding whether I would sin, or choose the other path. Occasionally we were informed“Picture ahead, Kodak as you go.” Apparently a man may be blind, the state will see for him.
As the day advanced we speeded, so as to catch the sun before it set into the sea. We fetched up eventually at his sister’s house which is above the rocks on the wild seashore, known as Pebble Beach. The house, which has arcades and is Italian in design, reminded me of Shelley’s house at Lerici, the house to which Shelley was sailing back from Sorrento, when the storm overtook him and he was drowned. The peace, the loneliness, and the sea sounds that pervaded this house on the Pacific shore were balm to my socially weary soul. I walked in the dusk among the gnarled and tortuous storm beaten cedars of Lebanon that have their roots among the rocks. These are the only trees that grow, and the only place where they grow. No one can explain how the seeds were brought, whether by hand of human, or by a bird, or with the wind. But here on this coast, with the grip of centuries that no storm can dislodge, and with their heads as bright young green as their stems are old and warped, the cedars of Lebanon reign supreme.
I was sorry that I had only one night to spend, it seemed too beautiful to leave so soon.
I know that some day, when I have seen all I want to see of people, when I have travelled more and allayed some of my curiosity, when I haveworked some more and am more tired, then I will go away into a silent and lonely and beautiful place and never more be seen, and my children will say: “We have a funny old mother, who lives way off somewhere, and whom we go and visit now and then.”
Thursday, October 21.Monterey.
Next morning we motored along the coast, visited the old mission of San Juan, which is interesting. The guide showing us over the church announced impressively that it was 170 years old. “Isthatall?” I exclaimed, looking round at the primitive walls that might have been archaic and pre-historic. My companion in reply commented on “thearroganceof foreigners” and completely shut me up.
We then went and called at the house of Francis McComus, the painter. He and his wife were in. Mrs. McComus is the first human being I have ever seen who looks like a Gauguin, and attractive, which I never thought a Gauguin!
I had never seen the work of McComus before, and I was spellbound. One after another he showed us his Arizona landscapes, with their pure almost irridescent colors. I am aware that I am given to enthusiasm, but here is something to be enthusiastic about. Men who produce work at this level lend to the country they belong to a reflectedglory that should arouse much national pride.
Here is a man that Paris or London would acclaim, and who should not be allowed his life of indolent contentment on the wild Pacific Coast. How strange a country this is, how full of surprises and unexpectedness! That one should drop into a house by the wayside, and find so great an artist!
Tuesday, October 25, 1921.San Francisco.
Dick Tobin telephoned me to come in early to San Francisco as he had something he thought interesting for me to do. I picked him up at the Hibernian Bank and he took me down to the ferry, gave me a ticket, a bunch of violets and typewritten directions, and sent me off to St. Quentin prison across the bay.
At the prison, which stands up like a great fortress on a promontory, I introduced myself to Warden Johnston. He and Mrs. Johnston gave me lunch at their house above the flowered terraces, sunbathed, with its wonderful view of the bay. On their verandah two grey-flannelled prisoners were tying up the Bouganvillia creeper. Inside we were waited on at table by a Chinaman who has a life sentence. I asked his crime ... he was just a “Tongman.” After lunch the Warden handed me over to Miss Jackson who is in charge of theWomen’s Section, and for an hour I sat and talked in their little sitting room, with a group of women prisoners. Their bedrooms were like cubicles in a girl’s school, small, simply furnished, full of personal knickknacks, and not at all suggestive of a prison cell. Their clothes were blue and white narrow striped linen, made pretty well as they liked. Miss Jackson, I found a most interesting character. Full of insight and clairvoyance, full of deep human sympathy, understanding and kindness. One realized how tremendously these caged souls were hers to help or hurt, and how much more terrible their fate would be if the Wardress were hard and without understanding. But Miss Jackson talked to me of some of them (before I met them) with real interest and even affection.
I asked her whether a life sentence case was as easy to manage as one who had done a lesser crime. Her reply was illuminating. She said that whereas a life sentence was pronounced on an individual who might be clean of character but for the one desperate deed, prompted by God knows what passionate provocation, the lesser criminal on the other hand might be an habitual petty malefactor who had merely chanced to be caught on the hundredth act!
Out of over 2,000 prisoners only about 25 or 27 were women, and of these about 10 came and talkedto me in the sitting room, showed me their needle work and conversed animatedly about the world outside. They seemed in their hearts, almost unbeknown to themselves to be tremendous feminists, and we had quite a heated debate on the subject of whether men were intellectually superior to women, as a man asserted to me the day before at lunch. We all granted the physical superiority, but as to the rest ... well, happily we were all women and no man heard us!
