It S The Gypsy In Me The Autobiography Of Konrad Bercovici

92 B485 1065^1

BercoYlci

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00447 3534

DATE DUE

AUG 23 1977

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IT'S THE

GYPSY

IN ME

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY (OF

KONRAD BERCOVICI

IT'S THE

GYPSY

IN ME

%[ew York 1941
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.

Copyright, 1941, by
KONRAD BERCOVICI

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form, by mimeo-
graph or any other means, without permission
in writing from the author.

First Printing November 1941

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

NAOMI

AND

OUR CHILDREN

IT'S THE

GYPSY

IN ME

I

MY EARLIEST childhood memory is of a winter after-
noon when a caravan of Gypsies crossed the frozen
Danube River in front of the home of my parents. In the
howling snowstorm the long file of covered sleds inched slowly
forward over the ice. Gypsies in long sheepskin coats and
tall, black fur caps marched ahead of each sled, probing the ice
with long, iron-tipped sticks. The little brown horses snorted
and neighed while their breath froze in the air. When the
first sled pulled up on the shore, the Gypsy jumped into the
driver's seat, let out a loud yell, and gave the horses their
heads. One after another the covered sleds pulled up and
ranged themselves in the form of a square. When the last one
had crossed, the Gypsy men unrolled a huge tarpaulin canvas,
with which they roofed the square. While some of the women
were clearing the ground underneath, others were building
fires under huge copper kettles set on three-legged iron stools.

What impressed me strongly was the order and the efficiency
with which the work was done. There were a hundred pairs
of hands in that caravan, and each pair knew exactly what
to do without interfering with another's work.

When all was done, my father took them a demijohn of
brandy and poured some of it into each cupped hand until
he had emptied the large bottle of the last drop.

That same evening all the Gypsies men, women, and chil-
drentrooped into our enormous kitchen, which was warmed

1

2 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

by two red brick ovens, and sat down to the yearly dinner
father offered to the first tribe that crossed the frozen river.

The first words I learned to read were Rinaldo Rinaldini,
the tide of a novel mother was reading. Mother was always
reading the latest sensational novel and loved to read aloud
even when no one was listening. She would reread passages
a dozen times if she hadn't hit upon the right intonation the
first or the eleventh time. The rest of the family, willy nilly,
learned by heart the novels mother was reading by hearing
her recite them.

I had learned to read these words all by myself and didn't tell
anyone until I had learned the other letters of the alphabet and
was able to agglutinate them into words. Then one night as
my older brothers and my parents each sat down with a book
about the table, I, too, nonchalantly took a book from the
shelf along the wall and sat down to read under the same
kerosene lamp with the rest of the family,

Observing out of the corner of my eye that they were smiling
at my conceit, I didn't protest, but began to read aloud, "The
great Rinaldo rode his white horse that night* He had sworn
to avenge himself, and the hour had come."

"Whom do you think you are deceiving?'* father asked,
taking the book away from me.

"I am deceiving nobody," I said quietly. "I can read as well
as anyone in this house."

"Who taught you to read?"

"I taught myself."

"He has heard mother read the chapter aloud and has
memorized it," my older brother said.

Without another word I took his book, a geography, from
him and read aloud from it.

"You haven't read me aloud your book, have you?" I asked
with all the irony of mv four vears. mishmcr

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 3

Then they all began to laugh and to Hss me. Father
promised me a watch; mother, a new pair of woolen gloves;
one of my older brothers gave me his own penknife; and the
oldest one, six years my senior, gave me a small silver piece
after I had read a whole page from his book.

Overjoyed, mother called Mama Tinka, the Gypsy woman
who had nursed me at her breast, from the kitchen, and asked
me to read for her first from the novel, then from father's
book, and then from the books of my two brothers. Mama
Tinka wept for joy. Such an event had to be celebrated.
Father brought up from the cellar two bottles of the best wine,
one for us and one for the kitchen; mother offered special
sweets baked in honey; and I was allowed to drink wine un-
mixed with water. Then we sang, and mother played the
guitar and sang with us. Mother had a beautiful voice and
was very musical, but sang only on great occasions.

Our house was very spacious. It was built of stone and
brick, with one wall facing the river, and with a wood-burning
brick oven in every one of the fifteen rooms. During the
long winter two men, a Turk and a Russian, who had attached
themselves to our family after the Russo-Turkish War, were
busy carrying firewood and stoking the ovens. The Turk,
Mechmet, held the Russian in contempt because he was a
drunkard, and Fedia, the Russian, despised the Turk because
Moslems didn't drink.

Their quarrels furnished us with a share of the winters
amusement. Father often called them both into the living-
room to discuss with them the Russo-Turkish War, in which
they had fought opposite each other. When Mechmet had the
better of the argument, father would regale him with an ounce
of tobacco from his own pouch. When Fedia was declared the
winner, he was given a glass of plum brandy from the bottle
on the table.

The other servants of the house despised both the Russian
and the Turk, and made them eat at a separate table in the

4 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

kitchen. All the other servants had specific duties and re-
ceived monthly salaries. Mechmet and Fedia were hangers-on
and received only such money as father pressed in their hands
when he was in a good mood or remembered to give them
something. The other servants wore clothes they bought or
had made for them by their relatives; the Turk and the Russian
wore fathers cast-off clothes and boots except for the fez
of the Turk and the military cap of the Russian.

We were a lusty family. Father was a tall, broad-shoul-
dered man with a short-cropped black beard; he loved food and
wine, song and laughter, and the sight of other people eating,
drinking, laughing, and singing. He bred, raised, bought,
and sold cattle, and was proud of his horsemanship. His busi-
ness brought him in contact with Gypsies, and he, unlike
anyone else in our neighborhood, was happy to have them
about his place and to ask their chiefs in to eat with us and
their fiddlers to play for us.

Any Gypsy in Roumania who came into possession of a
really fine horse knew where he would find a ready buyer.

We were a polyglot family. Besides Roumanian, father
and mother spoke German, French, and Greek, and I can't
remember when I learned those languages. I always knew
them. We switched continually from one to the other.
Father didn't mind how much we mispronounced the other
languages, but the slightest mispronunciation of a Greek word
made him furious.

The town we lived in then, Galatz on the Danube, was
Roumanians principal port. All the exports and imports of
the country flowed through it, and because of this, people of
all nationalities lived in our vicinity. But the Greeks pre-
dominated. Fifty per cent of the business was in their hands.
The mayor of the city was a Greek. The chief of police and
the prefect were Greeks. Greeks owned the steamboats, the
flour mill, and the bank, and Greeks also set the price for the
corn and the wheat that they exported to other lands. Because

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 5

neither father nor mother ever went to the synagogue, they
had very few Jewish friends. Our relatives seldom came to
see us and never remained in the house long enough to par-
take of a meal, because our kitchen was not conducted in
accordance with Jewish ritual.

Out of respect for his people's beliefs, father wouldn't be
seen smoking outside of the house on Saturday, nor would he
transact any business on Jewish holidays, but he smoked in
his room and worked at his desk when the other Jews were
in the synagogue.

I don't know how he had come to abandon traditional Jewish
ritualism. He was no atheist; he was a pantheist. I re-
member his saying, "God is not something. God is every-
thing. Everything is part of God. All living things are
Godlike. Life is God."

The spring following that winter when I taught myself to
read, I was sent to a private school directed by a German.
Being far ahead of the other pupils in my class, I was bored
by them and the teacher. A month later I was lucky enough
to acquire the measles. By the time the disease had run its
course, the school closed for the yearly vacation, and Mama
Tinka, my Gypsy nurse, took me to her relatives to show me
off and to astound them with my learning.

We went from Gypsy camp to Gypsy camp, and I liked
the Gypsy children better than the pupils at the school. They
had seen the world and knew things. They could ride, swim,
help shoe a horse, put up a tent, weave baskets, blow bellows,
and play the violin, the reed flute, and the cymbalon. I
learned riding, basket weaving, and enough of Calo, their
language, to make myself understood and to understand them.

On tie way home, a month later, Mama Tinka entered into
a secret pact with me; I was to teach her to read, and she
would teach me Calo. As we walked homeward, stopping
here and there, Mama Tinka taught me to read the patrins,

6 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

road signs the Gypsies leave behind them for the information
of those who follow. The patrins were made of two twigs and
were left at crossroads. By their position the Gypsies informed
those who knew how to interpret them where they went and
what had happened to them on the way.

We were away a whole month. When I was tired, I rode
on Mama Tinka's shoulders, but never when we approached
a Gypsy camp. I must say here that Mama Tinka occupied
an unusual position in my parents' household. She had come
to us when mother's first child was born. Some years later she
married and had a child of her own. The child died soon after-
ward; it happened to be on the very day I was born. I took
the place of her child at her breast, and she remained with us
to raise me, to take care of me, and to be more of a mother to
me than was my own mother.

My parents wouldn't have permitted any of their other chil-
dren to go away with a Gypsy servant woman, but when
Mama Tinka asked that I be given to her for a month, neither
of my parents saw anything out of the ordinary in her request.
It was taken for granted by the whole family that I belonged
to her at least as much as to them.

Mother was never a definite person. She identified herself
with the heroine of every novel she read, and play-acted all
the time. Her voice changed with every novel, and so did
her manner, her dresses, and even her figure. She was an
extraordinarily beautiful woman and very conscious of her
beauty. We never saw her except at her best. When she
thought she didn't look well, she would stay in her room day
after day while she tried coiffure after coiffure and had dresses
made and remade to suit her new mood. Despite our isolation,
she had the furniture of the house changed completely at
least once a year and cried like a child when father refused
to allow her even more frequent and more costly transfonna-
"ions.

I remember how, after reading a novel in which tlie heroine's

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 7

husband had been arrested, unjustly of course, she threw her
arms about me and my brothers, pressed us to her bosom, and
cried out, "My poor innocent children/*

"What German trash are you reading now?" father asked,
looking up from his book.

"Trash!" mother said, rising. "Trash, eh? You heartless
man. I never should have married you never/* And she left
the room in her best Sarah Bernhardt manner.

When we returned home and I asked mother to buy me a
violin, she said angrily that I was already dark enough to look
like a Gypsy.

"With a violin under his chin no one will believe that he is
anything but a Gypsy. That's the last time he will ever go
away with Tinka."

Fathe^ however, was willing and asked a Gypsy fiddler,
Costa, to buy me a violin and to teach me how to play it.

Costa was a great fiddler, but he couldn't read music. I
learned how from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, a German
encyclopedia on father's shelves, and eventually taught Costa
how to read it, too. He was as eager to learn to read music as
I was to play the fiddle. We made a fine team and learned so
fast that even mother was pleased.

When school opened again, I said that I hated school and
refused to go. This caused mother great anguish.

"All right/' I said. "Ill go to school, but only because I
can't stand your being angry with me/' and I ran crying to
father.

"So you don't want to go to school?" father asked.

"No."

"Don't you want to learn things?"

"I do. But not in a school."

"Then how?"

"From you. Why can't you be my teacher?"

"I don't see why not!" father said, hugging me. "You'll

8 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

ride behind me in the saddle, and 111 teach you when I have
a mind to. Would you like that better than going to school?"

''But'* mother interposed.

"No coercion/* father said. "We haven't used a whip on
our horses in years; I wouldn't use one on a child."

"But who talks about a whip?" mother exclaimed.

"Any kind of coercion is a whip. It's all settled." Father
turned to me. "Go wash your face and come back. I'll take
you to Vadu Ungurului."

Vadu Ungurului was a village ten miles away on a lake, and
was inhabited by a wild tribe of Hungarians who had settled
a century before in the marshes.

I rode behind father. On the way he explained to me the
multiplication table up to ten. On the way back he made
me recite the multiplication table to him. That night., after
dinner, he taught me to add and to subtract and was very
happy when I grasped quickly what he taught me.

He took his teaching seriously. I had to rise earlier than
the rest of the household and do an hour's work before going
out with him. He had me sleep in his bed with him, so that
I wouldn't oversleep.

I can still feel the warmth of his big body as I pressed
myself against it and asked questions just to hear his voice in
reply. Whatever has happened, and whatever may still hap-
pen to me, the memory of those nights near my father -will al-
ways be what I cherish most.

Before going to bed I used to prepare the spirit lamp for
the early morning coffee for both of us. While he supervised
the morning chores, I did my lessons multiplication, division,
the Greek and German alphabets, and the spelling of the
names of the capitals of the world and of great rivers and great
mountains.

When he wasn't teaching or questioning me, he spoke to me
about life and people. He was at that time reading Jean
Jacques Rousseau and was greatly impressed by the great

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 9

Frenchman's writings. He was also reading a new book on
anthropology and was clarifying its contents to himself by
explaining them to me.

A month after our first lesson I became six years old. Father
gave me a horse so that I could ride beside him like a man and
not behind him like a child.

Often at noon we stopped and ate at some village inn.
Father kept a little notebook in which he wrote down the daily
transactions. "Bought from Stan Golean a horse 200 francs.
Horse to be delivered. Sold to Vasili Star a yoke of white
oxen four years old 300 francs. Payable one hundred now,
the rest to be taken in corn at 38 centimes a bushel after the
harvest."

He gave me a notebook in which I was also to enter the
transactions. "In case I lose mine/' lie explained, in order
to make me feel that I was doing useful work.

Every once in a while he would check my book against his
and was really angry with me when I had made an error.
Those were great days, the greatest of my entire life. I had
a hero, a father, a friend, a teacher, and a companion all in
one.

My brothers continued to go to school. Mother smiled at
the arrangement and said that father would get tired of playing
teacher soon enough. When she spoke like that, father and
I smiled and winked at each other. We knew we would
never get tired of each other.

After my seventh birthday he often asked my advice about
a horse before agreeing to buy it. When the horses were
shod, I supervised the work of the Gypsy blacksmith and said
what I had to say and more in Calo.

Father's business radius was so calculated that we never
had to be away from home at night. He wouldn't leave the
house until daylight and was back home before nightfall even
when the days were shortest. He had a theory about that.
The nights were long because when it was cold, all living

10 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

things needed more rest. During the winter the snowstorms
kept us indoors most of the time, but that didn't prevent us
from working and studying together.

Roumanian villages are very close to one another, and some
of them overlap and run together, yet each one has its own
character and very often its own costume and its own turn of
phrase. The people of one village would drink only prune
brandy, and those of the next one only com whiskey. In one
village the men would be naive, and the women shrewd; and
in the next the women would be angels, and the men inclined
to every form of banditry and debauchery. There were vil-
lages whose people could not be trusted at all, and other
villages in whose people father had absolute confidence, trust-
ing them with large sums upon their word.

My violin lessons were sacred hours. Father used to post-
pone our trips when Costa and I were closeted in his room.

Father now varied our languages. One day we spoke only
Roumanian; the next day, only German; the third day, Greek.

During the next school vacation he took my two brothers
along with us. Mother would rise earlier than was her habit
in order to see her four men ride out together. She was in a
heroic mood. She was reading James Fenimore Cooper's
Indian stories.

We went every day to a different village, ate at a different
inn, and spoke to different people, Roumanian peasants, Hun-
garians, Tartar, Turk, Greek, and German settlers, and had
different encounters and situations to meet every hour of the
day. But whenever we met with Gypsies at an inn or at a
camp outside a village, we talked to them and took shelter in
their tents when it rained.

The winters are very harsh in Roumania. There were
weeks in which my brothers couldn't go to school because of
the snowstorms. Those were great days for all of us. Father
was hungry when he was well. He loved caviar and ate it
with a soup spoon at any hour of the day or night. I have

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME n

often seen Mm reading a book, smoking a cigarette, and eating
caviar at the same time, and suddenly bursting out in loud
laughter over something he had read or that had occurred
to him.

Then a terrible thing happened, a series of pogroms in the
villages and towns of the whole country. Jews were beaten
and murdered in the streets and in their homes. Gangs of
hoodlums broke into shops and stores in broad daylight, pil-
laged them, and then set fire to the buildings, while the gen-
darmes looked on or turned their heads away. When a
murderer was arrested, the courts freed him, and the people
made a hero out of him.

At first our own servants were ashamed of what their people
did, but after a while they became insolent and behaved as if
everything belonged to them. When a maid was dismissed by
mother for insolence, instead of apologizing, she threatened
vengeance. Only Mama Tinka, Mechmet, and Fedia re-
mained faithful. When most of our servants had left us,
Tinka went to a Gypsy camp and came back with a dozen
men to work in the barns and the stables. Enraged, the
servants who had left us returned to beat up the Gypsies.

"But," I argued with father when the peasants of Vadu
Ungurului had fired our granary there, "you told me that all
men are essentially good."

"Yes . . . that's how they are when they are good," he
reflected.

On a spring day father went out all alone to see a lawyer
on some business. At noon they brought him home on a litter,
unconscious, his face and head a swollen mass of bleeding
bruises, his clothes in rags and covered with blood. He had
tried to halt a band of ruffians from pillaging a shop in the
center of the town.

I had a feeling that the ground had melted under my feel
and that the skies had crashed about my head. Had he been

12 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

shot dead, I shouldn't have been hurt half as much, but that
he should have been beaten, beaten as horses, dogs, and oxen
were beaten by peasants, was an unbearable humiliation.

My older brother left to call the doctor. With the doctor
came the chief of police and several policemen to search the
house for firearms.

I shall never forget the months of tiptoeing about the rooms
while father's life hung in the balance. The doctor had
shaved off his beard and the hair on his head. He had lost
almost all his front teeth in the fight. His lips were split. His
eyes were hollow.

When he felt a little better, he called his sons to his bedside
and made us swear that we would avenge him.

Mother sent me to school with my brothers, accompanied
by a ferocious dog and two Gypsies armed with cudgels.
Every day, when we came home, after looking into father's
room, my brothers devoted several hours to physical exercises
to become strong and to avenge him. I wept.

Then one day my oldest brother, Max, got hold of father's
revolver and set up a target at the farther end of the court-
yard. Mother, hearing the shots, came running to take the
revolver away and to drag us weeping and arguing to father's
room.

"You are making murderers out of them,'* she cried. "Look
what I found in their hands."

"Leave me alone with them," father ordered. He stroked
our hands and said, "I am feeling much better. Soon, soon
I'll be walking about. I'll attend to the rest myself."

He never recovered fully from that beating. When he left
his sick bed, he had lost his gaiety, his laughter, and his
business acumen. Mother sold her jewels to pay the more
pressing debts. Then we lost our house and moved to a
smaller one. As a result of further business reverses, we left
Galatz and moved to Braila, a town thirty miles away. Mama
Tinka, Mechmet, and Fedia came with us. Then Fedia died

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 13

suddenly, and Mechmet was so downhearted that lie lingered
for a while, and then he, too, died,

My oldest brother entered college. The second and I
entered high school.

