My Autobiography (50 page)

My friend Ralph Barton was acting strangely. I noticed the electric clock in the sitting-room had stopped – the wires had been cut. When I told Ralph about it he said: ‘Yes, I cut them. I hate the ticking of clocks.’ I was dismayed and slightly annoyed, but dismissed the matter as one of Ralph’s idiosyncrasies. Since leaving New York he had seemed fully recovered from his depression. Now he had decided to return to the States.

Before leaving he asked if I would go with him to visit his daughter, who had only a year previously taken the veil and was now in a Catholic convent in Hackney. She was his eldest daughter by his first wife. Ralph had often spoken about her, saying that since the age of fourteen she had felt the call to become a nun, although he and his wife had done everything they could
to dissuade her. He showed me a photograph of her taken when she was sixteen, and I was instantly struck by her beauty: two large dark eyes, a full sensitive mouth and an engaging smile looked out of the picture.

Ralph explained that they had taken her round Paris to many dances and night-clubs, hoping to wean her away from her ecclesiastic desire. They had introduced her to beaux and given her the gayest time, which she seemed to have enjoyed. But nothing could deter her from becoming a nun. Ralph had not seen her in eighteen months. She had now graduated from novice-hood and had fully embraced the order.

The convent was a gloomy, dark building in the heart of a slum district in Hackney. When we arrived there, we were greeted by the Mother Superior and ushered into a small, dismal room. Here we sat and waited for what seemed an interminable time. Eventually his daughter entered. I was immediately struck with sadness, for she was just as beautiful as her picture. Only, when she smiled, two teeth were missing at the side.

The scene was incongruous: the three of us sitting in that small gloomy room, this debonair, urbane father of thirty-seven, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette, and his daughter, this pretty young nun of nineteen, sitting across from us. I wanted to excuse myself and wait outside in the car. But neither would hear of it.

Although she was bright and vivacious, I could see that she was detached from life. Her actions were nervous and jerky and showed strain as she talked of her duties as a school-teacher. ‘Young children are so difficult to teach,’ she said, ‘but I’ll get used to it.’

Ralph’s eyes twinkled with pride as he talked to her and smoked his cigarette. Pagan that he was, I could see he rather enjoyed the idea of his daughter being a nun.

There was a wistful detachment about their meeting. Undoubtedly she had been through a spiritual trial. As beautiful and as youthful as she was, her face was sad and dedicated. She talked of the glowing accounts of our reception in London, and inquired about Germaine Taillfer, Ralph’s fifth wife. Ralph told her that they were separated. ‘Of course,’ she said humorously turning to me, ‘I can’t keep up with Daddy’s wives.’ Both Ralph and I laughed self-consciously.

Ralph asked if she were staying long in Hackney. She shook her head thoughtfully and said she might be sent to Central America. ‘But they never let us know when or where.’

‘Well, you can write to your father when you get there,’ I interposed.

She hesitated. ‘We’re not supposed to communicate with anyone.’

‘Not even with your parents?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, attempting to be matter-of-fact, then smiled at her father. There was a moment’s silence.

When it was time to leave she took her father’s hand and held it long and affectionately, as though some intuition were at work. As we drove away Ralph was subdued, though still nonchalant. Two weeks later, in his apartment in New York, he committed suicide by shooting himself while he lay in his bed with a sheet over his head.

*

I now saw H. G. Wells frequently. He had an apartment in Baker Street. When I visited him there, he had four lady secretaries inundated in books of reference, checking and making notes from encyclopedias, technical books, documents and papers. ‘That’s
The Anatomy of Money
, my new book,’ said he – ‘quite an industry.’

‘It strikes me they’re doing most of the work,’ I remarked jokingly. What appeared to be large biscuit-tins were ranged on a high shelf round his library, each labelled ‘Biographical Material’, ‘Personal Letters’, ‘Philosophy’, ‘Scientific Data’, and so forth.

After dinner friends arrived, among them Professor Laski, who was still very young-looking. Harold was a most brilliant orator. I heard him speak to the American Bar Association in California, and he talked unhesitantly and brilliantly for an hour without a note. At H.G.’s flat that night, Harold told me of the amazing innovations in the philosophy of socialism. He said that the slightest acceleration in speed translates into terrific social differences. The conversation was most interesting until H.G.’s bedtime, which, with little subtlety, he indicated by looking at the guests, then at his watch, until everybody left.