We discussed the impending disarmament convention, and we agreed that it would most likely end, as the Versailles conference ended. We conjured up the picture of all the best brains in the world, gathered together for months and months, with all their retinue of secretaries, and their secretaries’ secretaries, and we were of unanimous opinion that women thus collectively could not have talked more, with less results. Indeed the result of Versailles is completely nil. Some of us dared to believe that womenmighthave done better! I like to think of even the women behind gaol bars, women of varying ages and nationalities, women with hardened or breaking hearts, putting aside now and then their personal griefs to watch, humorously, this conference of men who assemble for the second time, all seriously, to settle the problems of a perplexing and rebellious world.
At last I asked what I could do for them outside and the request was for books. New books, the latest publications, “something well written—and modern!” Classics they had in plenty. The Russian prisoner wanted “Confessions” by Tolstoi. The Italians, however, said they would read nothing, not even if I secured Italian editions! To the charming English girl, with a life sentence, I promised Margot Asquith’s diary, Strachey’s Queen Victoria and the Mirrors of Downing Street. Then Warden Johnston came and fetched me and showed me all he could of the rest of the prison.
I saw the library, the workshops, the chapel and the hospital, but he would not take me among the male prisoners. The sex problem is not without interest. One forgets, that to a man with a life sentence it is not very fair to parade women visitors. I sat up in the balcony with the guard and watched the men assemble in the yard for lockup. They were of such varied types and mostly so young. In front of them, like a giant patio, surrounded by the prison buildings was a huge parterre of brilliant dahlias all bathed in the setting sunlight. These flowers have gone forth into the outside world, and won prizes at the local flower shows. Hanging from the verandah roof in front of the upper story cells, baskets of growing flowers were suspended by wires, a curious contrast.There were a few negroes among the crowd. Some Chinese and one or two prisoners conspicuous by their wide striped uniforms. These were the men who had broken parole. One man I noticed who did clerk work in one of the prison offices, he walked across the patio at lockup time and he held his head high and walked with an almost insolent assurance. His hands were the hands of a man of breeding and he smoked a cigarette through a long amber holder—I pointed him out to the guard—“a forger—” he said, indifferently. I asked about the negroes—“I suppose they have done desperate things—?” The guard shook his head, “they’re not half such bad chaps, most of them, as some of the white men—”
I stayed till the big bell sounded and the motley humans were locked up for the night. Then I went back and talked to Warden Johnston. He is severe and looks hard, but his theory is to accomplish the regeneration of men’s souls through kindness and trust, and not the brutalization of a man into a stone. He hopes that most of these men when they come out may have a new chance in life and make a success. When I got home late for dinner, I told where I had been. Constance looked surprised and even perplexed. “Did youwantto see another prison—?” “Well,sucha prison, yes,” “How did you get from San Raffaele to the prison?” “In a taxi—” ... Exclamations—howdid I dare trust myself to an unknown taxi, how did I know when I told the driver to go to St. Quentin prison three miles off that he was taking me there? I didn’t quite know what to say. But it seemed to me that if I wasn’t safe to go in a taxi from San Rafaele to St. Quentin this must be a far more dangerous country than Russia or Mexico and then she asked me this strange question in reply to my account!
“Did youwantto talk with the women prisoners for an hour—?” I thought of all the hours we had spent talking with women in the sheltered verandahs of Burlingame, and I did not dare to tell her that the women of St. Quentin had roused in me a desire to go to prison, so as to gain some human understanding.
October 29, 1921.Los Angeles.
I got back to Los Angeles yesterday morning. Instead of starting, as planned, for New York, my change of plans being due to a telegram from Mr. Lehr of the Goldwyn Company asking me if I would dine on Monday night next to meet Charlie Chaplin, who is due to arrive that day. And so of course I succumbed to another delay in my schedule. A month ago I should have been back in New York but time, they say, was made for slaves—.
This evening, at sunset, Dick and I drove pastthe flying field and watched the planes set out against the evening sky. Dick begged to be allowed to go up, but I was frankly afraid. This morning I was ashamed of my fear. I know that I was wrong. One should always trust people, things, Destiny. So Louise and Dick and I crushed into a small front seat and took a flight out over the sea. It was cool and it was steady. The green fields and the plough patches looked like little mats laid out to dry. The motors on the roads like small crawling beetles. We could see the mountains behind the mountains, and way down below us, on the earth, our little shadow followed us. Dick loved it—he wanted to fly on and on. It is a great privilege to be born in an age when one can get up and leave the earth the moment one is bored with it.
October 31, 1921.Los Angeles.