We were on our way up the social scale again and were
beginning to cut a figure in local society because of our culture
and versatility when father had to take to bed again. For
the next two years of his life he was in pain day and night.

I was not yet twelve when he died.

I ran away from home, went to Galatz on foot, and there
joined a band of Gypsy musicians. I played at a peasant wed-
ding in a village. During the festivities two peasants, brothers,
quarreled over some land. When their wives tried to pacify
them, one of the brothers struck the other brother's wif e on the
mouth and called her a name. The next moment he was
stabbed to death by a dozen knife thrusts from the hand of
his brother. At the sight of her dea$ husband, the wife tore
the knife out of the hand of the killer, killed hiit, and stabbed
his wife before anybody was able to interfere. ^11 this took
less time than it takes to tell it. \ '

I ran out of the inn with the other Susies aad ran and^rap.
When I wanted to stop, the Gypsies drag^efl pie, along. J ?

"Run, dantchiuh When the gendarmes |;4jt t&ere,
ants will put the blame on us."

We separated. I threw my violin into a cornfield and
as fast as I could. Just before daylight I jumped on the back
of a hay wagon, going to Braila and was home when the post-
man handed mother my first letter to her.

The newspapers carried headlines about some wandering
Gypsy musicians who had killed a whole family of honest Rou-
manian peasants and wounded a dozen men and women in a
quarrel about money. The gendarmes and the people started
a Gypsy hunt. God alone knows k>w many innocent Gypsies
wfcre tortured in the basements of the gendarmeries and

14 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

how many were killed with pitchforks on the roads after
that. Shortly after the Gypsy hunt, the pogroms against the
Jews, which had been smoldering for a while, flamed up
again.

Whenever the government had to divert the minds of the
people from their misery caused by bad harvests and high
taxes, it instigated a pogrom against the Jews. During years
of comparative prosperity there were no pogroms in Roumania.
What happened in Roumania followed a pattern of what had
happened, was, and is happening in other lands. The
pogroms in Russia, Poland, and Hungary were the safety valves
of the stupid and criminal governments in those countries.
The German pogroms could not have been instigated in years
of prosperity.

Years later, Alfonso, the ex-King of Spain, said to newspaper-
men, "It is not true that I am hated by my people. Unfortu-
nately for me there were no Jews in Spain. Had they been
there in any considerable number, my government would have
known how to use them as scapegoats. What forced me out of
Spain was the expulsion of the Jews by the Inquisition hun-
dreds of years ago/*

I peddled Alfonso's words to every American newspaper and
magazine, but nobody would print them with my explanation.

My older brothers began to dream of Palestine as a home-
land. I had no such desire. I had discovered books on social-
ism and co-operatives on father's library shelves and was read-
ing them wildly. Going to Palestine was a temporary escape
but no solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. I was no
Jew; I was a human being. Father had called for vengeance
when he was in horrible pain, but during our long rides to-
gether, he had spoken to me of the oneness of all human beings.
I was ashamed of the behavior of the gangsters who destroyed
what they could not create, life, but I also pitied them, their
ignorance, and their stupidity.

"They ought to be made to understand to what horrible uses

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 15

they are put, and then no government would be able to insti-
gate pogroms/' I said.

"And how will you do that?" my brothers asked.
"That's what I am trying to find out, how to do just that."
In due time my oldest brother sailed for Palestine, promising
to send for the family as soon as he had established himself
there. He didn't. The Arabs, too, made pogroms against the
Jews when the locusts had eaten their grain. My brother's
right leg was broken during one of these pogroms. When he
got well, he sailed for Australia. His four sons are in the Eng-
lish navy now. The oldest is one of the youngest of the high-
ranking officers.

I was fifteen years old when I became a member of the first
workingman's club in Braila. The club had the only library
in town. The majority of the books were on socialism, but the
leader of the club, a local lawyer, had a large collection of
books on other subjects in French, German, and Greek. He
lent me whatever books I wanted to read.

I got a job as an apprentice engineer with a firm dealing in
agricultural machinery and won great favor with my employ-
ers. Though only fifteen, I was big for my age and a year later
I was being paid the wages of a full-grown man. I bought my-
self a good violin and took lessons from a really good teacher,
the leader of the best band in Roumania. Between my second
brother and myself, we were able to keep the family tolerably
well fed and clothed. When the pogroms flared up again, I
stood up in the middle of the street and denounced the insti-
gators and told whoever would listen why such barbarism was
unleashed. My employers asked me to stop speaking at the
street corners and from the tables outside cafes. I stopped
talking on street corners, but with a member of the working-
man's club, a printer and a gentile, I wrote, set up, and printed
protest leaflets at night and plastered them over the walls of
the entire city.

16 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

Caught redhanded by a detective and brought to the police
station, I said to the chief, "If you want to beat me, you had
better kill me, for if you don't kill me . . /'

He looked me in the eye for a moment and then said, "I only
wanted to tell you that it is against the law to paste paper on
the walls. Now go home and be a good boy. I knew your
father. He was a fine man."

In the morning my employer called me into the office, paid
me a full month's wages, shook both my hands, and said, "I
have to let you go. ?>

I had three hundred francs (sixty dollars in gold). The
month before, an old debtor of father's had come andpaid his
debt to mother. My older brother and I talked the matter
over between us that evening.

"We must leave Roumania," my brother said.

I knew my brother was deeply in love with the daughter of
one of our wealthy relatives. I, too, was in love with a girl
five years older than myself and had written her many love
letters and poems in all the languages I knew.

"Where can we go?"

The police decided that for us. We were declared danger-
ous to the security of the country, and our family was given a
week to leave.

The whole family boarded a freighter sailing for Antwerp.
In a month we were in Brussels. Six weeks later we arrived
in Paris with only the clothes on our backs. In reply to my
first letter to my lady love, I received an invitation to her wed-
ding with a postscript in her handwriting, "Wish me luck, my
love."

II

TJ^ATHER'S DEATH and our exile had somewhat taken
JL mother out of the clouds. Although we had almost no
luggage when we arrived in Paris, mother had managed to save
half a dozen old paper-bound novels and was rereading them
in a new light now. She pretended, or perhaps it was true,
that she reread them to recall instances when she had read cer-
tain passages to father and what he had said about them. She
had built up father as another book hero and was inventing
stories about him. She told one of these stories while we were
sitting in the waiting room of the Gare St. Lazare, waiting for
the rain to stop so that we could go in search of our first night's
shelter in Paris.

"He went directly to the Sultan in Constantinople/' she said,
"and told him: 'Your vizier is betraying you.*
. ** If you can't prove that, I shall have you boiled in oil/

'"Call the vizier/"

"But, mother, that was in one of Lemaitre's novels/'

"Ah, yes. Still that's what he would have done."

I should like to say that I was the best of sons to my mother
in Paris, but it wouldn't be true.

After we had been in Paris a few months, my brother in
Australia began to send mother a monthly sum which was
almost enough to keep the family provided for. But mother
had never been an economical or careful housekeeper. While

17

18 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

father was alive, her uneconomical ways of keeping house had
not mattered, but they mattered considerably after he was
gone. If anything, she had become more wasteful. In Paris
she seldom cooked, but bought ready-cooked vegetables and
meats at the grocery store and only warmed them up to serve
them for dinner. She had a book in one of her hands even
when she stood over the kitchen stove.

When I talked to her about her neglect of the younger chil-
dren, she looked at me vacantly and said she didn't see what
right I had to complain. When she received the monthly sum
from my brother, she spent half of the money on silks and other
materials with the intention of making them into dresses for
herself and forgot all about them after she had cut them up
into some fantastic pattern.

When I remonstrated with her for buying materials for
dresses which she never made, she cried and said there was no
one for whom she should dress beautifully.

"Then why do you buy the stuff instead of buying clothes
for the children?"

"Because when I have the money, I forget that your father
is dead/*

We had come to a Paris seething with the turmoil of the
Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army
accused of treason, had been sentenced by a military court to
spend the rest of his natural life at Devil's Island, the worst
penal colony in the world. Because he was a Jew, the royalist
papers howled that all Jews were traitors and demanded their
expulsion from the army.

Dreyfus's wife and brother, convinced that the captain was
innocent, eventually discovered proof of his innocence and
presented the documents to the military court which had sen-
tenced him. When that court refused to re-examine the case,
the family engaged the attention of several famous writers,
lawyers, and statesmen, fimile Zola, Labori, and Clemenceau

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 19

among them, and the "affaire" was aired in public and in the
press of the whole world.

France became divided into Dreyfusists and anti-Dreyfusists,
and there were daily fights in the streets, cafes, colleges, courts,
homes, and meeting places. The Dreyfusists demanded a re-
vision of the trial and the consideration of the new evidence.
The antis retorted that because the highest military court had
once decided that Dreyfus was guilty, a revision of the trial
would be a confession of its fallibility.

I quite naturally joined the pro-Dreyfus elements and went
to all the meetings, pro and con, listened to the impassioned
speeches, heckled, applauded, argued, and wielded a stout cane
with the best of them.

I had joined the Universite Populaire in the Faubourg St.
Antoine to hear lectures on literature, economics, philosophy,
and science delivered by Anatole France, Jean Jaures, Bergson,
and Prince Peter KropotMn, the famous philosopher, com-
munist, and anarchist. At the close of every lecture, the audi-
ence discussed the Dreyfus case and ended up by fighting.

I had also joined the music class of Charpentier, the com-
poser of the famous opera, Louise. There, too, discussions
about music ended in fist fights. Women pupils fought
among themselves and with the men, and gave and took many
a blow defending their opinions.

In the end, after many ministerial cabinets had been over-
thrown, after many courts-martial and suicides, the Dreyfus
case was reopened, and the military court, after examining the
new evidence, ordered the captain brought back from Devil's
Island and absolved him of the guilt of treason.

But that didn't quiet the royalist pack; on the contrary, the
street fighting continued.

At the Universite Populaire I met intellectuals, writers, and
artists of all political and artistic shades. Jean Lorrain, one of
the most gifted French novelists, a writer who surpassed de
Maupassant in daring and brilliance, took a fancy to me and

20 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

introduced me to his friends, the poet Jehan Rictus and the
musician Anton Guth. Lorrain, a big powerful man, was
feared by all the writers and artists as much for his vitriolic
pen as for his physical violence. He wrote three times a week
in Le Journal and was one of the best swordsmen a deadly
combination. But he was always gentle with me, corrected
my French, and dined with me in the most modest restaurants
in the Faubourg because I insisted upon paying my share.

Jean Lorrain had rather an unsavory reputation in Paris, a
reputation he had helped to create in order to attract attention
to himself. Having created the reputation, he had to main-
tain it and did so by saying and writing the most shocking
things about himself and others. To accentuate his eccen-
tricity, he hennaed his hair, rouged a little, painted his nails,
wore bracelets on his wrists and innumerable rings on his
fingers, and often paraded in Turkish costumes. Because of
a painful malady he had to take opiates, yet he spoke of him-
self as a morphinomaniac and informed everyone of his vice.

The truth of the matter was that he had fewer vices than
most other Parisians of his class and was a prodigious worker.
He also gave fantastic epicurean banquets at which he himself
drank only milk and ate a few pieces of toast. Because of an
unhappy love affair with Judith Gautier, the daughter of Th6o-
phile Gautier, the great writer, Lorrain posed as a cynic and as
a woman hater. In their Journals the de Goncourt brothers,
Lorrain's friends, tell something about the real Lorrain who had
unburdened himself to them.

I earned my living first as a laborer in a furniture factory;
then by painting the steel frame of the Eiffel Tower; and when
that was done, as a traveling salesman for a clockmaker, and
by die time the World Exposition of 1900 was opened, as a
builder's helper. I never worked steadily at anything. I con-
tributed my share to the upkeep of our home > but as soon as I
had saved up a little money, I quit work and devoted my time
to study, to writing, to the lecture rooms of the free universities,

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 21

and above all to music. Anton Guth was my teacher. He was
a fine musician, but not much of a teacher and a very erratic
sort of man.

On the floor below his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli lived
a young pianist ( who lias since become famous ) . He was furi-
ous wlien he saw me talk to lier one day and accused her and
me of all sorts of "Schweinerei."

"But you haven't even met her!" I thundered. "How can
you talk like that about her?"

"So! You are in love with her!" he grinned. "Go to her.
Let her teach you."

I banged the door and left. He ran after me, caught me on
the landing below, and begged me to come back.

While we were arguing, the door opened and the young lady
herself appeared to ask what caused the commotion.

"You," the furious man shrieked.
I?

"Yes. You. You!" Looking at her, he calmed down.
After he had smiled and apologized, she asked us in.

"He has no time for women/' Guth explained. "He works
as a laborer to earn his bread, spends hours on a hundred things
that have nothing to do with music, and wants to be a mu-
sician."

I blushed to the roots of my hair, and iny temper was about
to get the best of me when the young lady said sarcastically, as
she opened the door, "Which reminds me that I have no time
for men."

He rose to go, and I followed him, but she pressed me back
into a chair and said: "You stay here. You are only a boy."

Henriette was beautiful, very talented, and knew many peo-
ple to whom she introduced me. Jehan Rictus, the king of the
Parisian argot poets, was one of her admirers and second
cousins. Rictus, whose work has been made famous the world
over by Yvette Guilbert, the diseuse, used to recite his poetry
in the night clubs of Montmartre, at the Chat Noir, the Con-

22 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

servatoire, and the Cabaret des Arts. Henriette often "im-
provised" piano backgrounds for his recitations, improvisations
that were worked out days and weeks in advance. I often
spent hours with her reciting one of Rictus's poems while she
worked out the musical background.

Rictus's poetry was of the extreme left, poetry of protest and
revolt in the language of the people. Tall, angular, pale, black-
bearded, always in black and with a tall silk hat on his small
head, he would stand on a platform and recite the most inflam-
ing verses in an absolutely colorless voice. Henriette thought
it a great joke to have me recite his verses to Rictus in my im-
passioned manner. Rictus used to laugh.

"He wants to set them on fire. I only want them to feel
warm."

To Guth, Rictus and Henriette were anathema; to me, they
were salve and balm, and I was in love with the girl.

I rented a room to be by myself and to use all my free time
as I wanted. My mother's apartment was too crowded. Its
inhabitants had been augmented by two of her relatives, a niece
and a nephew, from Bulgaria, who had come to see the Expo-
sition and had remained to become permanent residents.
They were nice enough youngsters, but exasperatingly noisy
and provincial. After I had taken the girl to the Louvre, she
left me in the hall of statuary and ran home to complain to
mother that I had taken her to an indecent place filled with
naked men and women in stone.

I had another reason for leaving home. One of mother's
old beaux, who had offered her marriage before she had mar-
ried father, had suddenly shown up in Paris. He was still a
bachelor, was wealthy, and was now more than ever in love
with mother.

I disliked the man intensely, and was angry that mother
hadn't shut the door in his face when he appeared. The
thought that mother might possibly marry him was intolerable.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 23

Because mother had not said "No" definitely, lie began to act
as if he already had gained authority over her children and
criticized my conduct, my not working regularly, staying away
from dinner, and coming home late at night.

"You may become mother's husband, but never my father/'
I told him. And that was that.

Poor mother, how I misunderstood her! She had no thought
of marrying him, of all people, but after twenty years of a man's
love, she was love hungry, hungry for some one to look with
loving eyes at her, to listen to her tales, to admire her voice.
She was incurably romantic. Here was a man who had re-
mained for twenty years a bachelor after she had married
another man, and he was begging her to marry him now. She
had no thought of marrying him, but how could she resist
wanting to listen to his entreaties?

The atmosphere of my home became even more insupport-
able when my younger sister, a great favorite with me, fell in
love with a young Roumanian do-nothing with musical pre-
tentious.

My older brother, mother's favorite, hewed the line. He
was never late for dinner, worked regularly, brought all his
earnings home, helped with the younger children, was polite to
our guests, and spent his evenings reading and writing letters
to his inamorata, letters which he kept in the drawer of his
table instead of sending them away. He had his friends, of
course, Russian students mostly, but he seldom spent a late
evening with them.

When I said that I wanted to live outside our home, he didn't
get angry. He looked at me and asked, "Have you no consid-
eration for mother's feelings?"

"I will continue to give her what I can," I expostulated.

"I was talking about her feelings and not about your money,"
he said.

He was a much better son to my mother than I was and much
more considerate.

24 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

I was in a turmoil of living. Being was not enough. I
wanted to learn things, but had no patience to follow a normal
course of study.

I like to suppose that the erratic manner with which I was
allowed to begin my schooling had something to do with that.
I took the bull by the horns in everything. I knew six lan-
guages well, but the theoretical grammar of none. I had
taught myself to read music and was now studying Berlioz's
great book on orchestration before I had mastered harmony
and counterpoint.

Once in a room by myself, I plunged, literally plunged, into
a sea of work. There were weeks in which I didn't leave the
room at all. A pot of boiling lentils on the little cooking stove
and a bottle of wine on the table satisfied my wants. When
the money was gone, I went out to earn some, as a laborer in
a bakery one week, as a carpenter's helper the next. A week's
wages kept me in lentils and wine for a month. I had become
a strict vegetarian and had no desire for meat. My strength
was herculean in those days. I even earned money wrestling
at the fairs around Paris.

Jean Lorrain came to see me occasionally in my room. He
wanted me to go out with him, wanted to introduce me to peo-
ple he knew who would facilitate my existence, but I refused.
I didn't feel that I needed help; I had no hunger and no wants,
and I didn't want other people to interfere with my way of
living. I knew enough people as it was. Still, one night I
couldn't resist temptation and went out with Lorrain to the
Left Bank.

For a short time cafe life became a vice with me. I plunged
into that as enthusiastically as into study. After a few months
in the Latin Quarter I was suddenly filled with a disgust for
myself and all my companions. The women were putrid.
The men were worse. They called themselves students, but
what they studied was . . .

They wore student's garb, long hair, heavy canes, wrote
poetry k la Baudelaire, a la Mallarm& & la Villon and h la

IT'S THE GYPSY IX ME 25

Victor Hugo, and tried to surpass each other in degeneracy and
villainy. Homosexuality and nihilism were in style. The
prostitute, Casque d'Or, was the ideal woman; a criminal
apache was their hero.

My affair with the young pianist got stalled when she re-
turned to Alsace, her home. It had never been a love affair.
We liked each other and enjoyed bantering away for an hour
or so. It was pleasant to sit pressed close together on a rainy
day and look out of the window over the fantastic roofs of Paris
and talk about love and the future.

There were other girls, Gabrielle, Suzanne, Sonia, but they
meant little and not for long. I suppose I mystified them
somewhat. I was neither workingman nor artist, a hybrid.
And I was not patient in my courtships. Girls were only an
interlude between work, study, practice, the composition of
too ambitious symphonies, too impassioned long poems, philo-
sophical essays, tremendous financial projects which were never
wanted, and grandiose dreams.