When Wells visited me in 1935 in California, I took him to
task about his criticism of Russia. I had read of his disparaging reports, so I wanted a first-hand account and was surprised to find him almost bitter about it.

‘But is it not too early to judge?’ I argued. ‘They have had a difficult task, opposition and conspiracy from within and from without. Surely in time good results should follow?’

At that time Wells was enthusiastic about what Roosevelt had accomplished with the New Deal, and was of the opinion that a quasi-socialism in America would come out of a dying capitalism. He seemed especially critical of Stalin, whom he had interviewed, and said that under his rule Russia had become a tyrannical dictatorship.

‘If you, a socialist, believe that capitalism is doomed,’ I said, ‘what hope is there for the world if socialism fails in Russia?’

‘Socialism won’t fail in Russia, or anywhere else,’ he said, ‘but this particular development of it has grown into a dictatorship.’

‘Of course Russia has made mistakes,’ I said, ‘and like other nations she will continue to do so. The biggest one, I think, was the repudiation of her foreign loans, Russian bonds, etc., and calling them the Tsar’s debts after the Revolution. Although she might have been justified in not paying them, I think she made a great mistake, because it resulted in world antagonism, boycotts and military invasions. In the long run, it cost her twice as much as if she had paid them.’

Wells partially agreed and said that my comment was good in theory but not in fact; for the repudiation of the Tsar’s debts was one of the edicts that had inspired the spirit of the Revolution. The people would have been outraged at having to pay off the debts of the old régime.

‘But,’ I argued, ‘had Russia played the game and been less idealistic, she might have borrowed large sums of money from the capitalist countries and built up her economy more rapidly – what with the vicissitudes of capitalism since the war, inflation and the like, she might have liquidated her debts easily and retained the world’s good-will.’

Wells laughed. ‘It’s too late now.’

I saw a lot of H.G. under different auspices. In the South of France he had built a house for his Russian mistress, a very temperamental lady. And over the mantelpiece was inscribed in
Gothic letters: ‘Two lovers built this house.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, after my commenting on it. ‘We’ve had it put on and taken off a number of times. Whenever we quarrel, I instruct the mason to take if off and when we make up she instructs the mason to put it back. It had been put on and taken off so many times that the mason finally ignored us and left it there.’

In 1931 Wells completed
The Anatomy of Money
, a two years’ work, and he looked rather tired.

‘Now what are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘Write another book.’ He smiled wearily.

‘Good heavens,’ I exclaimed, ‘wouldn’t you like to take a rest or do something else?’

‘What else is there to do?’

Wells’s humble origin had left its mark, not in his work or outlook, but as in my own case, in an over-emphasis of personal sensitiveness. I remember once he aspirated an ‘h’ in the wrong place and blushed to the roots of his hair. Such a little thing for a great man to blush about. I remember him talking about an uncle who had been head gardener of a titled Englishman’s estate. His uncle’s ambition had been that Wells should go into domestic service. Said H. G. ironically: ‘But for the grace of God I might have been a second butler!’

Wells wanted to know how I became interested in socialism. It was not until I came to the United States and met Upton Sinclair, I told him. We were driving to his house in Pasadena for lunch and he asked me in his soft-spoken way if I believed in the profit system. I said facetiously that it required an accountant to answer that. It was a disarming question, but instinctively I felt it went to the very root of the matter, and from that moment I became interested and saw politics not as history but as an economic problem.

Wells questioned my having, as I thought, extrasensory perception. I told him of an incident which might have been more than a coincidence. Henri Cochet, the tennis player, another friend and I went into a cocktail bar in Biarritz. Three gambling wheels were on the bar-room wall, each with numbers from one to ten. Dramatically I announced, half in fun, that I felt possessed with psychic power, that I would spin the three wheels, and that the first wheel would stop at nine, the second at four and the
third at seven. And, lo, the first wheel stopped at nine, the second at four and the third at seven – a million-to-one chance.