Charlie Chaplin arrived in Los Angeles today at noon, on his return from Europe. I met him at dinner. We were just a party of four at the Lehrs. It has been a wonderful evening—I seem to have been talking heart to heart with one who understands, who is full of deep thought and deep feeling. He is full of ideals and has a passion for all that is beautiful. A real artist. He talked a great deal about his trip to England. It had been, I gathered, one of the big emotions of his life. Heleft, as he said, “poor and unknown” to return 10 years later famous....
What made a great impression on him was the psychology of the English crowd, which seemed to him to contain such a spirit of real affection.
Of course Charlie is English—and England was welcoming her own. Besides, who has more right to public adulation than this man who has brought laughter and happiness to millions? But it was sad, he said, in England—something had happened, or was happening. He was not sure if it was a decay that had set in, or whether it was a reconstruction. But everyone looked as if they had suffered, and it saddened him to be there. A good country to belong to, we agreed, but not a country “for a creative artist,” he advised me to remain where I am. And then, in spite of his emotional, enthusiastic temperament, with a soundness of judgment that surprised me, he said: “Don’t get lost on the path of propaganda. Live your life of an artist ... the other goes on—always.”
One can see, in the sadness of the eyes—which the humor of his smile cannot dispel—that the man has suffered—has known things we do not dream. Has striven, hoped and aimed. Has reached his goal, yet he is not content. He feels there is more to do, and see, and know, more to attain. He believes in work and in producing always the best of one’s effort. He is not Bolsheviknor Communist, nor Revolutionary, as I had heard rumoured. He is an individualist with the artist’s intolerance of stupidity, insincerity, and narrow prejudice. He is sincere and absolutely without affectation. He has no illusions as to what the bourgeois world thinks of “movie actors—” and he has no intention of being patronized by the condescending. He has an almost feminine intuition about people, he knows at once if they are sincere or not. Before the evening was over we had discussed Lenin, Lloyd George, Carpentier, J. M. Barrie, and H. G. Wells. I found that he had each person pretty well summed up, and his opinions of them were not biased by the world’s opinion of them, nor clouded by their fame; and just what he thought (of those I knew) was right. In fact Charlie was a great deal more interesting to talk to than most of the people who are expected to be.
When he asked me about my work in this country, I explained that the United States had made of me a writer instead of a sculptor, and I told him my view of the American man who is so modest that he thinks it is a vanity to have his bust done.
“He does not mind having his portraitpainted” I said, “he has grown accustomed to the idea. But he exaggerates the importance of a portrait bust. In fact he is quite un-simple, in his point of view,almost self-conscious—” and Charlie, looking at me half shyly, half humorously, as he sat tucked away in the sofa corner, under the light of the lamp: “I’m vain!” he said—“Thank goodness!” I said. And so we fixed it right away—that I will linger here until his bust is done.
On the way back to Hollywood Hotel where he dropped me in his car, we had a discussion on marriage. He has the chivalry, and the instinct to protect, I maintained my fanaticism of freedom.
He is a strange little man with a great big soul. He made me think of Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley, in which he said that Shelley tired not so much of a woman’s arms, as of her soul. It seemed to me it was more a spiritual than a physical companionship that Charlie is subconsciously searching for, in his heart.
November2, 1921.Hollywood.
I have been with Charlie from midday to midnight. He has just left me. First we went to his studio, and Dick came along with us to see “The Kid” which I had never seen. He had it put on for me in his studio theatre, and now I realize the whole world of possibilities in films. Just as a “movie” can be stupid, boring, badly done, and irritating, as any bad bit of work must be, so too it can be very fine and very beautiful. Charlie has produced an exquisite story. It might so easily havebeen “soppy” and full of false sentiments—but it is not. It is simple, human and full of pathos.
Dick reacted to it in the most stirring way. When the moment came that the Kid was to be taken from Charlie and put in an orphan asylum, Dick clung round my neck and cried and sobbed. He said “I can’t bear it, I can’t look till the end.” He got so hysterical that Charlie was quite alarmed and had to reassure him by saying that it wasn’t true. “It’s only a play Dick! It will all come right in the end!” Charlie too was quite affected by Dick’s emotion.
Whenever we came to the pathos parts, Charlie tiptoed to the harmonium and played an accompaniment and when the lights went on Dick and I were shamefacedly mopping our eyes!
When we went up to his house and lunched, it was half past three! The house which is not his, but is rented, is Moorish and fantastic in design, the tortuous unsimplicity of which disturbs Charlie. But he loves the quiet of it and the isolation on a hill top with the panorama of the town extending for miles below to the sea. At night, as he says, it is just a fairy twinkling world when the town lights up. Later we went for a walk round the hilltop, and the air was hot and full of evening insect sounds. Dick scrambled wildly up the sloping banks, while Charlie and I more sedately walked round and round by the windingclimbing path. He was trying to tell me what he thought was the ultimate aim of all our effort. He maintained that no artist would do great work until all petty ambition was obliterated.