Then came Naomi, the sister of a friend. She arrived in
Paris on a sixth of July morning, and I met her the same day.
She was the first really serious young woman I had met. She
had seriously studied economics, read considerably in several
languages, had definite opinions on philosophy and art, and
knew how to express herself clearly and vividly. She was my
own age, but much more mature. And she was formidable.
Small and thin, she towered over me when she spoke.

On the eighth of July she, her brother, and I went to see my
mother, who was ailing. Mother looked at her and at me and
smiled so that we both blushed. On the fourteenth of July,
when all of Paris danced in the streets celebrating the fall of
the Bastille, we danced together, first here, then there, and still
elsewhere, and I took advantage of the traditional privilege
of that day to kiss her.

When we sat down in front of a cafe for a glass of beer, she
asked, "Did you kiss me because it is Bastille day?'*

"No."

26 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"I have come to Paris to study," she said. "Kissing is out/'

We went to look for her brother, whom we had left dancing
with a girl he had just met, but we couldn't find him. I took
her home, walking silently beside her. I knew then that I had
met the woman, but she had said kissing was out, and she was
no Gabrielle, Suzanne, or Sonia.

At the door of her room she turned suddenly and kissed me.

"Bastille?" I asked.

But she was gone.

Instead of going to my room, I went to my mother's apart-
ment. It was almost daylight, yet mother was not sleeping,
but was waiting for my sister to come home from the night's
celebration. She wasn't surprised to see me come. She asked
for a cigarette, sat up in her bed, and asked me to make her a
cup of tea.

'Well," she asked, "is it still a secret?"

The old romanticist! She was sick unto death, but wanted
to hear a romantic story. We had never been so close as that
night when I told her how we had danced, what Naomi had
said, and what I had answered. She didn't let me slur over
any detail, but wanted me to prolong the tale.

"And where did you go from that dance? What music was
played? Who else was there? Don't hurry. Tell me every-
thing."

When she had extracted the last drop of my tale, she sent me
to sleep.

**Put out the light. Your sister is coming. I don't want to
be disturbed. Good night."

I moved back home. The cousins were gone. The old
beau, despairing of ever receiving "Yes" for an answer, had
returned to his business in Roumania, My sister was getting
married. My oldest brother in Australia had begun to skip his
monthly remittances. He, too, was planning marriage.

Naomi's brother was a friend, but didn't favor me as a hus-
band for his sister. She was the pride of the family. I was

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 27

too young, too wild, and too unreliable. Naomfs brother, a
socialist, didn't like my political ideas. He called me an un-
disciplined idealist, an anarchist, and had no use for my cul-
tural strivings and still less for my musical ambitions.

"Music/" he said, "is an anodine."

He liked stirring marches and workingman's songs, but or-
chestral music he said was humbug.

"What good is music without words?"

Their family had been exiled from Roumania because they
were all influential socialists. He, like the rest of the family,
thought my courtship of his sister a piece of cheek. When I
wrote to her, he intercepted my letters. When I came to see
her, he told me she wasn't in or that she was too busy to see me.
He disliked my friendship with Lorrain and with Guth. They
were only bourgeois and not of the best.

In despair, I took a job as traveling salesman and left Paris,
but wherever I happened to be, I wrote every night two letters,
one to Naomi and one to mother, and gave my next address.
Mother alone answered my letters.

Six months later, when I had given up all hope of ever re-
ceiving an answer to one of my nightly letters, there were two
letters for me at the post office of Avignon. One was from her.
I took the next train to Paris. She was alone. The rest of the
family had gone to America. We went to see my mother.

"Marry him," mother said, kissing her.

"I will. But he must make something of himself," she said.
"He wants to do too many things."

"He wants you more than he wants anything," mother said
in her most romantic accents.

She died shortly afterwards.

On the money I had saved as a traveling salesman, Naomi
and I took a walking trip to the South of France. We carried
little baggage, all of it stuffed in a rucksack on my shoulders,
stopped when and where we liked, lunched in any one of the

28 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

innumerable village inns along the road, spent one night here,
another one elsewhere, following no itinerary or plan, talking,
talking all the time.

We were two strangers in love with each other and trying
to get acquainted. Our discussions ranged from vegetarian-
ism to art, from poetry to economics. I, too, was exasperated
by the economic inequalities that existed, but unlike her, I had
not accepted socialism as a cure for all evils. I did not see eye
to eye with her on many other subjects. She was imbued with
the materialistic conception of history; I was not. Although
exiled from Roumania, she glamorized the Roumanian peas-
ant whom she had known only through the literature of the so-
cialist writers who had frequented her parents* home. I had
had contact with the peasants and knew them as they were,
barbarous and sentimental. They sang beautiful songs and
told marvelous tales, but they were quick to reach for the knife
in their belts when they quarreled or when a wealthy traveler
could be waylaid.

In the midst of a heated discussion, however, one of us would
always stop the other with a kiss or attract the other's atten-
tion to a partridge flying out of the grain field or to a curious
formation of clouds. Each of us was afraid to antagonize the
other too much.

By the time we were on our way back to Paris, hard, brown,
we knew each other and had influenced and moderated one an-
other's views.

We rented a small apartment on the Rue Biscornet within
sight of the Bastille monument, and I obtained employment
with a picture dealer. The job paid quite well and gave me
considerable leisure. And now Naomi began to put some order
into my cultural, musical, philosophical, and literary baggage.
We went to the lectures of the University Populaire together
and discussed them on our way home.

Because her education had been more disciplined than mine,
she criticized mercilessly whatever I wrote. She knew little

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 29

about music, but her taste was a good guide. We had acquired
many friends, but she didn't permit me to waste too much time
with them. She disciplined me to regular hours of work. I
was in the habit of working away the whole night, three and
four nights in succession, and then relaxing for a week or so.
She made me work two or three hours every night after dinner
except on Saturdays and Sundays, when we received friends
or went out, and proved to me that I did better work with less
fatigue that way. I jumped the traces again and again. In-
stead of being angry with me for doing so, she jumped them
with me. During such periods we were a familiar sight at
brasseries and cafes in Paris and on the outskirts of the city.
She could drink me under the table and never interfered when
I got into a scrape with some other reveller. She enjoyed see-
ing me in a fight. One night at a cafe I left her alone for a few
minutes. When I came back, she pointed her finger at a man
who had insulted her and said, "Beat him up."

I went up to the man and smashed him in the face, although
he was quite a big man. During the fight that followed, a
fight across overturned chairs and tables, Naomi never left her
seat.

When the fight was over and the other man was hustled out
by the waiters, Naomi said, "Sit down. Have another glass of
beer. You look thirsty."

From the Rue Biscornet we moved to a house on the Quai
Voltaire, on the Seine, to be near a friend of hers. It was there
that our first son was born on the second anniversary of our first
kiss.

After the birth of our first son, Hyperion, I began to look
at Paris, at France, not as a place in which I lived, but as a
place in which my children would live. And the prospect
frightened me. The end of the nineteenth century was not a
reassuring picture to contemplate in France, especially in Paris.
The unrest of the working classes was met by the new indus-
trial bourgeoisie with a stupid arrogance which increased the

30 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

unrest. The old nobility hated the industrial bourgeoisie so
deeply that it incited the working class against it.

I was not fooled when I noticed Count So-and-So and Baron
This-and-That at the meetings of socialists and anarchists.
They were ready to do anything to associate themselves tem-
porarily with any group that would help them destroy the Third
Republic of France. The air of France was stifling. The Ger-
mans took advantage of this state of affairs and filled Paris with
"tourists" who spoke French well and literary men who came
ostensibly to lecture on Wagner and Goethe, both of them
in sudden vogue in Paris, but who actually preached anarchy,
revolution, and rebellion against conscription.

It was this propaganda, hammered at by the French socialist
press, that ultimately compelled the government to reduce the
period of military service from three to two years and weak-
ened the army that was eventually to oppose the army of Ger-
many.

Hitler was not the inventor of the German tourism. The
Kaiser had practiced it long before him. I was an antimili-
tarist and antiwar man by conviction, yet when I heard a Ger-
man lecturer preach antimilitarism in Paris, I asked why he
didn't preach the same thing in Germany. The audience of
French socialists howled me down.

"Don't worry about France. Leave that to Frenchmen.
Let the Germans come if they want to come. We won't stop
them. They'll lay down their arms and sing the Internationale
with us."

"Of course, of course," the lecturer said, and they all ap-
plauded and sang the Internationale forthwith.

The German militarists used the socialist Internationale to
undermine and soften France for their onslaught I saw that
clearly forty years ago.

Another lecturer gave a course in sabotage, in scientific sabo-
tage, and told the workingmen that this new weapon would

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 31

free them from the slavery of capitalism. I held no brief for
capitalism, but I had a horror of willful destruction of machin-
ery, and when employed factory workers willfully injured
themselves to collect compensation for a week or a month or
a year, I was filled with, disgust and refused to have anything
to do with those who had committed "macadam."

My socialist friends laughed at my attitude. They didn't
see what I saw. They thought my sensibility amateurish and
my suspicions of the "tourists" unjustified. In a few short years
the street songs changed from vigorous and piquant to flabby
and canaille. The whole business of the street song had passed
into the hands of "Les Camelots du Roi," an organization of
royalists and Catholics friendly to Germany. German propa-
ganda used the royalists as skillfully as they used the socialists.
To the royalists they promised the return of the Due d'Orleans;
to the socialists, a socialist state.

When I met Jean Lorrain again, on one of his trips from Nice
where he now lived, and told him what I saw and felt, he said,
"Mon vieux, La France est pourrie. (Old friend, France is
rotten. ) If I were not about to take another voyage, a voyage
for which there is no return ticket, I should go to America.
Why don't you go there? Go there and stay away from in-
tellectuals. Work with your hands at some trade. Then some
day you'll do something with what is in your head, if it stays
there long enough/'

I took his advice seriously. Selling cheap paintings to fools
was a disgusting business. I thought of myself, but also of my
present and future progeny for whom I desired a cleaner and
healthier atmosphere than the one then prevailing in France,
in Europe.

Naomi wouldn't hear of leaving France at first. She loved
Paris. She had been brought up there and had only gone to
live with her parents in Roumania when she was comparatively
grown up. She didn't agree with me about the dark future of

32 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

France. She saw socialism on the inarch, not by the road of
sabotage and macadam, but by the yearly increasing vote ob-
tained by the socialist candidates for political offices.

"You are only just beginning to take root here," she argued.

"I don't want to take root"

"I won't go to America."

"I won't stay here."

We had many word battles day after day and night after
night. We were very much in love with each other, but were
both hardheaded and stubborn. In the end I resigned my job,
bought two third-class steamship tickets for New York and gave
her no choice in the matter. She cried, stormed, and threat-
ened, but left with me when the hour came to take the boat
train to London, and took the boat with me and the child to
America.

Ill

rr"i HE OLD TUB took eighteen days to cross the ocean. In-
JL stead of three hundred passengers, there were fifteen hun-
dred on the boat. We were packed like sardines. The food
was miserable. The immigrants were mostly from Russia and
knew little of sanitation or privacy. And they were all seasick.
For eighteen days Noaini huddled close to me and studied
English with me from a French-English dictionary.

After a night spent on Ellis Island in a huge wire cage, we
were ordered to fall in line behind hundreds of immigrants who
had come over on the same boat with us. At the farther end
of the line was a heavy door, which opened like a maw to let in
the one nearest to it; then stayed closed and guarded by two
men in uniform until it opened, as if by magic, to swallow the
next human being. I thought of Flaubert's description of
Moloch at Carthage.

Two hours later we were swallowed by that maw and stood
before five men who sat on a dais, listening to an immigration
inspector who looked into a notebook and told them why he
had detained us for further examination.

I knew enough English to understand what he was saying.
His report was biased. He had examined my wife and me
briefly on the boat just before we had been taken to Ellis Island,
but he now talked as if he knew me inside out.

After the inspector had made his report, the oldest of the
commission, a gray-haired, blue-eyed man, looked me steadily

34 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

in the ey for a few moments, told my wife, who held the baby
in her arms, to sit down, and then asked me at the top of his
voice in German, "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"Why did you come to America?"

"Because I thought I'd like it better here than in Europe
. , . but if this is a sample of American hospitality . . "

"No, it isn't," the white-haired gentleman interrupted an-
grily.

"I am glad to hear that," I said, and wanted to say more, but
die white-haired man turned to speak to the other gentlemen
beside him.

During the whispered conversation of the five gentlemen,
the immigration inspector left the room by another door and
soon returned with my wife's father, who had been informed
the day before that we had been detained at Ellis Island for a
hearing before the commission.

My reception was not an auspicious one. I had come to free-
dom and die first door that had opened to me was the door of
a jail. The first American I saw upon our arrival was a man
with a club. I had come as a free man to the free United
States, but I was made the ward of my old father-in-law before
I was allowed to set foot on its shores.

Before we set foot in New York, I wished that we were back
on the boat, on the return voyage to London and Paris.

At the apartment of my wife's parents on the East Side some
of their relatives were waiting to greet us.

They showed quite plainly their disapproval of the long-
haired musician who had married into the family. When they
had gone, my father-in-law, who had known my parents, said,
embracing me, "I was afraid that you would fly off the handle.
They have been here so long they feel superior to any green-
horn."

"They can't possibly like him less than he likes them/* mv
wife interpreted for me.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 35

The following day one of the younger set of relatives, upon
hearing that I would accept any kind of work, informed me that
there was a job open in an artificial flower factory on Bleeker
Street run by one of his friends. Hard work. Five dollars a
week. Ten hours a day. Six days a week He looked at me
in an infuriating manner while he spoke. I wrote down the
name and address of the firm and sat down on the floor to play
with the baby without paying further attention to him or to the
other visitors.

"But why don't you want to continue with your musical pro-
fession?" he asked. "A musician is nothing to be ashamed of
in America!"

The factory consisted of one large room in the top loft of a
rickety old building, impregnated with the odor of urine,
banana oil, and glue. It employed some twenty men and
women. I was hired immediately, and the foreman, a burly
Italian, showed me how to stamp out with a heavy hammer
on a steel die the material from which artificial flowers are
made.

The other workers were all recent immigrants from Poland,
Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Germany. The boss, a dwarf-
like hunchbacked woman with the head of a Quasimodo, sat
behind a desk and kept an eye on everyone. On the walls of
the lavatory in the hallway hung signs in eight different lan-
guages saying: "This is not a rest room," and Quasimodo, who
watched the door to the hallway, often informed those who
went out during working hours what was printed on the signs.

"Whatsa ma? You went out two times already," she said
to one of the girls showing two fingers. "Two times. I see
you."

That evening when I came home, the relative who had sent
me to the artificial flower factory came to inquire how I liked
the work. He asked the same question the following evening
and the one after that On his fifth visit I said, "I will stick to

36 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

the job long enough to learn how to make a funeral wreath."
I next saw him twenty years later.

As I went down with my first pay envelope that Saturday
evening, a flat-faced young Russian woman who worked in the
shop stopped me on the street corner to ask me to come to a
shop meeting on Sixth Street near Second Avenue.

"Everybody will be there. You got to come."

We picked up the rest of the crowd at the next corner.

The back room of the saloon was the scene of another shop
meeting when we got there. Beer was five cents a schooner
and the free-lunch counter was loaded with squares of strong
cheese, frankfurters, roast beef, herring, and salted mackerel.
Men and women loaded up on the free fare.

I drank three glasses of beer while waiting our turn, leaning
against the counter, and listening to the talk about me. They
were all newcomers to the country. The steamship agents
were there to collect the weekly payments on the tickets on
which they had come to this country. Occasionally a woman,
her head covered with a colored shawl, came in timidly to see
that her husband didn't spend too much in the saloon.

The loudest talkers, the union organizers, spoke German, but
a German bastardized with such words and expressions as, "Sag
ich dem sonafabitch, 'Bin Scab, dats wass you are. Ein Scab
ohne Klass bewustsein.' "

When our turn came, the young Russian woman called out,
"Everybody from the rose shop come in, please. Pozhalitista.
Hurry up."

In the back room we sat about little tables, and while the
waiters took my order for more beer, I heard a fat man on a
platform in the back shout at us, "Who don't want to belong to
unions and pay dues is scabs and lice. Initiation fee is one
dollar, and dues is twenty-five cents a week. Pay dues to Sonia
every week. If anyone tries any monkey business, he got the
union to coiint with. So join the union now if you ain't no

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 37

scab. Initiation fee is one dollar; dues is twenty-five cents a
week. How many new members, Sonia? Make ? m pay up."

Everyone paid up dues, arrears, and initiation fees. It was
a great and convincing speech! Such, speeches and such meth-
ods of organization eventually produced the Unione Siciliana,
Lepke, Guixah, and other shining examples of humanity.

By the time the meeting was over, I was short two dollars of
my pay. At the bar the beer was five cents. It was ten cents
in the back room. The extra five cents went to a secret fund
of the union. Sonia gave me a receipt for a dollar and twenty-
five cents.

"Shake hands everybody. A new member of the union.
The rose shop is one hundred per cent organized."

She was a homely creature. Her nose was not larger than a
button, but her mouth went from ear to ear. As we walked
out, she asked me to come and hear Johann Most speak.

"Everybody goes there on Saturday night."

The hall in which Most spoke was thick with the smoke of a
hundred pipes and twice as many fragrant cigars. White- and
red-bloused girls went up and down the aisles selling anarchist
papers and pamphlets.

"Free Love, five cents. Bombs or Votes., ten cents."

Sonia took the two pamphlets from a girl, handed them to
me, and said, "Pay. Fifteen cents, that's all. Everybody buys
them. It's good. It's education."

Johann Most, long-haired, one side of his bearded face
swollen to twice the size of the other side, was one of the most
famous German anarchists of the day. Colorful, witty, and
vigorous, he lashed out with stinging eloquence and biting
irony at governments and officials, at bourgeois traditions and
exploiters of labor.

That night Most orated in German about Czolgosz, the man
who had killed McKinley, and extolled the assassin as a man of
courage and a martyr. Having explained to his audience that
patriotism was a fable by which the workers were narcoticized

38 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

so they wouldn't awaken to the realization of their power and
strength, that laws were made by the rich to enslave the poor,
and that no millionaire had ever been hung or electrocuted by
the state* not even for murder, he shouted that there was only
one way to rid the world of kings, rulers, and oppressors,
Czolgosz's way. The audience of pipe smokers and beer drink-
ers applauded frantically.

Suddenly the red-bloused girls in the aisles waved little red
cardboards in the air and called out: "Tickets for the Czolgosz
Ball. Who wants tickets for the Czolgosz Ball? Twenty-five
cents now; fifty cents at the door."

