In the floating land of Mauretania I could now join my own. I had at last found a true spiritual home!
THIRTEEN
A SCIENTIFICALLY ORDERED City State, Mauretania embodies the best of all possible futures. Every monitored function is perfectly designed to give her inhabitants maximum benefit and comfort. Providing protection from the elements, luxury, security and mobility, the metropolis of the future will also fly. She will locate herself geographically at the convenience of her citizens. She will be heated, lit and provisioned from a central energy source maintained to perfection by a benevolent Master Engineer. Social discipline will be achieved chiefly through good will. Citizens will know that transgressing her code will mean isolation or perhaps banishment to a less hospitable environment.
Mauretania is beauty and freedom: a country where art, intellect and business success are properly honoured, where health, good looks and wit are the norm, where everyone is truly equal, having already earned the right to be here. Thus every man is a Lord and every woman a Lady. This future has conquered nature but continues to respect it, unhampered by the past’s banalities, yet remains conscious of its fallible humanity. The world will have control of all its affairs. A central board will govern through selected officers, allowing liberty to all prepared to live and work for the common good. The Grand Patriarch of Constantinople shall be head of a reunited Church. The black and yellow hordes of Carthage shall wither away within a few generations, by a natural process of inbreeding. Fair-skinned, athletic young men and women shall look down through clouds and see the gentle gardens of India, the vast cornfields of China, the game reserves of the Congo; their inheritance. Human nature will not have changed, but certain temptations and threats will vanish: with the voice of Carthage stilled forever, Islam and Zion shall perish as shall everything pagan and ignorant; unnourished it shall rot under the light of truth. Krishna and Buddha will be pleasant myths of a time before the New Dawn. The Jew, the Negro and the Tatar shall be no more than those goblins of prehistoric legend. Byzantium’s world of free City States shall eventually send settlements to new planets, crossing the darkness of interstellar space to spread humanity’s benefits over whole solar systems, filling the universe with the love of Christ. Velocità massima! shall be the cry upon the lips of our clear-eyed pioneers.
Not for nothing were our liners named after Roman countries, modern cities, provinces, sometimes whole nations: Places suddenly no longer tied to specific locations on the atlas. Free from the bondage of Space, we shall start to consider the bondage of Time. Nationality becomes a matter of individual application, just as the sailor selects his ship. And the choice is considerable: Umbria, Campania or Lusitania; New York. Paris, Stockholm, Rome, St Louis, Glasgow, Bremer; Oregon, Minnesota, California, Bourgogne, Lancastria, Saxony or Normandy, Great Britain, United States, France or Deutschland. Replacing old carthbound states they release us from all outmoded thinking, useless economic theories, decrepit moralistic behaviour. We are truly free because we possess complete freedom of movement. We wander in terraced parks and lush forests just as I wandered through the galleries and passages of Mauretania. We dine in comfortable surroundings where fountains arc; sweet music plays as we observe the passing world below. Elsewhere great undersea tunnels connect land masses, bear cargoes by automatic railway; orchards are tended by mechanical servants; herds of beasts live in controlled environments. Disease is conquered. We are escaped from old fears, from starvation and exposure. Perhaps even death itself is defeated. When I was young I read Jules Verne’s romance. The Floating City, in which he visualised a world very much like Mauretania. I, in turn, visualised its successors. Here, amongst my peers, my mind was unburdened, able to examine the most stimulating problems. I was never without a fascinated audience. Fired by my visions, some people even asked for my autograph. These educated, wealthy men and women were not easily impressed. From the second night aboard, which was the night I dined as a guest of the Captain, I wore my Don Cossack uniform with its discreet ribbon and became known as Colonel Pyat by most English-speaking passengers. By some friendly, lazy-minded Americans I was called ‘Max Peterson’. They found the Russian too alien for their ears but it was also their way of accepting me as one of themselves. I had no objection to Anglicisation. My interest, as always, was to adapt as quickly as possible to the host culture. Names were never of much consequence to me. It is what people are that matters, as one English gentlewoman wisely said during the voyage. She was a viscountess, connected to the finest families in Europe.
In her carved oak and mahogany, her wrought iron elevators, her open fireplaces and leather upholstery, the Mauretania represented the best of English good taste. It was easy to imagine oneself part of that country’s noble past. This atmosphere of security persisted even on deck in a high sea when she rolled magnificently, her bow lifting sixty feet before plunging down, burying itself in the waves, thrusting back mountains of water on either side. Crashing and creaking she roared with exultation at her own enormous strength.
As a man of science I was welcomed in the wheelhouse. Captain Hargreaves talked proudly of the ship’s wartime service, her long record as fastest Atlantic liner. He spoke of the sad murder of her sister ship Lusitania, struck by treacherous torpedoes off the Irish coast, a signal for the whole American nation to rise in arms and rush to fight the Kaiser. I was impressed by her huge steam turbines. She had only two main condensers but these could develop a million pounds of steam an hour. Her twenty-five boilers were stoked round the clock by hard-bodied, sweating men who never seemed to tire. ‘Liverpool Irish,’ said Hargreaves. ‘The only stokers to match them are Hungarians. Of course we have nothing but British crews since a British ship is legally a floating piece of our nation. That’s why Cunard never sought foreign capital, even in bad times. Cunard and England are synonymous.’ He was a proud old sea dog, not an easy man to impress. I was flattered by his interest in my ideas for larger and faster ships. Later I learned he sailed home on his last commission, so attached to his ship he died the moment she docked at Southampton.
Two particular friends (I think these originally christened me Peterson’) were, like me, young ex-army men. Captain James Rembrandt (‘as in Van Dyke’) and Major Lucius Mortimer, both fashionably dressed, personable and good looking: American gentlemen to their fingertips. We originally met in the first class smoking room. They taught me gin rummy and poker. I won quite easily and they said I was evidently a natural player, suggesting I give them a chance to win their money back the next evening. I agreed, though as it happened I had to cancel our appointment when I met Mrs Geldorf, who was travelling alone and needed a dancing partner for the ‘novelty ball’. Mrs Geldorf was dark, curly haired, a lady of about forty. She swore I was the handsomest boy she had ever met. She introduced me to Tom Cadwallader (‘I pack meat in Mississippi, but I used to pack a six-shooter in Arizona’). He told me of his early life fighting the Apaches and was curious to hear all my Cossack experiences. He invited me to join the company of George Stonehouse, an Atlanta lawyer with business interests all over the world. Mrs Geldorf told me Stonehouse was one of the richest and most influential millionaires in the South. A neat, small, soft-voiced man with terrier eyes and a way of chewing a cigar like an old slipper, he was excellent and humorous company. We shared many views in common. In my presence he told Tom Cadwallader they could do with more like me in the South. Cadwallader himself was short and fat with the ruddy complexion of the habitual drinker, but his little blue eyes possessed a steady candour at odds with the rest of his appearance. He and Stonehouse talked of their troubles since the War. Everything had been shaken up and things were even more problematical than before. The main difficulty seemed to be with Eastern agitators sent down to disturb the working people. Much of what they said was fairly meaningless to me. ‘Carpetbaggers trying to get in by the back door since we stopped them coming in the front.’ My visit to the South would illuminate me.