“There must be no dreams of posterity, of immortality, no desire for admiration, for after all what are these worth ... at best 1,000 years hence people might walk round your immortal stone and say—it certainly is beautiful; yes, it is wonderful—(and Charlie acted the part)—Who did you say did it? Clare Sheridan 950 years ago”—“and then,” said Charlie, “in 5 minutes they will be saying ‘Where is that motor, I told him to be back in 35 minutes’”—There is nothing, he said, so beautiful that will make people forget their eggs and bacon for breakfast—as for admiration of the world—it’s not worth anything—there is in the end but oneself to please:—“You make something because it means something to you. You work, because you have a superabundance of vital energy, you find that not only you can make children but you can express yourself in other ways—in the end it is you—all you—your work, your thought, your conception of the beautiful, yours the happiness—yours the satisfaction; be brave enough to face the veil, and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world—”
I said rather feebly that I wanted my childrensomeday to be proud of me—he made a repudiating gesture. “You should want them to love you—to love you in a perfectly primitive animal way. To love you because you are you—to love you whatever you are—to love you if you are wrong.”
I said that if he left me nothing to work for, no aim, no end, only my own satisfaction, I thought one might feel suicidal.
He was horrified at this. We stopped in our walk. Charlie looked at me: “How could anyone like you with so much vitality talk of suicide? Oh the glory of life, the glory of the world (he threw his arms wide to the horizon) it’s all so beautiful, and it’s all mine ...” and then we had to laugh at ourselves for becoming so desperately serious.
I had not meant to stay so long but he asked Dick if he would like to stay for tea, and Dick said yes, and that he’d like to stay the night as well. Dick likes Charlie. He says to him: “Charlie, you’re the funniest man there is ...” and in the car going home after tea, Dick said that as I had talked to Charlie all the afternoon it was only fair that he should have him all to himself until we arrived home. Finally Charlie and I went and dined together, and danced at the Ambassador Hotel. Everyone knew him, and seemed glad to see him back. The whole world is Charlie’s friend, no wonder Charlie loves the world!
Then, such a strange thing happened, there inthat gay room full of jazz music we got to talking of our childhoods. Goodness knows how it came about, but I told him mine, and then he told me his. He told it with his wonderful simplicity, told it with detachment as if he were telling of some one else, not of him. It was a terrible bit of realism, and I though I rather love realism, I felt almost a desire to stop him from going on. It was more than one could bear to visualise.
It was a curious place in which to tell such things, but we were oblivious of everyone in the room. And now, stranger to me than ever is the psychology of this man, once a little child of sorrows, who has taught a whole world to laugh.
Thursday, November 3, 1921.Los Angeles.
I have worked the whole day on Charlie’s head, worked at his house. Today is Thursday and it has to be finished on Saturday because he wants to go to Catalina and fish.
It was a very peaceful day, and though the lovely Claire Windsor was there when I arrived, no one disturbed us during the remainder of the day. His moods varied with the hours. He started the morning in a brown silk dressing gown, and was serious. After having sat pretty quiet for some time, he jumped off the revolving stand and walked round the room playing the violin. Having thus dispelled his sober mood hewent upstairs, changed his dressing-gown and reappeared in an orange and primrose one, and we went on with the work. He is perfectly right, one’s desire for color depends entirely on one’s mood.
Now and then we stopped for a cup of tea, for a tune on the piano, for a breath of air, on the sunbathed balcony and Charlie with his wild hair standing on end, and his orange gown dazzling against the white wall of his moorish house, would either philosophise or impersonate. He told me that when he was a young man in London, he longed to know people, but that now he knew so many and he felt lonelier than ever, and it is no use, he said, for artists to hope to be anything else. He then put on a gramaphone record and conducted an imaginary band. It was a very entertaining day, and the work got on awfully well.
Saturday, November 5, 1921.Hollywood.
Three whole days I have worked on that bust, with a concentration of effort that is exhausting. It is finished—I feel tonight the elation of a girl out of school. Moreover I can sleep without the anxiety due to an unfinished work. Charlie is pleased, and I—well I am never satisfied, but I am conscious of having accomplished my best. His friends who know his restless and capricious nature are surprised that he gave me those threewhole days. I was fortunate of course in meeting him immediately in his return, before he was re-engulfed in work. Moreover, with some perception, I planted myself with my materials in his house, and as I wanted him bare throated I begged him not to dress. A man in pajamas and dressing-gown does not suddenly get a notion to order his motor and go off to some place. I had him fairly anchored. Nevertheless he has been difficult to do. There is so much subtlety in the face, and sensitiveness, and all his varying personalities arrayed themselves before me, and had to be embodied into one interpretation.