When the sale of tickets was over, Most, who hadn't left
the platform, but had drunk two large glasses of beer, read
from the social pages of the bourgeois newspapers extracts de-
scribing receptions at famous hotels, the menus at great din-
ners, and the gowns, and furs, and the jewels worn by the
ladies, and told the audience that all this was paid for by the
sweat of men and women who worked ten hours a day for half
the pay that it took to keep body and soul together.

When, after receiving tremendous applause, Most came
down from the platform, Sonia beckoned to him, and he came
over to drink another beer and talk to me.

I was no tyro. I had listened to anarchist speeches before.
I had heard Sebastian Faure lecture at the Societe Savante in
Paris; had heard Libertad, the Christlike anarchist, debate on
Society's Future with Paraf-Javal at the Manage Saint Paul;
had heard Jean Grave, the stubborn, firebrand editor of Les
Temps Nouveaux, argue with Prince Peter Kropotkin, the au-
thor of Fields, Factory and Workshop, on the difference be-
tween individualistic and communistic anarchism; and had
read books by filisee Reclus and Max Stirner, and "Libertarian"
magazines which discussed and explained philosophic anarch-
ism in all its phases.

Most did not talk about philosophical anarchism, but offered
a justification of the reign of bombs, daggers, and pistols.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 39

A world inhabited by such perfect human beings that neither
law nor police would be necessary was a Utopia which I should
have liked to see. The propaganda to kill the lawmakers and
law-enforcers before such perfect human beings had been
evolved repelled me as much as advocacy of Hottentotism.

While I was arguing with Most against terrorism, the waiter
continued to fill our glasses. When Most left our table with a
gesture of disgust and I rose to leave, the waiter presented me
with the bill for all our drinks, fifteen in alla dollar fifty.

It was a long time after supper when I came home with only
a dollar and a half in my pocket to show for a hard week's work.

<e Why so late?" Naomi asked.

"It takes time and money to initiate a new man into the
union," I answered.

I spent the following day, Sunday, looking over the East Side.
Houston, Rivington, Delancey, Grand Street, and East Broad-
way were lined with pushcarts whose owners shouted the
prices of their merchandise, eatables and wearables, in Russian,
Yiddish, Polish, Italian, and Greek. At the corner of East
Broadway and Essex Street, a Salvation Army lass was blowing
a trumpet. Opposite her, from a soap box, an electioneering
socialist was denouncing the American bourgeoisie in Russian,
while a Methodist missionary twenty feet away was collecting
pennies from the poor, to convert heathens in Asia.

The filth and the garbage littering the sidewalks and the
gutters was being kicked about by street urchins who screamed
at each other in half a dozen European jargons seasoned with
mangled Americanese. Not knowing Yiddish, the most popu-
lar language on the East Side, which even the Italian peddlers
spoke fluently, I only half understood what the "pullers-in" of
the shops said to me, tugging at my sleeves as I passed them
by.

Broken, tired, despondent, I returned home as soon as night
had fallen.

40 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Ready to quit?" my wife asked. She did so want to go
back to her beloved France!

"No. I'm ready to stay. Something has to be done here.
I don't know what. I don't know whether I am the man to
do it. But something has to be done in this city."

Four weeks later I was fired by my boss, the hunchback, on
the pretext that I had been late two mornings in succession.
The truth was that a batch of fresh immigrants, huge peasants
from Lithuania, had just arrived and were being offered by
the steamship agents to the sweatshops for three dollars a week.

Stinking, unsanitary, overloaded boats from Europe arrived
daily at these shores, unloaded their cargoes of wretched im-
migrants from Russia and the Balkans, and left for more
cargoes before the holds had even been fumigated. Starvation
in Russia, hunger in Hungary, and persecution of Jews in
Roumania and Armenians in Turkey filled all the boats.

Agents of steamship companies, posing as representing min-
ing and lumber companies in the West, were hiring men in
Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary to work in America at "fabu-
lous" wagesfabulous when translated into the coin of those
countries. When steamship companies entered upon a trans-
portation price war, German boats carried passengers from
Poland to New York for fifteen dollars for an adult and five
dollars for a child under twelve. Because of this transporta-
tion war, the labor market here became glutted with unskilled
workers. The owners of the ships in Hamburg, Rotterdam,
and London didn't care a fig about what would happen to the
human cargo they transported.

Eventually unemployment, hunger, cold, and illness de-
stroyed the weak and aroused the anger of those who survived
in that golden age of rugged individualism.

The greater the misery, the more popular Johann Mosfs
Kamerad, the anarchist weekly, and the higher the circulation
of all the other papers and magazines agitating for revenge

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 41

against the bourgeoisie became. Idle Polish, Italian, and
Russian immigrants crowded the East Side street corners to
listen to "class-conscious" workers translate passages from the
Kamerad into their own tongues.

Most had spoken to a handful of people in New York before
the transportation war; after that, he spoke to thousands there
and to more thousands up and down the country.

Emma Goldman, fiery, clever, and eloquent, lectured on
literature and the drama in halls and theaters and from the
rostrums of liberal colleges, but always from the anarchist
point of view. Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian,
Polish, Yiddish, and Greek revolutionary papers and pamphlets
were sold by the tens of thousands. All preached revolt; all
preached hatred of bourgeois society and capitalism-
Today the American flag waves over a stage or a soap box,
even one from which the most un-American theories are
preached, but in those days no such subterfuge was resorted
to. The red flag was the only flag one saw in the slums and
the foreign quarters. Only "traitors to the Cause'* and syco-
phants waved American flags.

The leaders of the socialists and anarchists were Germans
and Russians, mostly Germans. When an English-speaking
American delegate to a socialist convention demanded that
English be spoken so that he, too, could understand, the whole
audience yelled, as with one voice, "Heraus. Maul halten/*
(Out with him. Hold your tongue.)

That wasn't the America I had envisaged before I saw it,
but that was the America that I found when I came.

We moved into a two-room apartment on Monroe Street near
the East River. We paid six dollars a month for it and fur-
nished it with two beds, two chairs, a table, and a coal stove.
When friends came to visit us, they sat on the floor. We
weren't apologetic about our poverty. Naomi even took a
certain pride in it. Instead of planning how to better our

42 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

situation, she helped ine to formulate plans for the betterment
of the world.

I roamed the streets answering want ads, searching for work.
I wasn't any too lucky. Here and there I got a job for a few
days in some factory, but I didn't last long. Often I was fired
after two or three hours > work and refused payment. Some
of the sweatshops that employed only immigrants regularly
practiced this kind of petty robbery. And there was nothing
one could do except yell, "Down with the bourgeoisie," at the
nearest street corner meeting. Once when I refused to leave
a shop before being paid for four hours' work, the foreman
called a policeman and had me arrested. On the way to the
station, the cop shoved the end of his club into the small of
my back and shouted, "Move on, you goddamn greenhorn."

When winter had set in in earnest, I got a job shoveling snow
for twenty-five cents an hour. After ten hours of work, with
burlap bags wrapped over my thin shoes, the Irish foreman
asked me whether I wanted to work another two hours. I
thought of the additional half dollar and said, "Yes." When, at
the end of that period, the jovial fellow asked me whether I
wanted to work another few hours, I said, "Yes," again, warmed
by the thought that I would have three and a half dollars to take
home, I turned in my shovel at midnight and was back at
the tool shack the following morning at five to stand in line in
the hope of another day's work,

A week later the foreman refused to give me a shovel.
When I asked him whether I hadn't done my work right, he
said:

"Sure, the work was all right, but ain't you got any brains
under that black hair of yours?"

I understood.

"OX, foreman. I understand now."

From then on, for the privilege of working sixteen hours a
day, I kicked back fifty cents every day to die foreman. When

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 43

I mentioned the kicking back to one of tlie men working beside
me, he called me a greenhorn and explained that the foreman
paid thousands of dollars a year to keep that job.

Late one night, while loading a snow truck on Fourteenth
Street, near Third Avenue, I heard the newsboys set up a
terrific racket as they ran screaming, "Extra! Extra!"

People coming from the theaters bought the papers and read
them in the glare of the lamplight, in spite of the snowstorm.
I bought a paper and leaned on my shovel to read the head-
lines. There had been a revolution in Russia. Maxim Gorky
and Father Gapon, a Russian priest, had led a hungry mob to
the Czar's palace to ask for bread. The Little Father's Cos-
sacks had allowed the mob to come within the range of their
guns and had blown them to kingdom come. Though the
revolution was drowned in blood and smothered under the
hoofs of Cossack cavalry, the throne of the Romanovs had been
badly shaken.

That night my wife was taken to the hospital to give birth to
our second son, whom she named Gorky. When I came to
work in the morning, Flanagan, the foreman, bellowed at me,
"What makes you late?"

"My wife gave birth to a baby/' I answered.

"A boy or a girl?" he asked, suddenly affable.

"A boy."

<< Yiminy crackers, a boy! You ain't fooling me? A boy! A
real boy, eh? Well, here is your shovel and don't forget to set
up the cigars. Goddam it," he cried out, giving me a hug,
"I've wanted a boy for twenty years, and here comes this green-
horn and gets one right out of the box. How do you do it?"

Ten hours later I went to the hospital to see Naomi and our
second son. She was terribly excited about the revolution in
Russia. I left her to go to Madison Square Garden to attend
a protest meeting against the manner in which the Cossacks
had smothered the revolution in St. Petersburg.

44 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

There were twenty thousand people in the hall. A dozen
speakers, anarchists, socialists, and liberals, succeeded one
another and spoke in Yiddish, Russian, German, and Polish.
Between speakers, young party members hawked button pic-
tures of Karl Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Johann Most, Tolstoi,
Gorky, Caserio Sante, and Czolgosz, all martyrs to the cause.
The last speaker spoke in English.

As we all left the hall between rows of policemen and plain-
clothesmen, who had come to spot the "bad eggs," a tall, broad-
shouldered young man with a small head and a pale face asked
me in English whether I had understood all the speakers.
Talking, he led me away from the crowd and asked me to join
him over a glass of beer at a near-by saloon. The pale young
man was Courtenay Lemon, the editor of the socialist paper
The Worker, the boy orator, the terror of married men, and the
darling of the women in the movement. He was a real Amer-
ican, a socialist, a writer, a critic, and a dramatist.

While I answered his questions, he corrected both my gram-
mar and my pronunciation and was angry when I mispro-
nounced the same word twice. Before we separated, he asked
me to look him up at his office whenever I felt like having a
chat.

/''
Two days later, during a fresh snowstorm which had halted

all surface traffic, the foreman, Flanagan, took the shovel away
from me in the middle of the day, and told me to "get the hell
out of here/* I had been reported as having grumbled about
the daily kick-back of fifty cents. At parting, Flanagan said,
"You goddam foreigners. You're nothing but a bunch of so-
cialists. If you don't like it here, why don't you go back where
you came from?"

That second son of mine was brought home by his mother to
a father who averaged a dollar a day, although he did enough
work for three dollars for a window-cleaninor mTrmanv.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 45

company > two illiterate Italians, took the other two dollars as
their honest share. When I attempted to become independ-
ent, bought a ladder, a pail, and a chamois cloth, and went out
to wash windows on my own account, two toughs smashed my
ladder, caved in my tin pail, and would have done the same
to me had I not been the possessor of two good fists and learned
to use the "savate," the kick, in Paris. We all wound up before
a magistrate, who fined me two dollars for disturbing the peace
and discharged the innocent toughs.

I felt wonderftil when I came home. I hadn't used my fists
in years. A good fistfight was a fine stimulant. I was a strict
vegetarian and hated brutality, but I hated cowardice even
more. I come from that kind of stock. We hate the idea of
fighting, but once in a scrape, we enjoy it. Had I come home
from the battlefield instead of from a street brawl, Naomi
couldn't have been prouder of my scars. I had to tell her the
story of that battle over and over again while we took turns
at rocking the cradle in which slept our younger son.

IV

A "WANT AD" in the New York World sent me to a labor
agency on the Bowery, to a large hall crowded with
several hundred immigrants from every corner of the earth.
The place, serving as a dance hall for sailors at night, was
decorated with crude paintings of women in lights and girls
with black stockings pulled up above their knees so that just
a few inches of rosy flesh showed between the garters and the
lacy pantalets. The place reeked of sweat, cheese, and pipe
tobacco, and of that foul, sour breath sewered up from the
bowels of the ill-fed, the worried, and the quarrelsome.

After a while two snappy young swells came out of the office
at the end of the hall and ordered us to stand up against the
wall.

"How long have you been here?" one of the swells shouted
at me.

"Six months."

He looked at my calloused hands, found them satisfactory,
asked me what country I came from, said, "O. K.," and marked
my coat sleeve with a piece of chalk. I followed a line of men
to a smaller hall in the back where we were given two corned-
beef sandwiches apiece and told to wait.

"Does anybody know what we're supposed to work at and
where?" I asked.

No one answered. Finally an elderly man with gnarled

46

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 47

hands and a bulbous nose said to me in Roumanian, "Do you
need a job badly?"

xr **

Yes.

"Then shut up. Nobody is paying you to ask questions."

Around noon, when we numbered sixty, one of the swells
came in to tell us that the job was in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Three dollars a day. Ten hours a day. Steady work.

I telephoned the news to my wife's brother, asking him to
tell her where I was going.

We were led to the railroad station by a private policeman
who bought our tickets and traveled with us. No one said a
word during the two-hour journey. At the Bridgeport railroad
station, when a crowd in overalls called us "Goddam scabs," I
understood why I had been hired. While we were being
herded toward an open truck, I stepped away from my com-
panions and ducked into the crowd.

"Come back, you. Come back, you bastard. No one is
going to hurt you," the private policeman called after me. But
I lost myself in the crowd and was soon on the main street of
the town.

Here I was in Bridgeport, sixty miles from New York, in a
snowstorm, with two sandwiches in my stomach and ten cents
in my pocket. It was four in the afternoon. Resolving to
walk back to New York, I spent five cents on a loaf of bread
before I started out. The roads were not what they are today,
and there were no automobiles to give one a lift.

At midnight, having covered almost half the distance, I crept
into a stable off the road and lay down in the hay. An hour
later I crept out. At ten in the morning, after fifteen hours in
a blinding snow, I was at West Farms and faced with the
decision of either spending the last nickel for a cup of hot
coffee or taking the elevated train to downtown New York.
The elevated won.

My wife, Naomi, approved what I had done. But we were
at our wits* end. Naomi, who could have asked her relatives

48 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

for temporary assistance, which they would have gladly given
us, refused to let them know our plight. She was fiercely
proud and almost as fiercely confident in me.

My next job was in Brooklyn in a fire-escape factory at two
dollars a day. I had to get up at four in the morning, to be on
the job at six-thirty. Our factory, a shed in "New Lots," com-
peted with much better mechanized shops by paying low wages
and working immigrants longer hours. The boss, a polyglot,
spoke all the languages, but the only English he used was
"Hurry up. Move on. What the hell."

When an immigrant became "too smart/' he was fired and
replaced by a new one just come from Russia or Poland. Some
of the men slept in the factory and cooked their meals over the
fire of the forge.

Three months later, on a Saturday night, the boss handed
me my pay, saying, "You are too 'smart/ "

Instead of going home from work that night, I went to a beer
saloon in Cooper Square to hear capitalism properly damned.

When I came home, I announced that I was through, for a
little while at least, with day labor. We had twenty dollars in
cash and the house rent was paid for a month.

Three days later I walked out on East Broadway, where the
scrawny trees at the edge of the sidewalk were beginning to
leave out, and saw on the walls of the Lyceum Hall a large sign
announcing a concert of Russian music by the famous pianist,
Platon Brounoff. Although it was eleven in the morning, a
short, stout man in a top hat with a magnificent head on a pair
of wide shoulders was talking to the girl cashier behind the
booth in the lobby. From the picture on the poster I recog-
nized him as the pianist of the evening. I introduced myself,
told him that I was a musician, and he promptly invi,ted me to
tea at "Sholem's," where all the East Side intellectuals met.

Brounoff spoke half a dozen languages, including French,
loudly and volubly, but they all sounded like Russian. Be-

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 49

tween two glasses of tea he told me all about himself and what
a great man he was. When Abraham Cahan, the editor of the
Forward, the most influential Yiddish socialist newspaper, came
in, Brounoff called him to our table and introduced me as one
of France's "greatest" and most "famous" musicians. Tall,
broad-shouldered, with a flowing blond mustache, - Cahan
looked like an arrogant Russian army officer. When he had
left, Brounoff said, "This is America. You have to exaggerate."
He asked me to accompany him to his studio in a basement on
East Broadway, where he introduced me to one of his pupils,
"Miss Gluck from Roumania."

It was Alma Gluck, later to become one of the most famous
singers in the world, but at that time still an unknown. She
was no newcomer to the United States. (I was thrilled many
years later to see both our names inscribed on the "Wall of
Fame" at the New York World's Fair.)

When I came home that afternoon, I found a shiny, bright,
upright, golden oak piano standing against the wall, between
the folding bed and the cradle. Naomi had bought it on the
instalment plan, five dollars down and five dollars a month.
Before the week was over, I had eight dollars* worth of pupils,
sixteen in all. Twenty-five cents a lesson seemed to be the
prevailing rate on Monroe Street*

My pupils were girls in their teen years, dark daughters of
Sicily, corn-colored ones from Poland, red-haired ones from
Russia, all ill-fed, ill-clothed, and very eager.

When my income reached twelve dollars a week, I was the
busiest piano teacher in New York, and my wife and the chil-
dren had to stay in the park the whole day, while the piano was
being banged fifteen and sixteen hours at a stretch. My pupils
stood four deep about the piano, or sat on the floor, or outside
the door, talking, quarreling, and waiting their turn.

We moved down a floor to a larger apartment, and I raised
my fee to fifty cents a lesson, but didn't lose a single pupil.

50 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Then suddenly, in September in one week half their number
stayed away; the capmakers had gone on strike. A week later
I had only four pupils, the two daughters of my landlord and
the daughters of our grocery man.

I went to visit some of my pupils. The poverty of their
parents, the bleakness of their homes, made my heart shrink
at the thought that I had taken money from them. Had I
given them anything as valuable as what I had taken?
"Well come back, teacher, as soon as the strike is over."
"Come back now," I urged. "You'll pay me later."
The girls were willing, but most of the parents refused to
put themselves in debt to the piano teacher also, while going
into debt to the landlords and the grocery store keepers.

Unoccupied, I went to "SholemV* cafe on East Broadway
and listened to the political disputes raging from table to table.
At one table the Marxists advocated organization, discipline,
and the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the adjoining table
the philosophical anarchists shouted back that the world would
be no happier a place to live in under socialism than it was
under capitalism, and that a policeman with a socialist badge
was no less a policeman than one with a capitalist badge.
The Marxists, the anarchists shouted, wanted power and not
the happiness of mankind.

The socialists sneered at the anarchists and called them
foolish Utopians.

