I was more than pleased to put Washington behind me. I still had a few hundred dollars left from the sale of my patent, but Jimmy Rembrandt had found himself short earlier and I had lent him $500. Moreover a certain married woman, wife of a New England Senator, had begun to pester me at the hotel, telephoning at inconvenient hours, threatening to charge me with rape and have me deported unless I accommodated her. I resented being blackmailed into the position of a stud stallion to be used at will. If I left the city I should have no more trouble. She would cease to interfere with my work which was nearing completion. I had finished the specifications and diagrams for the directional transmitter. When Charlie Roffy next came to see me he asked if I could leave for Memphis by February 3rd. I was at his disposal, I said. He seemed extremely excited. Everything was settled apart from a little paperwork. Our aviation enterprise could be off the ground in less than a month.
It did not take me long to put my affairs in order. I registered my new invention. I wrote once more to Esmé and Kolya. It was dangerous to contact me directly, but a message could be passed through Mrs Cornelius. I wrote to my cockney friend, telling her what I needed, wishing her luck. My star was about to ascend in Tennessee; before long I should doubtless have my own mansion and plantation. She could contact me, under the name of Colonel Peterson, at the Adler Apartments, Lindon Street. Memphis, Tennessee, where Dick Gilpin had rented me rooms.
That night I dined for the last time with my two young benefactors. They themselves were returning to New York on business. They would try to see me in Memphis as soon as they could. Inevitably we should be reunited in the near future, said Jimmy. After all we were still ‘the Three Musketeers’. He would send my $500 in a few days.
On February 3rd 1922 I boarded a Pullman car in the service of the Southern Railroad Company which would take me in no more than forty-five hours to the ‘City of the New Nile’ as Mark Twain once described it. A little light snow had begun to fall. Wrapped in my bearskin coat, feeling the security of Cossack pistols against my thighs, I sat in a private cabin. I imagined myself a nineteenth-century explorer about to examine the interior of the virgin continent. I had had my fill of Washington and her decadent delights. I was looking forward to the more austere pleasures of Memphis. A bell rang. The train gasped. Later, at dusk, I walked back to the observation car. Behind me the great monuments and columns were falling away. The track became two thin black lines in blurred air which gradually grew more and more agitated. Soon all I could see was the driving curtain of the blizzard, wiping away one dream so that it could be replaced by another.
SIXTEEN
THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, as heavily used and as vast as the Volga, as important to American history as the Dniepr to our own, wide and shallow and winding through gentle hills, brought a frisson of recognition. It was as if I had never left Russia at all. As I raised myself in my bunk, peering through the gap in the blind, I could easily believe myself on a train bound for Kiev. All my experiences since 1917 might have been no more than a prolonged hallucinatory fever. Then the billboards and signs in English appeared and we shifted course in a scintillant dawn for the outskirts of Memphis: Little rows of miserable, unpainted shacks, sudden clearings in which stood grandiose Victorian houses whose carved wood imitated Gothic churches and French chateaux, all under a threadbare covering of snow. The impression of pre-Revolutionary Ukraine continued to persist. These suburban streets were low and wide. Tram cars in smart liveries of brass and primary paint moved decorously along avenues of bare trees. The brightly painted gables and shutters seemed those of a well to do small town rather than real city, even as the higher buildings of the centre emerged from a haze of sunrise. As the train took a bend I glimpsed rows of tall sternwheel and sidewheel paddle steamers moored to wharves on which stood piles of cargo. I might have been in Nizhni Novgorod, save for sharp Baptist steeples taking the place of our Orthodox onion domes. There was also far more motor traffic than was ever found in a Russian town. Consequently there were more metalled roads.
A little dark smoke drifted in the mist. The stillness gradually gave way to sounds of a busy trading port preparing for the day. Then the illusion of familiarity was further distorted by the sight of a gang of negroes who puffed short-stemmed pipes and joked amongst themselves as they walked up towards the levee from the railroad tracks. I was by now used to black faces, but sometimes they still materialised in unexpected contexts. All servants were black in the South, from the conductor on the train to the well groomed coachman who had been sent to take me from the station to my rooms. His name, he said, was Gibson. He wore an old-fashioned brass-buttoned uniform, brown top coat and white gloves. He spoke in a low, cultured voice, a surprising contrast to the whining sing-song of the porters, paperboys and other urchins who moved everywhere with that ground-watching, half bestial lope. This was largely absent in the niggers of the North East, whom I assumed to be of different stock. The carriage took me along Main Street, through a city far more modern than I had expected, with construction going on everywhere. Although not reaching the vast heights of New York’s, some of her skyscrapers were at least fourteen storeys. Her trolley cars, overhead electric lighting, illuminated signs, automobiles, department stores, as well as her plentiful restaurants, created that reassuring blend I had missed so desperately in Washington and found at its finest in New York. Relatively small, Memphis was still a real city. The carriage stopped outside the Adler Apartments on Linden Street. To one side of the entrance was a Western Union office, which I was glad to see. Here my bags were transferred to two porters while a white manager welcomed me and showed me to my suite on the second floor. Mr Baskin wore a dark gabardine suit. He carried a hat and overcoat, explaining he had an appointment to keep. He showed me the amenities, wished me a pleasant stay in Memphis and courteously told me he was at my service if I needed anything further. By noon a maid had put away my clothes and I was able to bathe, change and lock my blueprints safely in a drawer. I decided to have some lunch.