Wells said it was purely a coincidence. ‘But the repetition of coincidence is worthy of examination,’ I said, and related a story that happened to me as a boy. I was passing a grocer’s shop in Camberwell Road and noticed the shutters were up, which was unusual. Something prompted me to climb on the window-ledge and look through the diamond hole of the shutter. Inside it was dark and deserted, but the groceries were all there, and there was a large packing-case in the centre of the floor. I jumped from the ledge with a sense of repugnance and went on my way. Soon after, a murder case exploded. Edgar Edwards, an affable old gentleman of sixty-five, had acquired five grocery stores by simply bludgeoning the owners to death with a sash-weight and then taking over their business. In that grocery shop in Camberwell, in that packing-case, were his three last victims, Mr and Mrs Darby and their baby.

But Wells would have none of it; he said that it was commonplace in everyone’s life to have many coincidences, and that it proved nothing. That was the end of the discussion, but I could have told him of another experience, of the time when I as a boy stopped at a saloon in the London Bridge Road and asked for a glass of water. A bluff, amiable gentleman with a dark moustache served me. For some reason I could not drink the water. I pretended to, but as soon as the man turned to talk to a customer I put the glass down and left. Two weeks later, George Chapman, proprietor of the Crown public house in the London Bridge Road, was charged with murdering five wives by poisoning them with strychnine. His latest victim had been dying in a room above the saloon the day he gave me the glass of water. Both Chapman and Edwards were hanged.

Apropos of the esoteric, about a year before I built my house in Beverly Hills I received an anonymous letter stating that the writer was a clairvoyant and in a dream had seen a house perched on a hill-top, fronted by a lawn that came to a point like the bow of a boat, a house with forty windows and a large music room with a tall ceiling. The ground was the sacred site upon which ancient Indian tribes had made human sacrifice two thousand years ago. The house was haunted and must never be left in darkness.
The letter stated that so long as I was never alone in it and there was light, there would be no visitations.

At the time, I dismissed the letter as being written by a crank and put it aside as something odd and amusing. But going through my desk two years later, I came upon the letter and reread it. Strangely enough, the description of the house and lawn was accurate. I had not counted the windows and thought I would do so, and to my astonishment I found there were exactly forty.

Although not a believer in ghosts, I decided to experiment. Wednesday was the staff’s night off and the house was empty, so I dined out. Immediately after dinner I returned home and went into the organ room, which was long and narrow like the nave of a church, and had a Gothic ceiling. After drawing the curtains I turned out every light. Then, groping my way to an armchair, I sat in silence for at least ten minutes. The heavy darkness stimulated my senses and I imagined shapeless forms floating before my eyes; but I rationalized that it was the moonlight coming through a slight crack in the curtains, reflected on a crystal decanter.

I pulled the curtains closer and the floating forms disappeared. Then again I waited in the darkness – it must have been five minutes. As nothing happened, I began talking audibly: ‘If there are spirits here, please give me a manifestation.’ I waited for some time, but nothing happened. Then I continued: ‘Isn’t there some way of communicating? Perhaps through a sign – a tap, or, if not that way, perhaps through my mind, which might prompt me to write something; or perhaps a cold draught of wind would indicate a presence.’

Then I sat for another five minutes, but there was no draught or manifestation of any kind. The silence was deafening, and my mind was a blank. Finally I gave it up as a lost cause and turned on a light. Then I went into the living-room. The curtains had not been drawn, and outlined in the moonlight was the piano. I sat down and began running my fingers over the keys. Eventually I came upon a chord that fascinated me, and repeated it several times, until it vibrated the whole room. Why was I doing this? Perhaps this was a manifestation! I kept repeating the one chord. Suddenly a white band of light embraced me around the waist;
like a shot I leaped from the piano and stood, my heart pounding like a drum.

When I had recovered, I tried to reason. The piano was in a recess by the window. Then I realized that what I thought was a belt of ectoplasm was the light from an automobile coming down the mountain-side. To satisfy myself, I sat at the piano and again struck the same chord several times. At the far end of the living-room was a dark passage and, across from it, the door of the dining-room. From the corner of my eye I saw the door open and something come from the dining-room and pass along the dark passage, a grotesque, dwarfish-looking monster with clownish white circles around its eyes, waddling towards the organ room. Before I could turn my head, it had gone. Horrified, I got up and tried to follow it, but it had vanished. Believing that in my highly nervous state a moving eyelash might have created the illusion, I went back to playing the piano. But nothing further happened, so I decided to go to bed.