The philosophical anarchists, the Kropotkinists of "Sholem's,"
didn't advocate bomb throwing. They believed that people
could be educated to a degree that would make every form of
constraint superfluous. To achieve that, these anarchists pub-
lished the best literature, translated the best books from a
dozen languages, and organized amateur theatricals, concerts,
and lectures. They were saints without knowing it.

The anarchists of East Broadway believed in the essential
goodness of man. The socialists didn't. The anarchists said

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 51

that capitalism would fall when and if men became capable of
living and working without being whipped by exploiters. The
socialists argued that a social revolution ought to be brought
about at once, by any means, regardless of whether the masses
were ready for the change or not.

I learned Yiddish rapidly and was soon able to voice my
opinion in the brouhaha of the discussions. In one of these
discussions I came up against Abraham Cahan, the editor of
the Forward. Cahan, a former reporter on the New York
Globe, had become the dictator of a powerful daily newspaper,
brooked no contradiction from anyone, and accused me of
arrogance when I disagreed with him.

Some weeks later, the Forward announced a short story con-
test. I sent in a story under a pseudonym and was awarded
the first prize, twenty-five dollars. Abraham Cahan was in-
censed at my duplicity.

It was odd that the first language in which I learned to write
in the United States should have been Yiddish, a language more
alien to me than English was.

The twenty-five dollars prize money came in the nick of time.
The capmaker's strike was still on. We owed two months' rent
and a staggering grocer's bill. My wife still told her relatives
that our affairs were running smoothly. We both studied
English in earnest. We had discovered the King James version
of the Bible, and spent hours of exaltation while we recited
aloud to each other whole chapters of the great book. Even
the "begats" were musical and majestic.

The day the piano company took the piano away for non-
payment of the instalments, I took an inventory of myself. I
had not come to America to teach the piano. I had come to
tear myself away from crumbling Europe, to live and raise a
family in an atmosphere of youth and freshness.

I promised myself to make every hour count from then on,
and to take inventory every night of what I had done during
the day.

52 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

That night, when everyone was asleep, I sat down at the
kitchen table with one foot on the cradle and wrote from
beginning to end my first English story, Brothers and Sisters.
In the morning I dropped it in the letter box of the New York
Call, a socialist daily. It was published the following Sunday,
illustrated by John Sloan. It occupied the whole front page
of the magazine section, and I received a five-dollar check from
the Call in Monday's mail.

That check was more than money to me. It confirmed me
in my belief that I could write, although Naomi said that she
hadn't needed any such confirmation.

My next job was as a piano player in a nickelodeon on the
East Side. The pay was fifteen dollars a week; the hours, from
nine in the morning to midnight. We comprised a three-piece
orchestra, a violin player, a drummer, and I. When my left
hand was too tired, I played with my right hand only. When
I was hungry, I ate with the right hand while I played with
the left. There was no set music for those movie operas. I
looked at the screen and improvised something to suit the
action of the drama or the comedy. The violinist, a young
Italian, couldn't read music, but had a fine ear and followed me
in whatever I played. The drummer, a blind man, just
drummed. After a picture had played a day, I knew without
looking at the screen when to play a waltz, when a thunderous
march, and when a dirge. The owner of the theater, a Greek,
who also owned the restaurant near by, repeated the same
formula every Saturday night when he paid us, "Money, money
for nothing, for playing. Easy money. You guys have it easy.
How about a crap game?"

He often won half of the fifteen dollars from the violinist and
raged because I refused to "take a chance."

Some of the people in the neighborhood came every night,
although they saw the same picture, and I got to know them
and talk to them when they sat close enough to me.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 53

I wrote to Courtenay Lemon, asking Mm to see me at the
nickelodeon some night. He came and took me out for a bite
at "Beefsteak Jones*/* where they served only steaks and coffee.
Between two steaks Courtenay spoke to me about Samuel
Butler s novel, The Way of All Flesh. He had read my story
in the Call, and thought It somewhat sentimental. He prom-
ised to bring me the Butler book the next day. He did.

I propped the book up on the music rack and read it while I
played, read it while pounding out waltzes, one-steps, and
inarches, repeating to myself aloud some of the great passages
of the novel

Courtenay brought several of his friends to the theater to
watch me read a book while I played. He never slept at night
and was glad to have someone to visit after midnight. Six
foot three, this side of thirty, and very handsome, he was a
master of English, a fascinating talker, a mathematician, a
critic, a theorist, a socialist, a philosopher, and with it all one
of the most charming of men. But lazy . . . irresponsible,
forever in debt, and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

I thought Butler's Way of All Flesh almost as beautiful as
the Bible and learned it by heart. The fifteen hours' daily
grind passed rapidly in its company. But the Greek, Patapop-
olis, didn't like to see me read while I played. Every time
he passed by the piano he threw the book from the rack,
screaming, "I pay you for playing/*

When my left hand had swollen so that I was compelled to
play fifteen hours a day with the right hand only, the drummer
and the violinist covered me up and made a great deal of noise,
so that the Greek wouldn't notice that I was disabled. When
my right hand had swollen to twice its size, I gave up the job.

While I was waiting for the swelling to go down, I roamed
the East Side with Courtenay. The cafe socialists knew him
as a great orator and fine writer, but they resented what they
OW "slumming." The resentment grew still more when

54 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

I took Courtenay and one of Ms lady friends to the Thalia
Theater to see Jacob Adler and his troupe play Tolstofs The
Living Corpse.

"Are we freaks? Why bring strangers here!"

The next day a columnist of the socialist Forward printed a
biting satire on me.

"Why does he come to 'SholemY? He is a stranger. He
speaks Yiddish as if it were a foreign tongue. He writes Yid-
dish as if it were French. He knows nothing of Jewish learning
and tradition. He brings his friends to look at us as if we were
animals in a zoo. Let him get a job with a sight-seeing car and
wear the uniform and cap of a guide!"

A month later we were down to our last dollar again, and my
left hand was still swollen to the size of a ham. The New York
Call had published two more stories and paid five dollars for
each, but when I sent in another story, the cashier informed me
that there was no money in the bank for "outsiders."

V

SOME OF MY WIFE'S friends, who were living in James-
town, New York, wrote to say that if we cared to come to
Jamestown, I could probably find work in a factory there, I
took the next train to Jamestown.

These friends in Jamestown were friendly people, but when
they saw me, they didn't think my chances of getting employ-
ment were very good. "You don't look like a workuigman!"

The next day, however, I got a job at the coal heap of a
worsted mill and came home with the war paint on me. Two
days later I was given a better job at the dyeing vats.

The mill employed about five hundred immigrants, Swedes,
Norwegians, Macedonians, Greeks, and Hungarians. It was
owned by a pink-cheeked Englishman, who walked about the
premises in a morning coat and striped trousers and carried a
cane in his gloved hands.

A few weeks later my wife and the two children joined me,
and we set up housekeeping in a small apartment on the street
floor. There was a backyard large enough for a vegetable
garden. True, the backyard was under four feet of snow and
ice just then, but I could imagine it growing vegetables the next
spring.

We worked eight hours a day at the mill, and only half days
on Saturday. The owners of the house, a Swedish couple, who
lived above us, were kind and offered to stay with our children
whenever my wife and I wanted to go out together.

55

56 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

The foreman of the mill, a florid-faced, blue-eyed English-
man, who called me "Frenchle," eventually gave me a cleaner
job in the storeroom and often came up to smoke a cigarette,
keep me company, and talk about his family, which consisted
of a wife he didn't like and a daughter he adored. A Liverpool
man, he had lived in France and loved France, but thought the
French were the wrong people for such a beautiful land.

"England should have had it," he said.

His French vocabulary was almost entirely gustatory and
amatory. He talked by the hour of the good food he had eaten
at San Malo and Paris and of the girls he had slept with, and he
smacked his lips at the memory of the good food and the
women as if both were gustatory.

We had, meanwhile, made the acquaintance of a Dr. Jahn-
sen, a fine singer and a cousin of Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian
writer. The doctor, a blond giant, often came to see us non-
prof essionally, and brought with him a Miss Rumpell, a church
organist. They were crazy about our children, one of whom
was dark and the other blue-eyed, and they brought them toys
and taught them Norwegian songs.

During the long winter I was looking forward eagerly to the
spring and a vegetable garden. I wrote a little, and reread the
Bible, Butler's Way of All Flesh, and whatever else the James-
town library had on its shelves.

In April my foreman gave me an assistant, a young Mace-
donian Greek, who didn't know a word of English.

When the Liverpooler came up to smoke his cigarette and
heard me talk Greek to my assistant, he was bowled over.

"So you speak Greek, eh?"

"So does this boy," I defended myself as if against a crime.

"Righto! But he is a Greek." And he looked at me as if he
had sxlddenly produced the corpus delicti of my crime.

I tried to explain to him that people spoke Greek in the sec-
tion of Roumania where I was born. But he didn't seem to
believe me.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 57

don't you tell me your real name?" he asked.
I told my wife that evening that I would probably lose my
job.

"They might give you a better one," she consoled.

When he was three years old, my wife taught our oldest son,
Hyperion, to read. Because our Swedish neighbors and Doc-
tor Jahnsen had talked about the phenomenon to their friends,
they came to convince themselves. In this way our circle of
friends became larger and larger with Hyperion the central
point of attraction. We liked the Scandinavians very much.
My wife, who had interested herself in Scandinavian literature
and knew all of Ibsen's plays, became the pet of her new
friends.

Early in May, a heavy warm rain melted the snow and left
a lovely patch of fat brown mud in the backyard. A few days
later Dr. Jahnsen and our neighbors helped me dig up the
garden, while the children screamed as they watched the
wriggling earthworms turned up by our spades. The whole
backyard was turned over before nightfall.

The following afternoon the Liverpooler asked me to accoin^
pany him home after work to meet his daughter.

"My wife/* he said, "is in New York."

The foreman's home was about a mile from the mill in the
residential section of the city. The daughter was a wide-
hipped, tall girl in her twenties, red-headed, freckle-faced, full-
lipped, and groggy-eyed. She greeted me with <c Vous parlez
frangais, nest-ce pas?' 9 She had a most atrocious pronuncia-
tion.

An hour later my host told me that I was to leave the mill
two hours earlier every day and complete his daughter's French
education, which he had begun with "Vcgulez-votis coucher
avec moi? Je vow aime" and so on.

I gave her her first lesson then and there.

**Oh/' she cried out, "if a table is a taable, then a chair is a
chaar and a ladle a laadle. Oh, ain't it easy!'* And she

58 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

laughed and laughed. Her father thought her very witty.

Compelled to stay for dinner, I listened to Miss Diana speak
French in her own fashion. Some of it was funny. Her father
was completely ga-ga about her. I had never suspected that
such a relationship between father and daughter was possible.

By the time the peas in my garden had podded and we were
eating the first radishes, the Liverpoolers had become unbear-
able. Mademoiselle refused to be called Miss, insisted on be-
ing French and doing as the French women do or as her father
had told her they do. She craved a wild, French love affair.
She was stupid and insane, and had been corrupted to the
marrow by her own father. What a spectacle! On one side
of the curtain the sane, solid, normal Scandinavians, Jahnsen
and the Swensens, and on the other, the putrid Liverpoolers.

We left Jamestown suddenly without giving anybody an
explanation, leaving behind us a vegetable garden at its very
best and some very lovable friends. What I most regretted
was the sweet corn, the peppers, the tomatoes, and the rows
and rows of sweet peas and green beans. Who would take
care of them, water them, cultivate them? And who would
eat them? So green a garden, after months of white snow and
icel

I went to see Platon Brounoff, who, having been blacklisted
by the Jewish Forward, had left East Broadway and moved
uptown in the West Sixties.

"But what has happened? You and Cahan were such good
friends!"

"I wrote something about a pianist whom I didn't like and
whom Cahan did/'

"And because of that you had to leave the East Side, where
you are so well known?'*

"Well, if I had crawled on all fours and licked Cahan's boots,
he would have forgiven me. But I have my pride. I am a
pupil of Anton Rubinstein," Brounoff said. "Cohan's paper

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 59

wouldn't even accept a paid ad for my concerts after my quarrel
with the great socialist. Bozhe moil "Bozhe moil (My God, my
God! ) What land of a world will they make when they come
into power?"

His big jowls were sagging. He still wore his top hat and
Prince Albert coat> but he was in the dumps, I haid come to
be consoled, and I found myself consoling him. He laughed
himself sick at the tale of my experiences in Jamestown.

"Bozhe mot, bozhe mot! A Potiphar in America! And a
Joseph who had been brought up in Paris. Bozhe moi, bozhe
mot! And he regrets the beans and the peas in his garden!
What a finish to a story! What Chekhov wouldn't do with
such a story!"

We drank vodka and tea. People came in. Brounoff re-
peated my story, embellished and embroidered, touched up
here and there, but always ending with the pathetic regret for
the vegetable garden.

<< Who'H take care of the peas and cabbages? Who will water
them, cultivate them, eat them? Like in the Psalms!"

His belly shook. All the bellies shook. We drank more
vodka and more tea.

"If only Anton Rubinstein were alive to hear this story!
Bozhe moi, bozhe moil If only he were alive!" Brounoff re-
peated again and again. ""Who will take care of the peas in
my garden? Who will water them, cultivate them, eat them?"

Our little apartment had become the center for a group of
young women who were being stimulated by Naomi to found
a modern school for children. I obtained another piano-
playing job at a nickelodeon, where I had better pay and
shorter hours, and I learned how to manage my hands while
playing.

Courtenay Lemon came to see us. "To hell with James-
town/ 5 he said, and he hopped about the room dancing with
the children, marveling to hear Hyperion read so fluently.

60 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Having brought several stories and also an essay about music
from Jamestown, I sent them to the new Sunday editor of the
Call, one of Courtenay's friends. A few days later she wrote,
asking me to come and see her at the office the following week.

Joanna was an ethereally beautiful woman in her late forties,
tall, and blue-eyed. She told me that the first story, which had
been set up, had gotten her into trouble with Herman Simpson,
the editor-in-chief, because it did not conform to the Marxian
theories. While we were talking, Simpson, the English-speak-
ing counterpart of Abraham Cahan, broke in on us and told me
what was what! I laughed at his conception of literature and
art Simpson banged his fist on the table.

"I am boss. I am boss here/* he ranted. I laughed out loud.

"Get out. Get outl" Simpson yelled, beside himself.

"Did you have to quarrel with him?" Naomi asked, when I
told her what had happened.

"Yes. Remember the fight with those toughs who broke my
ladder? Well, it was the same thing only on a spiritual plane.
He as much as told me that 111 either work for him or hell
smash my ladder/*

Joanna knew all of Courtenay's faults, some of which were
unknown to me, but she blushed like a little girl when she saw
him. She lived with her sister, a biologist, and Courtenay
often went to their house for supper.

One day, when we were alone, I told Joanna a Gypsy story
which included the description of the Gypsies crossing the
frozen Danube.

"Write it down/' she said. "Write it down Just as you told
it to me/'

When I brought her the written story, she said, after reading
it, "You'll never see it in print in this country/*

Courtenay was even more discouraging. "In Russia, yes;
in America, no. It is not sweet enough for American maga-
zines. A beautiful story, yes.'*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 61

Courtenay was interested in an essay I had written on die
sex of musical instruments and eventually Lad it printed in an
obscure magazine published by someone who was <c bugs" on
abnormal psychology. The essay was based on personal obser-
vations of musicians and the instruments of their choice. Dr.
Freud, and the eminent American psychoanalyst, Dr. Brill,
have often quoted that essay since, and have enlarged upon it,
drawing conclusions that hadn't been in my mind when I
wrote it.

Some day in the future I shall write more extensively on the
same subject. Hitler's admiration for Wagner's music, Musso-
lini's love of the bassoon, and Frederick the Great's virtuosity
on the flute are not just so many accidents. The theory has
its dangers, however. In the hands of charlatans it can become
a terrible tool. I hate to think of a pseudo-psychoanalyst ask-
ing a patient: << What's your favorite musical instrument?" or
<c Who is your favorite composer?"

I didn't see Courtenay often. He had a heavy love affair
on his hands. He had met his match, a lady who only shrugged
her beautiful shoulders when he accused her of unfaithfulness.

We had some trouble with Hyperion, who had started school.
He was too young to be placed in an advanced class, and too
far ahead in his studies to be happy with children of his own
age. One day he rose and left the classroom, saying to the
teacher, 'This is a class for dummies. I am no dummy." And
he wouldn't go back to school any more. When I insisted, he
went into a rage and was a very sick boy for the next few days.

My hands had swollen up again; so I got a job with a wreck-
ing company which was demolishing a building on upper Sixth
Avenue. I, who had come to the United States to build, now
earned my bread by wrecking. The Poles who worked beside
me enjoyed the work. Their eyes glittered when a section of
a wall came down with a thud. When some Hungarians came

62 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

to work, there was a series of accidents on the job. First one,
then another Hungarian was hurt by falling bricks. A crow-
bar, "accidentally" falling out of the hand of a Pole on the tenth
floor, killed a Hungarian working six floors below. The follow-
ing night the whole side of a wall came down unexpectedly
and buried two Poles underneath. Poles and Hungarians
fought with hammers and crowbars during "lunch time" at
midnight When I tried to act as peacemaker, telling them
that they were neither Poles nor Hungarians, but wreckers on
a job, they turned their anger against me.

Now that I worked at night, I roamed the streets every after-
noon, from the Roosevelt slip to St. Marks on the Bowery, and
became acquainted with Italian pushcart peddlers, and the
notdbili of the district. My knowledge of Greek and Turkish
delighted the cafegiis on Henry Street and Cherry Street. I
was welcome in sweatshops tinder the elevated on Allen Street,
where almond-eyed Syrian girls made lace and repaired orien-
tal rugs, and tall Moroccan Jewish women helped their hus-
bands hammer out brass trays and other ornamental wares in
brass and copper. These Moroccan Jews had a newspaper all
their own, a weekly in which the Spanish that they spoke, the
Ladino, was printed in Hebrew letters. Because I helped
them explain their troubles to the landlord, to the police, to the
school superintendents, to the insurance men, and to the steam-
ship agents, I was asked to sit at their tables and eat their food,
chick-peas cooked in oil and cabbage boiled in honey, and was
invited to their curious weddings, barbarous affairs, neither
African nor Moslem, but a mixture of both.

One such wedding between an elderly man and a young girl
was broken up when the chacham> the minister, chose to deliver
a sermon on "Just Measure" before the final ceremony.

"When an old man marries a young woman, can he give her
just measure? And when a young woman marries an old man,
will she give him jusjt measure?" he questioned, looking first at
the groom and then at the bride.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 63

The bride fainted, and the groom edged out of the room.
Then the old chacham gave the girl's parents a piece of his
mind.

I wrote that story down twenty times, trying to capture the
atmosphere of the wedding and the stunning effect of the
chacham s words. And every time Naomi said it was still un-
convincing. Years later I wrote the story again, and discovered
that I had rewritten from memory the first draft of the story.

In the Syrian quarter below Rector Street near Battery Park,
I watched the printing of a Syrian newspaper in Arabic, went
to christenings and weddings in a Syrian Coptic church, and
eventually met Khalil Gibran, poet and painter, a wealthy
man's son, a combination Tagore and Maeterlinck with greater
ability and talent than either of them. Gibran, a young man
who looked like a Persian painting, published, at his own ex-
pense, a gorgeously gotten up magazine, Al Funoon (The
Arts ) , in both English and Arabic. Although raised in Boston,
he was an oriental of orientals to the tip of his fingers, lived in
a magnificent studio on West Tenth Street, surrounded himself
with beautiful models and sycophants, drank interminable cups
of black coffee and glasses of arachi, and eventually died from
overwork, arachi, exhaustion, and the influenza.

In the Italian sweatshops below Fourteenth Street, women
worked their fingers to the bone hemstitching gowns to be sold
on Fifth Avenue as "French" dresses. Children who should
have been in school sewed on buttons to earn ten cents a day.
Hat makers, cigar makers, bakers, and makers of costume
jewelry employed consumptive Italian immigrants, who were
at the mercy of the padroni, the Maffia, and the Black Hand,
always in debt to the banchieri for a steamship ticket on the
installment plan, or the expensive funeral, with music, of a
mother, a brother, or a child.

On receipt of a telegraphed request for a hundred or two
hundred men to be sent to Detroit or Chicago, Pittsburgh, or
the Messabi Range, the banchieri would herd a crowd of their

64 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

debtors together, tell them what their wages would be, and
pack them off under guard like slaves to the mines or the shops
that had hired tliein sight unseen.

Every foreign group was hectored and bossed by some organ-
ization; yet not one was as murderous as the Maffia. It had a
finger in everything, Its higher-ups made millions selling a
patent medicine supposed to cure gonorrhea and syphilis.
Many Italian doctors in the United States were compelled to
prescribe it to their clients whether they had any such disease or
not. Every pushcart peddler paid toll to the organization.
It ruled church and political organizations and owned ceme-
teries and funeral parlors. Thousands of Italian midwives in
New York and thousands all over the country paid twenty
dollars a month to the Societa for protection. The children
brought into the world by a midwife who hadn't paid her dues
to the Societa died shortly after birth.

The only difference between the Maffia of those days and
the Fascist Maffia of today is that Mussolini has clothed his
gang in uniforms and black shirts and given it diplomatic status
in the world. Fascism is the Maffia legalized. As members
of the Lictor Federation, Dante Alighieri Society, Confedera-
zione Italiano, Dopo Lavoro, and the Squadristi, these gang-
sters in uniform, who beat up the honest Italians who refuse
to obey the orders of Mussolini and his New York representa-
tives, give themselves cultural airs, but they are no less the
Maffia, under new names.

While this was going on in the ghettos, all the immigrants
heard of America was the prattle of Tim Sullivan's soap box
speakers and the mutual vilifications of Democratic and Re-
publican politicians.

The Russians lived below Second Avenue in the same way
they had lived in Russia, the Poles below Monroe Street in tlie
same way as in Poland, the Hungarians along Second Street in
the same way as in Hungary, and the Jews like the Jews in the
lands they came from. Each nationality had its caf^s, its own

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 65

papers, its own theaters, its own gangs, its own midwives, its
own bankers, and its own undertakers. The legal authorities
treated them not as future Americans, but as future criminals.
When, in later years, so many gangsters and killers rose out of
this moral swamp, it was not the milieu that was to blame, but
those who stupidly tolerated its existence and left the immi-
grant without guidance and education.

I had been appalled by the filth when I came to New York.
A few years later, I was appalled at the thought of what would
come out of it.

The only ray of light in this bleakness was the "Free School"
on Madison Street near the East River, established by Alex
Ferm and his wife. An empty store with a few chairs and a
piano, the Free School was open to the children of the neigh-
borhood from eight in the morning to seven in the evening.
Mrs. Ferm was always there, to pose questions, to answer them
truthfully, and to listen to complaints. Of Irish origin, tall,
beautiful, with large green eyes, Mrs. Ferm, patient as an angel,
directed the lives of hundreds of youngsters without seeming
to do anything of the kind. Somehow she managed to feed
the children when there was nothing at home, and managed to
see that at least some of the parents were not always hungry.

Her husband, Alex Ferm, an engineer of Scandinavian origin,
came to the school every afternoon. In a corner of the room
he had placed a lathe and a workbench, and he gathered the
older boys about him to teach them to work and to instill in
them the joy and pride of work.

By themselves and with no fanfare or outside help, these two
people, themselves immigrants, did more for the morale of the
neighborhood than all the settlement institutions put together.

VI

ONE DAY I ran across a blue-eyed, blond young man in
his early twenties, who was soliciting orders for button
pictures, miniatures made from photographs. We walked up
and down hundreds of flights of stairs. He screwed up his nose
before every door, sniffed, and announced before knocking,
"Irish . . , cabbage. Hungarian . . . paprika. Brussels sprouts
and wurst . . . Germans."

At about four o'clock we stopped for a glass of wine. He
paid his turn with a crisp five dollar bill. After the third drink
he turned toward me quite belligerently and asked, <tf What do
you think of the social revolution? Yes . . . tell me, where
do you stand on the social revolution!"

It being Saturday night, when I did not work at my wrecking
job, I asked him to dinner at my home.

''Naomi, this is Jack," I said. "He wants to know where we
stand on the social revolution."

After dinner, Jack said to our youngsters, "Now, my young
comrades, it's time to go to bed."

"What is your name?" Hyperion asked.

>ck."

"Jack, will you sleep here?"

"If your parents will let me," Jack said, looking at us.

"Sure theyll let you," Gorky said. "Will you be here in the
morning?"

"Yes . . . Now go to your room, climb into your beds, close
your eyes, and sleep. Ill see you in the morning."

66

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 67

Jack talked social revolution the whole night long. The
slums of London. Poverty and its causes. Hobos. Indus-
trial workers. Music. Literature.

He was Jack London, seeking atmosphere for a chapter in
a novel.

We met again and shared many a bottle at the old "Boule-
vard" on Second Avenue, where Emma Goldman and Lincoln
Steffens listened to Jack's prediction that the coming dictator-
ship of the proletariat was around the corner. He almost
wrecked the bar when Steffens contradicted him. A lamb
when sober, he went berserk after a bottle of White Horse.

A week later, after a night in the Bowery, he knocked at my
door, his face beaten to a pulp, and spoke of the "lark" he had
had with some bums.

"Were you in a social revolution, Jack?" Hyperion asked,
climbing on his knee.

"Yes," Jack said. "The bums thought I was a bourgeois."

Some years after our first meeting, I visited Jack London at
his splendid ranch in California. He looked wasted and old.
His hair had thinned, and there were pouches under his eyes.
He had built luxurious pigstys to fatten the hogs, and also
several cottages where he housed their human counterparts,
idlers, bums, and sycophants, who fattened themselves at
London's expense, but without benefit of Christmas. Of all
the people on the ranch, George Sterling, the poet, was the only
one worth keeping, but Jack treated him with contempt and
lost no chance to humiliate him.

Everybody was drunk and vociferous before the day was
over, yet Jack cursed Sterling at the top of his voice. "The
bastard is swilling my whiskey," he said, and wouldn't let Ster-
ling have another drink until the drunken poet had agreed to
swallow two live goldfish from the fish bowl on the window
sill. George got the drink first and vomited his guts out after
he had gulped down the first fish, yet Jack made him swallow
the second one.

68 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"The bastard needs some discipline/*

The London of the famous ranch had become a sort of pasha
to a gang of intellectual bums, but was still hurraying the social
revolution.

Jack London was a great writer. What his writing lacks in
artistry and intellect is compensated for by an unusual supply
of vigor and movement. His stories proceed by leaps and
bounds. He was personally very much like his stories. He
had guts and real feeling. But he was cruel, even with him-
self, and cherished the memories of the beatings he had re-
ceived from cops and in drunken brawls.

"Boy, what a beating that was!"

As overseer on my next wrecking job, it was my duty to see
that the trucks were well loaded with wreckage and to get a
signed, itemized receipt from the drivers for everything on their
trucks, but the drivers were in the habit of throwing something,
a door, a window, or a length of lead pipe, on the trucks after
they had signed the receipt. When I attempted to stop their
pilfering, things just happened to fall on me. When we had
torn down and cleaned up the old Mouquin place on Sixth
Avenue, I was without a job again. I drew the line at working
with mixed crews of Poles and Hungarians. The accidents on
the previous job had cured me of being a peacemaker between
them.

When Bolton Hall's book, Three Acres and Liberty, based on
Henry George's single tax panacea, happiness to the world by
a different system of taxation, appeared, Naomi and I read it
with great enthusiasm.

Bolton Hall, called by Arthur Brisbane "the American Tol-
stoi," had bought a large tract of land in New Jersey and was
inviting those who cared to try out the single tax theory to
come and live on it.

At sixty, Hall was a mixture of practical idealist, business-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 69

man, lawyer, banker, artist, real estate dealer, theorist, philos-
opher, and flirt.

We rented a shack on Bolton Hall's tract for the summer.
Courtenay Lemon went to live in another shack a few hundred
feet from us. There was a brook behind our shack and across
the brook a piece of arable land. The rest of the sixty-five
acres was brush.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in which he described the Chi-
cago slaughterhouses, had confirmed me as a vegetarian. Our
children, three now, Hyperion, Gorky, and Rada, had never
seen meat, fowl, or fish on our table.

Upton Sinclair, a vegetarian and a single taxer, lived in a
single tax colony at Arden, New Jersey, after the burning down
of Helicon Hall, where Sinclair Lewis, still unknown, had been
janitor.

Having finished reading some twenty volumes of American
history and all of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and given my-
self a course in the American abolitionist movement, I planned
a journey to Arden, and from there to Fra Elbert Hubbard in
Roycroft, where he published The Philistine, when the news-
papers published a sensational story about the Sinclairs and
the tramp poet, Harry Kemp.

When Harry came to pay our "colony" a visit, I saw a tall,
broad-shouldered, lanky giant, with the eyes of a Savonarola
and the high cheekbones of a Slav, who looked and spoke like
a village priest. The Arden episode gave Kemp a great lift
with a young Russian woman, married to an American, who
howled like a mad woman after Harry left in order to let us
know how much she suffered. She even tried suicide. Some
people thought the husband callous because he wasn't over-
joyed when a neighbor saved her just in time. I was sorry she
failed. She was a pest, the worst of a half-dozen pests that
the single tax colony had attracted, not counting a few nudists,
some theosophists, and a woman who believed herself to be
Cleopatra reincarnated.

70 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Naomi furnished our shack with more taste than furniture
and bought a barrel of clay to teach the children how to model
and make topographical maps in relief. It was while teaching
them that she taught herself to model and to paint. Rion
showed great ability with clay and pencil, an ability I have
always been sorry he hasn't developed.

I planted my garden, wrote, composed some music, and gave
music lessons to the daughters of a Silesian nurseryman, two
buxom girls who wanted to learn to "make oompa oompa on
the right chords" when their father played a melody on the
zither.

I wrote two adventure stories and sold them to Munsey's
for fifty dollars each. I had no illusions about their literary
merit. I wrote to prove something to myself, that in a pinch
I could do hack-work. Having proved that, I never repeated
the performance. The pinch never seemed to be serious
enough to warrant any departure from the standard I had set.

Two months after we had moved into the shack, the garden
produced the major part of our food. We baked our own
bread in an oven I had built in back of the house. The heat
of the summer ripened the berries. The shady woods were full
of fleshy mushrooms. The Silesian nurseryman sent us all the
apples, pears, and other fruit we could use.

That whole region this side of the tracks, was inhabited by
the descendants of English Seventh-Day Adventists, all looking
very sexless though they had large families. Old lady Fernays,
a Huguenot widow of a Seventh-Day Adventist, spoke French
well, was the mother of nine grown children, farmed her land,
sold eggs and milk, and was the tax collector of the township.
When Madame Fernays was dissatisfied with her children, she
thundered against the English blood in their veins. When
they were dutiful, she spoke with pride of their English ances-
try.

Most of the houses in the neighborhood were dilapidated
farm homes. The Burgmillers, the Rogers, the Merciers, the

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 71

Goodhues, and the Bergers were the aristocracy of Stony HUL

Across the tracks, Italian families had settled in shacks on
neglected farmland, which they made productive again. The
women peddled to the neighborhood what they <ifdi/t use in
their own kitchens.

The leader of the Italian colony, Maria Lombardo, a squat
woman in her thirties, as broad as she was tall, with an enor-
mous elephantine rear on short stubby legs, liked us despite
the fact that we never bought vegetables from her.

"They got land, and they buy vegetables. Fools/' she said
of the other colonists.

When I asked her why she wore no shoes, she said, 'What's
the ma with foot? They good. Shoes they cost dollars.
Foots they cost nothing to buy, and nothing to fix."

When I asked her whether she ever went to the movies, she
said, "What' s the ma? I can have better fun for nothing. I
got a husband," and she winked broadly.

When her oldest daughter gave birth to an illegitimate child,
Maria didn't "die of shame" or order her out of die house, but
said, "He boy. He make help grandma when he grow up.
My girl she no wanna marry the man. He not much fun.
CapiccioP"

Maria was with her third husband. The first one had given
her four girls.

"I try and try. No good. I told him 'Gerade here/ Then
I marry another feller. Four boys . . . Good, eh? Then he
think he great feller . . . four boys, eh? And he no work no
more. I say "No work? . . . Gerade here/ This feller I got
now, he no good at all. No girls. No boys. I try two more
months. Then I say to him, too, 'Gerade here/ I got to have
some more childs. I got to make 'em quick. I got no time for
movie pictures. Capiccio? Sure you capiccio. You same
like me, paysano?*

A few years later Maria had built herself a big house, had two
more children, gardened sixty acres, and owned three teams of

72 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

horses, twelve goats, ten cows, and a car. The whole Lom-
bardo clan of married sons, daughters, and grandchildren lived
tinder one roof and ate bread baked in one gigantic oven under
a shed. Maria, stouter, rounder, but with shoes on, shook with
laughter when I pointed at a young man in the crowd and
asked whether he was one of her sons.

"Dto mio, dio mio . . ." she laughed, slapping my arms.
"He my new husband. I got money. I got everything. So I
got a new husband. If he no good, I get another one. I got
money. I got everything. Porca madonna. What for live?
Go movie pictures? You understand no?"

I was hailed before the local judge by the constable, on the
complaint of a neighbor that one of my sons walked about stark
naked without even a fig leaf.

"But lie did wear a fig leaf, your honor," I protested.

"Where?" the judge asked.

"On his f orehead."

"Complaint dismissed," the judge said, laughing. "Defend-
ant has complied with the letter of the law."

We didn't see much of Courtenay that summer. He was
busy writing a book and burdened with several love affairs in
Berkeley Heights and in New York at the same time.

When the leaves began to fall, our children, who had run
around naked, or almost so, the whole summer, were as brown
and as healthy as nuts.

I copied out some music I had written, two short stories, and
a long essay on Richard Wagner, and took a train to New York.
After a look at my music, die music publisher told me to write
something for the trombone, the zither, or the xylophone, of-
fered me a cigarette, talked to me in a fatherly way, and asked
me to leave my manuscript with him for a few days.

I mailed the two stories, one to McClures and the other to
Murneys, took the essay on Wagner to the New Jork Call,

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 73

where another Sunday editor was now presiding, and then went
to the East Side to snoop around.

Almost the first man I met was Joseph Barondess, later, under
Mayor Gaynor, commissioner of education, and at that time a
labor leader and a social worker. Six foot four with a splendid
head on stooped shoulders, he looked like the ideal operatic
tenor.

When we had seated ourselves in the corner of a cafe with
two glasses of tea in front of us, he said, "You love people, don t
you?"

"Well . . ?

"You like people. I know you do. I have read your stories
in the Call. The charity organization has a bunch of investiga-
tors who are heartless. I've got the right kind of a job for you.
I want you to go through the files of the applicants, pick out the
ones that have been rejected by the investigators, and reinvesti-
gate them. The job pays twenty a week. Doctor Worthman,
who is in charge, knows that most of his investigators are heart-
less and wants the job done by a man with a heart. What do
you say? Take it. It's something constructive and helpful.
It may lead to your real vocation.'*

The manner in which the applicants were handled by the in-
stitutions would have been considered inhuman in the dark
ages. The investigators were not out to help the poor, but
to uncover the petty lies, contradictions, and private secrets of
the applicants and to pry into their morals and the morals of
their relatives. The spied-upon poor were persecuted and de-
prived of all privacy once they had applied for assistance.
When there was a strike against a sweatshop, the sick and the
lame were forced by the investigators to take the places of the
strikers. The employers, themselves recent immigrants, were
as callous as the investigators. The East Side was dotted with
sweatshops, ill-ventilated, dark, cold, dingy rooms, with the
most meager and unsanitary toilet facilities. There were no

J4 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

fire escapes. No factory inspectors ever inspected those fire-
traps. No sanitation officer ever looked into the rest rooms or
cared whether there was enough light or air. Thirty per cent
of the sweatshop workers were consumptive, yet all drank from
one tin cup chained to the faucet in the hallway.

I checked on the reports of the investigators. Some male
investigators had been generous with women applicants for
charity for reasons other than their poverty. The whole busi-
ness of private philanthropy was nauseating, criminal, and
stupid.

When I wasn't investigating, inquiring, listening to heart-
rending tales, calling doctors, or buying food out of my own
pocket, I was arguing with the directors of the institution who
accused me of sentimentality and naivete.

"Don't you believe them. They are liars, cheats, and de-
generates."

The poverty-stricken immigrants told me in a babel of lan-
guages why their girls prostituted themselves, why the boys
stole, why they became killers and paupers, why, in general,
they were predatory animals.

Some of the most unsanitary houses in the city, the so-called
"lung blocks" with the largest percentage of the city's con-
sumptives, were owned by a wealthy old church. Other
blocks of houses, in which only the poorest of the poor lived,
were owned by other charitable, educational, or religious insti-
tutions that paid no tax to the city because they were nonprofit
organizations. In houses that had no bathrooms, no running
water, sick immigrants wrapped candy in fancy Christinas
boxes, made toys, knitted lace, and hemstitched expensive eve-
ning gowns ten hours a day for ten cents an hour.

When I described these conditions to the assemblyman of the
district, he told me to go back where I came from if I didn't
like it here. When I spoke to the congressman, he reported me
to the directors of the institution I worked for. When I de-
nounced the owner of a sweatshop for his inhumanity to the

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 75

immigrants, Doctor Worthman told me that this gentleman
was a generous contributor to "our institution/' and that I, and
not he was a danger to society.

"My dear man, you are as hysterical as a woman," Doctor
Worthman said, "and totally unfit for America."

At the settlements on Rivington Street and Henry Street, the
"workers" were interested in folk dances and reveled in the
local color without the slightest awareness of the filth under-
neath. A Mrs. Clark, a tall gray-haired lady, very interested
in the Poles living below Second Avenue and Fifth Street,
asked me to come to her house for supper one night and talk
to her guests afterwards.

When I was through talking, Mr. Clark said to his wife,
"Don't you think it is rather depressing to hear about all this
filth and poverty?" And turning to me, he added, "And don't
you think that these people are still better off here than they
were in their own country? They can always go back to the
filth of their own countries, you know! Nobody will stop
them."

Apologetically Mrs. Clark explained to her guests that she
had thought I would speak of the "colorful" side of the immi-
grants.

"Poor as they are, the Poles have Chopin. The Russians
have Tschaikowsky. The Hungarians have Liszt. Dear me,
dear me, they are so colorful!"

"You should have told him what you wanted him to talk
to us about," Mr. Clark said. "Really he has ruined our eve-
ning."

Naomi thought my stories unbelievable. I took her along
with me one day. She was ready to scream before the day was
over. When we came home, she hugged the children and
cried, "We must do something for all the children, so that noth-
ing like this can happen to them." Naomi was and is like that.
She cannot see an isolated case anywhere.

Charles Edison, then a young man publishing a little maga-

76 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

zine in which he printed his own poetry under the pseudonym
of Tom Thumb, one day came down to the East Side.

"What about the local color of these streets?" young Edison
asked me.

I took him to see the homes of a few applicants.

When Doctor Worthman heard who had been making the
rounds with me, he cried out, "Why didn't you bring him up
here to let me talk to him? We need contributions. We are
short of money. Who do you think pays your salary, the ap-
plicants?"

I went to see Barondess.

"What do you want me to do, change the world? The poor
are no angels. You speak of sweatshops. They are horrible,
I grant you that. But do you think the contractors and sub-
contractors are making millions? They hardly make a living.
They'd go bankrupt if they had to put in toilets and windows
and move into sanitary buildings. They, too, have families
to support. This is America."

I sent in my resignation, gave up my files, and went to Stony
Hill, in New Jersey, to breathe fresh air again. The trees were
only half-clad that early spring, and the shack was cold, but it
was clean, spacious, and didn't smell sour and sweaty. I dug
up the same garden for the second time and went to see Maria
Lombardo, who set a bottle of wine and some fresh baked
bread and cheese on the table. All the Italians across the
tracks were poor, but poverty hadn't destroyed them. Their
hands were hard and dry, and not like the hands on Cherry
Street and Avenue G, moist, soft, and cadaverous.

I was sick, sick with rage, impotence, pity, and revolt. Char-
ity wasn't even a palliative; it was one of the toys of the rich,
a pump to inflate their ego. What the manufacturers saved by
not providing sanitary conditions for the workers was spent a
thousandfold by the community on hospitals and jails,

Rion, my oldest son, taught his younger brother and his sister,

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 77

Rada, to read from the manuscript I wrote describing the evils
of institutionalized charity. When it rained and we were all
within doors, I told them that some day we should all of us
work towards the abolition of charity in the same spirit that the
abolitionists had worked for the elimination of slavery. We
spent our most intimate hours, Naomi, the children, and I, talk-
ing and planning a society without institutionalized charity,
and made many a sacred vow.

VII

HE EDITOR of a Yiddish paper agreed to accept a
JL weekly article for its English page, provided it wasn't
political or controversial.

"Be as poetical as all hell/' he advised.
I wrote about birds and flowers, children, gardens, stars, and
trees. The weekly check came regularly and paid for what
didn't grow in the garden.

The single tax colony had grown in numbers. Tucker, the
aristocrat of the colony, had enlarged his house. A lady car-
penter in overalls undertook building work on contract.

Will Crawford, one of America's most talented illustrators,
lived in the woods in a house that he had built with his own
hands and filled with Americana, arrows, bows, coyote skins,
squaw dresses, silver bracelets, the earliest editions of Ameri-
can books, and photographs of early settlers. Uncle Bill lived
alone, ate, slept, worked, and cooked in one room, and loved
company. The coffeepot was always on the stove. Bill
Crawford's stories were like genealogical trees. They started
with a root and then spread out branches and twigs and more
branches and more twigs that twined and intertwined them-
selves. By the time Uncle Bill had told one story he had told
a hundred, and he always wound up by asking, "Now, where
didj start from? What was I going to say? Pour me a little
more coffee, half a cup. So. Well, it doesn't matter where

78

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 79

you start from, does it? What the hell does it matter where
one starts from/'

Bill Crawford spoke of Emerson, Walt Whitman, and
Thoreau, of the Civil War, of Lincoln, and of the North and
the South. He was America,

On starry nights he'd lug out an old telescope and call the
children of the colony to look at the stars.

He was Uncle Bill to men and women his own age, to chil-
dren, and to the littlest tots. He found time to make dozens of
bows and arrows, embellish them, build a target, clear a field,
gather the youngsters of the colony about him, teach them to
shoot, and tell them Indian and early settler stories. At night
I often read to Uncle Bill what I had written during the day
for my book about charity.

"Now," he would say, "it's good English, but people don't
talk good English in America. Listen to the way I talk. It's
bad English, but it's good American. And you want to write
for Americans, don't you? Well, then. , . ." And Uncle Bill
was right nine times out of ten.

Another single tax colonist was Thome Smith, the future
author of Topper and all the other excruciatingly funny books.
At that time he was writing ads for women's undergarments.
He lived in a shack with his wife and two children, his wife's
sister, her husband, and their two children.

Thorne Jimmy, as we called him was a frail and delicate
fellow. "Une file manquee" my wife called him. Jimmy
climbed an old scrub oak in the woods whenever he felt like
writing, but before long his wife or his sister-in-law's voice
would ring sharply through the camp.

"Jimmy! Where are you, Jimmy? Telephone, Jimmmmm-
myy."

He often came to our bungalow to hide and do a little work
and a little secret drinking. He was Topper, witty, fantastic,
with no consciousness of what was real and what otherworldly.
He cared little for single tax, socialism, or anarchism. It was

80 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

no novelty to see Thome Smith on a Saturday afternoon in the
nude with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a wad of paper
in the other running to the woods to climb his scrub oak.

When in his cups, he went from door to door, clucking like
a hen, "Cluck, cluck, cluck/' to gather his brood.

Jimmy wept when he read some of the chapters I had writ-
ten about charity. "Gripes, I'd better do something. I don't
want my children to fall into their claws."

Another colonist was a young boy called Jimmy Cagney, a
cocky, saucy gamin and Uncle Bill's greatest admirer. In later
years, when Uncle Bill was ill and feeble, Cagney brought him
out to Hollywood, put him up in his own house, paid doctor
and hospital bills, and then set him to work on some panels in
his house,

I learned much about America in Uncle Bill's shack. Indian
friends and people from Alaska and Seattle, gold miners and
fishermen just dropped in on Bill when they were in the East.

Bit by bit the story of Crawford's own life floated out from
the maze of anecdotes and tales. Famous and successful as
an artist, he had lived a riotous life for many years. Suddenly,
one morning, while in his heyday, he took stock of himself and
returned to the woods. Often while telling a story, wandering
through half a dozen other stories, as was his manner, he'd sud-
denly stop for a moment, look vacantly into space, murmur to
himself the name of a certain woman, sigh and say, "Oh, well,
where was I? Yes. Well, that night I had just come from the
theater . . ," and go on telling the story of an Indian friend.

Hyperion versified:

"Uncle Bill
With his quill
Is the nicest man I know.
Uncle Bill
With his arrow
Sees a bird and shoots tomorrow."

Our daughter, Rada, who was very little, would listen to one

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 81

of Uncle Bill's stories, then touch his hand to make sure that
he was real and say, "There really is an Uncle Bill . . . really,
really. Isn't tjiere?"

There certainly was, and still is, an Uncle Bill, and we, the
Bercovicis, are all happier for having known him. When we
touched him, we touched some of the best in this country.

"Now well it's this way. Let's look at it from a distance
first and work up close to it. Now about these people who
say It serves England right/ What's in their minds, the Hes-

. e\>9

siansr

Just before I reached my thirtieth year, a strange thing hap-
pened to me. I became aware of unusual physical power in
my body, a power that clamored to be used. I tried to work
off some of it cutting trees and splitting wood, but after eight
or ten hours of the most violent exercise, I hadn't even begun
to tap the resources of that strength.

My strength had always been better than average. At eight-
een I won the long distance miming championship in France.
When I was nineteen, I pulled the second prize for long dis-
tance running at the Championnat de France.

I had done a little wrestling and dueling before I came to
the United States, but there never had been so much strength
in my body as there was that year in Berkeley Heights. It
made me terribly nervous and fidgety and eager to pick a quar-
rel with anyone who looked as if he would give me a workout.

One night I went out into the field to do some bending exer-
cises. Bending and stretching I fell into a definite rhythm and
suddenly discovered myself dancing to it. From then on, for
the rest of the summer, I waited until everybody was asleep,
then went out into the fields and danced. When we had guests
in the house and I couldn't go out to dance, I'd fret and become
very nervous. As a matter of fact, I lived only for the few
hours of secret dancing at night in the field. No one in the
house knew what I was doing.

82 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

My weekly article for the English page of the Yiddish paper
compelled me to go to New York every so often that summer.
Quite by accident, one day I met an old Gypsy and his wife,
relatives of Mama Tinka, who had come to America. Over-
joyed, they took me to their home, a cellar basement on Riving-
ton Street near the East River where I met a swarm of other
Gypsies who had come from Roumania recently. As far as
the Gypsies were concerned, America had just been discovered.
They wondered that they hadn't heard of it until then. Now
they couldn't make money fast enough to send for all their
relatives in Roumania, Russia, Hungary, and other parts of
Europe. There were already thousands of them who lived all
over the city, before spreading over the rest of the country.
The Roumanian Gypsies lived close to the people of Roumanian
origin in New York, the Russian Gypsies close to the people of
Russian origin, and so on, each Gypsy clan close to the people
of their own origin.

Before I knew it, I was their bureau of information and ad-
viser. Almost at once clan after clan was depending on my
advice. When they didn't see me in town for a few days,
they'd come to find me out in Berkeley Heights, a dozen or a
hundred of them, clamoring that I had abandoned them. I
was often embarrassed by their demands upon me and my time,
but was always flattered and pleased by their confidence in me.
What pleased me most was their appeal to me in the name of
my father, who had always been friendly to them.

"You are Conu Yancu's son. You must help us. What
would your father have done, eh? He would have said, 'We
must help the Tziganes/ "

They made up stories and legends about father which put
me under obligation as his worthy son. When I came down
to their cellars, the women sang and danced for me and smoth-
ered me with their love and adulation.

When Stana or Lena's wedding was about to be celebrated,
her mother would tell me:

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 83

Konack, she wanted to marry you, but . . ." and
Lena or Stana would cry on my shoulders until I promised to
come to the wedding.

I learned Calo all over again and how to play at their wed-
dings. I learned to play the violin all over again, to play it
Gypsy fashion, so as to play at their festivities and be part of
them and spend nights in their company.

We often drove out at night on the other side of the Hudson
to Nyack to an encampment near the river in order to sing and
dance to our hearts' content. I sat by their campfires and
listened to the stories of their old men and of the Daias, the
old women ? and told stories in my turn. They brought back
memories of my early childhood and with them fresh courage
and a freer outlook upon life. The whole Gypsydom in New
York opened its heart to me, and I gave myself to it in return.
I shouldered many of their troubles in those days, troubles they
ran into because they were unacquainted with the laws and the
customs of this country. One or another was often arrested for
telling fortunes or for not sending his children to school or for
disturbing the peace.

Half a dozen Gypsy women having a friendly talk on the
corner of Second Avenue and Houston Street disturbed the
peace. When they merely greeted each other, it looked to
strangers as if they were about to cut each other's throats.
They couldn't understand why they weren't allowed to make all
the noise they liked in their own cellars; they paid rent for
them.

As for their children going to school, whose business was it
whether they went to school or not, anyhow? The dantchiuks
didn't like school.

I tried to explain my friends to the police, to the landlords,
and to the truant officers, and did my best to make them comply
with the laws of the country when they got married or when a
child was born, but they were like children and happy when
they could cheat the law. And they crowded together.

84 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Though they had rented separate cellars, five families would
live in one for a week and then go to live in the next one.
When one of them received a letter, they all went in search of
me, combing the city, and followed me through the streets to
the home of the one who had received the letter* Good news
had to be celebrated with dance, wine, and song. Bad news
had to be drowned in dance, wine, and song.

The men were excellent coppersmiths, and the young women
made fabulous amounts of money telling fortunes to the
wealthy as soon as they had learned a little English, while the
older ones told fortunes to the poor on the East Side. At one
of those weddings in a hall on Avenue A, I waded ankle deep
in candy and drank only champagne. The guests, over five
hundred, feasted three days and three nights without interrup-
tion, eating, drinking, and singing all the time. That wedding
cost ten thousand dollars and was paid for by the sister of the
bride, who had saved all that money in a little over a year.

At the end of the festivities, the Gypsies hired ten carriages
from an undertaker, decorated them with flowers and ribbons,
and drove me home to Berkeley Heights in state. I shall never
forget that ride all alone in a carriage and covered with flowers
up to my knees. Every few miles or so the procession stopped
at the side of the road to drink champagne direct from the
bottles. It was late at night when the carriages stopped in
front of our little home, but that didn't matter. Naomi and
the children were awakened, and the festivities might still be
going on today, if I had not fallen asleep, exhausted.

I needed such sudden and violent relaxations. I grew stale
when I didn't get them. I still need them. When everything
goes too smoothly, I become nervous and ill. I have still much
too much energy for it to be used up in the usual pursuits of
Me. No matter how hard I work, after a while a certain ac-
cumulated quantity of energy spills over, has to spill over. I
have often asked myself whether whatever creative power I

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 85

have isn't simply tie result of an oversupply of energy and
vitality!

A wealthy middle-aged Jewish jeweler, a slight man with
very intense eyes, came up to my table in a cafe on the
East Side one night, and said, sitting down opposite me, "I
think you could give me some disinterested advice."

"On what?" I asked,

"I am a rich man. I don't have millions, but I am a rich
man. I came here fifteen years ago and have made a lot of
money. I am married, have no children, and I will never have
any. What can I do to perpetuate my memory? My name is
Kaplan, Moritz Kaplan."

He spoke as simply as all that.

"What made you ask my advice?"

"Can't you tell what? I have been here many times hoping
to meet you. Somebody told me you drop in here occasionally.
And I knew you wouldn't tell me to give my money to charity.
I know what you think of that I want something done with
my money while I am yet alive. I want, so to speak, to super-
vise my own monument."

On the spur of the moment I said, "Why don't you publish
some books that would otherwise not be published, cultural
books."

"Now you are talking!" he said, leaning forward. "What
books?"

"Balzac's."

"Balzac. . . . Balzac. . . . Who is he, an acquaintance of
yours?"

I laughed and then told him who Balzac was, and recounted
briefly, very briefly, some of the stories, the scope, and the
power of the French author. After a while, Mr. Kaplan ex-
cused himself and went to a telephone booth to talk to his
wife.

86 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"I told my wife I'll be late/' he informed me when he came
back to the table.

We were still at it at three o'clock in the morning. After a
last glass of tea,, we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge,
stopped on the Brooklyn side for a cup of coffee, and talked
Balzac and more Balzac.

At six in the morning, Mr. Kaplan said, "I live not far from
here. Come home with me for breakfast and meet my wife,
and we'll do something to let that Balzac carve me out a monu-
ment. I am excited about the Pere Goriot story. I want
my wife to hear it, too. And Cousin Bette . . . And Modesto
Mignon."

'Won't your wife be angry with you for bringing a guest to
the house so early in the morning?" I asked.

Mrs. Kaplan was in the kitchen when we came in. The
breakfast table was all set. A good-looking woman in her early
forties, she received me as an old friend who had dropped in
casually. The apartment was in a modest house and was fur-
nished with the standard things of a Second Avenue furniture
store. During the breakfast Mr. Kaplan told his wife one of
the Balzac stories I had told him.

"I know the story," she said, proudly tossing "back her head.
"It's by Balzac, the French writer. I read the story in Rus-

* 99

sian.

"So you know about him," the husband said, looking at her.
"There, you live with a wife fifteen years, and you don't know
that she knows Balzac! What other secrets is she keeping from
me!"

Mrs. Kaplan was as anxious as her husband to perpetuate
their memories, and agreed that to publish Balzac would make
a fine monument.

"And who is to translate him?" she asked.

'Who, but our friend here!" Kaplan answered, looking at me.
"How many pages could you translate into Yiddish in one day?
Four, five, ten? Tell me."

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 87

We agreed that five pages a day was a good average. He
offered two dollars a page and wanted the deal closed there
and then.

"I want to go to my shop with this affair off my mind, my
dear Konrad. I am a busy man. Well publish two books a
year. We'll do it in great style. Each book a monument in
itself. At this rate you have work for fifteen years or so ...
Done? Two dollars a page. Thirty pages a week. Let's
shake hands on that."

I agreed . . . not without a shudder at the thought of the
colossal enterprise.

The wife was jubilant. "I won't feel so bad about being
childless/* she said, putting a warm hand on my arm. "You
are giving us children . . . yes . . . children/' and she wept.

I was about to leave when the wife called her husband aside
and spoke to him softly.

"Of course, of course," he said, going into the adjoining room.
When he came back, he had four fifty-dollar bills in his hand.

"This is on account of our deal. A general deposit. As soon
as you are done with the first thirty pages, send them to me, or
bring them if you care to meet us again, and 111 pay you for
the work. The two hundred will stay to the end. . . ."

The woman was even happier than the man and begged me
to telephone to my wife and invite her to come to Brooklyn
for supper. She wanted to celebrate, Naomi came and
brought the children. The Kaplans said they had never been
so happy, and Moritz gave each of the children a silver watch
before we left.

I began the work joyously enough. I loved Balzac. I also
felt relieved of financial worries. Sixty dollars a week was a
fortune. Naomi bought more clay, paint, brushes, and canvas,
and began to model and paint seriously every day. We bought
a piano, and I played and composed a little every day and
taught Rada the rudiments of piano music. I varied my day

88 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

by digging in the vegetable garden, cutting wood, and going
out riding for an hour or so every morning on a horse I had
bought. There were days in which I worked twenty hours at
a stretch and other days in which I couldn't do a single page.

The Kaplans wanted to see me often. When I visited them,
they plagued me to stay for lunch and dinner and to sleep there.

When I had finished translating the first book, Pre Goriot,
Kaplan showed me a transcribed copy of my translation in
beautiful calligraphic script, done in three colors, red, black,
and green.

"My wife and I have also been working/* he said proudly.

I noticed immediately that they had left out many descrip-
tive passages in their transcription.

"Why have you left out those passages?" I asked.

"They are not interesting. Nobody would read them.
Why spend useless money to print them?" he answered.

I protested, and they reluctantly agreed to restore the elimi-
nated passages. As I read on, I noticed that they had im-
proved upon Balzac and added a page here and there of their
own invention. When I remonstrated, Mrs. Kaplan said that
they had read their version to several friends who had wept
during the reading.

"You mustn't improve upon Balzac," I told them.

"He is dead, isn't he?'* Kaplan asked.

"Yes, physically, but his books are alive, and they are his
children. You are killing them. You are making a pogrom on
Balzac. I won't stand for it."

"But Gott behuttel We don't want to make a pogrom on
Balzac's children, God forbid! We wanted to dress them up,
make them more pleasant," they both cried out. *We'll tran-
scribe your copy exactly and publish it as it is. To tell us, who
have lost all our dear ones in a pogrom, that we are pogrom-
tchikesl" Mrs. Kaplan repeated again and again.

They were quite cold to me when I brought them some sixty

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 89

pages of Modeste Mignon in Yiddish. Their enthusiasm had
cooled. They weren't interested in the bringing to life of chil-
dren in whose making they hadn't collaborated.

They had just learned to play bridge and had little time to
spare for literature.

When I brought the next sixty pages of Modeste Mignon,
Mr. Kaplan said that he had informed himself about the cost of
printing, paper, and binding. Manufacturing costs were rising
every day. And he would have to get the work done in a
union shop, otherwise the men in his jewelry shop would go
out on strike.

'Why beat around the bush?'* the wife said. "Tell him the
truth, Moritz. I went to a great professor, and he said that he
can fix me up so I could have children. You finish this book.
If I cannot have children, we'll go on. But if I can have chil-
dren of my own flesh and blood, there isn't any sense in having
paper children. Don't you agree with me?"

A year later she had a child of her own.

Somewhere, in a trunk in Brooklyn, there are some seven
hundred pages of Balzac in Yiddish.

I wrote two Gypsy stories and sent them out. The maga-
zines returned them promptly.

While translating Balzac, I had composed a symphonic poem,
which, in my naivete, I offered to G. Schirmer, Inc., the music
publishers. A month later the manager of the publishing
house wrote to inform me that he had sent my poem to Franz
Arens, who was the conductor of the People's Symphony Or-
chestra.

Weeks later Arens invited me to his studio on Fifth Avenue,
received me very cordially, and asked me out to lunch with him
and his son, who was his manager. He told me that he liked
my tone poem and would give it a first performance the follow-
ing season, He suggested some changes, and I agreed to make
them although I was not convinced that they were needed.

90 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

When I came home, I burst in upon my family, shouting and
singing and hugging them again and again.

"You should stick to your music/' my wife said. "I have al-
ways told you not to spread yourself out thinly over too many
things."

Unable to sell any of the Gypsy stories, I found a night job
with a wrecking company and worked part of the day at the
changes Arens had suggested. While digging into brick walls
with my crowbar, I thought out fresh musical phrases and de-
veloped them. I didn't give a damn when the Poles and Hun-
garians fought and maimed each other, and I cared nothing for
what was going on in the street. I had work of my own to do.

A month later, when I brought the manuscript to Arens, the
studio was in the turmoil of moving. Arens took the manu-
script from my hands, placed it on a littered table, assured me
that he would look into it as soon as he had settled down in his
new studio, and left me to talk to his son, who was busy with
the movers.

I tried to hide my disappointment when I came home.
Naomi had one look at me, raising her eyes from the easel on
which she was working, and asked, "What happened?"

I told her.

'Well, you didn't expect him to study your poem while you
were there, did you?"

"No, of course not. But he was so noncommittal! Besides
I have no copy of the manuscript. What if it gets lost?"

"It won't," she consoled.

The nights at the wrecking job were awfully long after that.
Every morning I waited for the mailman before going to bed,
and I could not sleep because Arens hadn't written. And be-
cause I didn't sleep, I was often cross with Naomi and the chil-
dren.

One day Rada told me, "You look like a bad man. We'll
never play with you any more."

Two months later the People's Symphony Orchestra an-

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 91

nounced its program for the following season. My piece was
not included. I went to see Arens.

"Hello/' young Arens said, looking up from his desk. "We
lost your manuscript. It must have been mislaid in the mov-
ing. Do you have a copy? No? Too bad! It will probably
turn up one of these days."

I asked to see his father.

"He is very busy just now. I'll let you know when and if I
have found it/' he said, burying his head in the pile of papers on
his desk.

I walked to the door as if on feet of lead. I felt whipped
and shocked. I went back again to young Arens and de-
manded to speak to his father in such a tone that I was taken in
to see him. I didn't say a word. I just broke down and wept.

Arens dismissed the whole matter lightly, as one of those
things that happen every day, and called me a child for worry-
ing so.

"You'll write other and better things/' he consoled me.
"Some day your manuscript will turn up, and maybe you won't
be displeased that it hasn't been played."

My months of expectation and hope didn't seem to mean any-
thing to him. And why should they have meant anything to
him? His expectations and hopes had not been dashed. I
had been living with the dream of hearing that poem played for
the first time by an orchestra I had heard hourly in my imagina-
tion.

"It will turn up some day when youll least expect it," he con-
soled me. "Go home and work some more. Let us see some-
thing else. It was a very interesting work, as I remember it.
Goodbye."

I went to see my Gypsy friends and got drunk with them.
This time I refused to listen to their troubles and made them
listen to mine. Within an hour there were a hundred Gypsies
in the cellar of Petru to weep with me.

Let me say now that Arens was a kindly man and really de-

92 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

voted to the cause of music in America. But he was somewhat
volatile. He had been enthusiastic about my poem, but he
wasn't heartbroken when it was lost.

VIII

WE MOVED back to New York where I worked at inter-
vals as a street car conductor, a house wrecker, and a
house painter. Later I wound up as a night watchman in a
jewelry factory on Maiden Lane which was owned by two
middle-aged Hollanders. About midnight one of the partners
would come in with a lady friend and spend some time in the
office. He always gave me a half dollar or a dollar with the in-
junction not to mention the midnight visit to anyone. I left
that job when the partners began accusing each other of theft.

Benito Petroni, a stone carver, a philosophical anarchist, and
the father of many sons, three of whom were born in New
York and none of whom could speak English, gave me a job in
his shop in East New York where he and his sons worked.

One of the sons leaned toward communism and subscribed
to an Italian communist paper printed in Milan. Another son
was a Kropotkinist, an anarchistic communist. The oldest son
shared his father's individualistic philosophy. The disputes
and discussions to the accompaniment of the thump, thump of
heavy mallets and the brittle sound of hard steel chisels upon
stone lasted the whole day.

Every two hours Signora Petroni would appear in the work-
ing shed with a pitcher and hand each of us a generous glass of
goat's milk to wash down the stone dust in our throats. We
lunched in the kitchen on heavy minestrone soup and polenta
with cheese. Signora Petroni, buxom, taU, looking much

94 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

younger than her age in spite of a slight mustache under her
nose, never permitted anyone to make an incorrect statement.

Other Italians of the neighborhood would drop in evenings
to share dinner with the Petronis. Each one brought some-
thing along, wine, bread, or cheese, Naomi and the children
came from New York almost every evening to dine with the
Petronis. Rion and Gorky were so fond of my Italian friends
that they always cried when we took them home. There were
sometimes as many as twenty people at the table, and the dis-
cussions, heated and loud, went on until after midnight. In
the end we all sang the Internationale, agreed on the main prin-
ciples of philosophical anarchism, hugged and kissed each
other, and drank a last glass of vino standing at the door.

It took me several weeks to acquire the knack of not "stran-
gling" the mallet, but letting it fall of its own weight on the
stone. Each one of the Petronis had a different rhythm. The
older Petroni's mallet strokes were short and staccato in three-
quarter time. His oldest son had a legato stroke in four-quar-
ter time. At the end of the day father and sons shook hands,
hugged each other, and stood in line to kiss Signora Petroni on
the cheeks.

Caught in the vibrant mesh of the Petroni family, I worked
with great gusto. That was the healthy life for which I had
longed in America. My hammer stroke was now legato, like
that of Octavio, the oldest son, whose girl friend, a Jewish girl
of the neighborhood and a rabbf s daughter, visited him at work
and sat beside us listening, talking, or singing.

It was all very ideal. But after three months of stone cut-
ting I became hard of hearing. I heard very well in the noise
of the shop, but was almost deaf in the comparative quiet of my
home. So I had to give up stone cutting.

To make the change complete, I attached myself to Petra's
Gypsies, Calos from my own country, and traveled with them
over New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The sound of the violin,

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 95

of dancing feet, of tie many nuances of the language of the
Gypsies, in time gave ine back my hearing.

When, brown and hard, I returned to my family, I found that
in my absence they had received fifty-five dollars from Mun-
sey's for a short story I had signed with a pseudonym.

Sholem Asch, fresh from Poland then, looked me up to ex-
press his admiration for some of my stories he had read, and
invited me and my wife to his home the coming Saturday eve-
ning.

Abraham Cahan, who was among the guests, promptly of-
fered me a job as music critic on the Forward and asked me to
come to his office the following Monday to settle the matter
definitely.

"You must not waste your energies on Gypsies/' he said.
"We need you on the Forward! 9

Before he left, he asked me not to forget to call Monday at
one o'clock to lunch with him and be introduced to the staff.

Mrs. Asch hugged me and my wife, saying that she was
happy for Sholem's sake and because I was really needed on
the Forward.

"Sholem won't be like in a wilderness there anymore/'

On Monday at one o'clock Cahan's secretary, whose desk
was at the door of the sanctum sanctorum, informed me that he
knew nothing of my lunch appointment with his boss.

"He has said nothing to me about expecting anyone for
lunch. As a matter of fact, he has already had his lunch."

Just then Cahan came out, took my hand between his limp
fingers, shook it absent-mindedly, and asked at the top of his
voice, "What can I do for you?"

"But you asked me to lunch with you!" I stammered.

"I have already had my lunch/' he said, and he moved away
to talk to one of the rewrite men at a desk.

"I didn't ask for this appointment," I said loudly, so that the
staff could hear me. "I didn't ask for this appointment. You
invited me. I didn't ask you to invite me."

96 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

I found out later why I had been treated so shabbily.
Sholem Asch and Cahan had had one of their frequent quarrels
that very morning, and the great socialist had hit back at Asch
through me.

Shortly afterward I had two offers, one from an Italian
weeldy in New York edited by Ugo D'Anunzio, and the other
from a Montreal Yiddish paper to write a daily story, edit the
English page, and cover the theater and concert halls, all for
twenty dollars a week. I accepted the Montreal offer.

I kept my job on the Canadian paper three months, three
months of squabbles with the editor-in-chief and the owner.

A concert of my own music in Montreal got me an engage-
ment for another concert in Toronto. When I returned to
Montreal, I was invited to organize and direct the choir of the
Workingmen's Circle. This in turn led me to organize a choir
of five hundred children. The first concert of my choir filled
the Monument National, the largest hall in the city. The pro-
ceeds of this concert and the ones which followed went to the
fund of the Jewish Sunday School.

After the third of these concerts, Horace Traubel, Walt
Whitman's biographer, came backstage to congratulate me.
White-haired and blue-eyed, Horace looked like a composite
picture of an idealized Mark Twain and Albert Einstein.
When he wasn't talking literature or poetry, he was as Rabelai-
sian as Rabelais. He had a tremendous appetite for life, ate
and drank at all hours of the day and night, and worked at all
hours. While he edited the Conservatory a monthly magazine
published in Philadelphia, he lived with friends here and
there when he was not at home in Camden, New Jersey.

Horace was an inveterate baseball fan and a great music
lover, and carried on a vast correspondence with hundreds of
people all over the globe. He had already published several
books, including Chants Communal and Optimos, and was
spending the early morning hours between three and five on

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 97

a new volume of philosophical dissertations. He was as Ameri-
can as corn and prairie buffalo. Although of a different tem-
perament, he was very much like Bill Crawford, always spoke
of Whitman as Walt and Emerson as Ralph, and used an Eng-
lish that was almost Biblical in its directness and purity.

Horace, my wife, and I met every night after midnight in a
little cafe and talked until two or three o'clock; that is, Horace
talked about his years with Whitman. He had lived with the
gray poet during the last ten years of his life when Whitman
was partly paralyzed, had run Whitman s printing shop for him
in Camden, and been Whitman's apprentice, nurse, cook,
friend, slave, amanuensis, and manager.

Horace's hosts in Montreal, the Balms, often joined our
talking feasts. The husband was the manager of a bank, and
his wife was a fine composer.

Meanwhile winter had set in in Montreal. The snowstorms
were so severe that my pupils couldn't all come. With my legs
wrapped in blankets, I wrote up anew my experiences as an
investigator for the charity institution.

One morning, looking out of the window, I saw a hatiess,
coatless man fighting the blizzard blowing from Mount Royal.
It was Horace.

"How is the book coming?" he asked, as he came in and be-
fore the icicles on his mustache had melted. "Let's see what
you have done/*

I gave him what I had ready and left him alone in the room.
When I came back an hour later, he said:

"Have no pity on the wolves. It's good. Keep it so to the
end. Hit straight. Put no curves on your ball. 7 ' And he rose
to go.

"Don't go yet," I pleaded.

"If I stay, you won't work. But if you let me talk to Naomi
*vhfle you work, I'll stay," .

The whole family was in a fever of work that winter. Rion,
he oldest, eleven years old, was writing a novel. Gorky was

98 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

rewriting some poems he had read, and Rada was writing at
least one poem a day. It was indoor weather. We knew
very few people. It was good to work, earn what was ample
for our needs, and have something left over after the rent and
the grocery bills were paid.

I finished the book early in the spring, and Horace took the
manuscript with him when he left Montreal. A month later
his publishers asked me to come to New York and sign a con-
tract. I took the next train.

Some months later Horace wrote to tell me that the pub-
lishers had shown the manuscript of my book to Doctor Worth-
man, the man in charge of the institution I had worked for,
and that he had dissuaded them from publishing it. However,
Horace had taken the manuscript to another publisher and was
hoping for the best.

Disgusted by this new disappointment, Naomi said, "I want
to go back to France. We have been in America long
enough/'

Two weeks later she and the three children were on board a
transatlantic steamer. I remained behind to wind up some af-
fairs. That was the spring of 1914. Two months later Naomi
wrote that there was war in the air and that the children
wanted to come back to America. They were all back the
month before the war broke out.

I was a pacifist. I was certain that if the plain people of
Germany, France, and England were given a chance to talk
the matter over, there wouldn't ever be any war. Why should
people kill each other because a fool or a spy had shot an arch-
duke?

But the war did break out. That war would have broken
out if the archduke had not been shot Germany goes to war
against someone when she is ready. War making is a major
part of German industry in fact, the major German industry.

An anti-war meeting, called by the socialists of Montreal,

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 99

packed a hall with Germans, sprinkled with French, English,
Jews, and Russians. The first speaker, a Frenchman, lashed
out mercilessly at the French bourgeoisie and the English
capitalists and held them responsible for the war. The chair-
man of the meeting, a German orthopedist, nodded his head in
approval as long as the Frenchman denounced the French and
the English capitalistic governments, but when the speaker
lashed out with equal vigor at the Germans, the orthopedist
disapproved violently, leaped from his chair, pushed the
speaker aside and in German thundered imprecations at the
French and the English who had the audacity to make war on
the Germans, a superior race. My wife and I looked at each
other in amazement. We had come to hear a denunciation of
war and not of the French and the English. On the way home
we read in the latest war bulletins in the window of a news-
paper office that the French had stopped the Germans at the
Marne. Elated beyond words, my wife and I sang the Mar-
seillaise on the street at the top of our voices.

The following day many Frenchmen who had been present
at the antiwar meeting the night before went to their consulate
and asked to be repatriated. The speech of the orthopedist
was sending them back to France to fight the Germans.

Rion, who was eleven years old, got into some of my old
clothes and went to the French consul to say that he was a
Frenchman and was ready to defend his country. Rada
argued that he couldn't possibly join the army because he was
a vegetarian. With great fortitude, Rion announced that he
would consent to eat meat for the duration of the war.

Catholic priests denounced pagan France and said that the
Lord had decreed the conquest of France to punish her for her
transgressions. When one of the priests sat down after such
a speech, I cried out, "Father Mercier means to say that the
Germans are the scourge of God. I fully agree with him.' 1

The result was pandemonium. I fought my way to the
door through a mass of pacifists who were striking out at ine*

100 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

With clothes torn to shreds and face and arms lacerated and
bleeding, I came home from the meeting of the pacifists,
washed, dressed afresh, and went to the French consul to volun-
teer for the French army. Naomi was in full agreement.

"Go. We'll get along somehow. You needn't worry. Ill
see that the children have food and shelter."

She was a disappointed woman when I came back to tell
her that the consulate had only taken my name and address, but
said, "Well, if you can't go to fight the Germans in France,
you'll have to fight them here."

She was already doing her share of fighting. She was talk-
ing on the street corners in the French section, where it was as
dangerous to speak up for the Allies as in Germany. For some
reason the French Canadians were anti-French, more so than
anti-English. All the Canadian priests were on the German
side of the fence.

I neglected my pupils and lost them. The choir I had or-
ganized hired another leader. All this, however, was unim-
portant to me at the moment. What mattered was that the
Russians had bogged down in the marshes of Tannenberg, that
the French counterattack after the Marne had also bogged
down, and that the English were too slow to follow up advan-
tages when they had them.

Despite his opposition to the war, the German orthopedist
socialist was waxing rich, manufacturing crutches and wooden
limbs for the Canadian wounded.

"I don't care who wins the war. In the end there will be a
social revolution to wipe out all frontiers between nations and
races," Horace Traubel said to me.

And the Balins and his other friends believed the same. The
German socialists had prepared the terrain for the German
armies well.

Montreal was gray and slushy. New recruits were being
drilled in front of our windows, and the sound of their boots

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 101

squashing in and out of the mud pursued me day and night.
One night at the house of some friends, Naomi said unexpect-
edly, "We have come to say goodbye."

"Where are you going? When? Why?" they asked.

"On the first train in the morning," I said. "Isn t it so?" I
asked, looking at Naomi and divining her thoughts.

"Yes, on the first train, eleven twenty."

"When are you coming back?" our friends asked.

"We are not coming back," I answered.

"And the furniture and things?"

"They are yours if you want them," Naomi said.

"We are taking only our trunks. We don't care what hap-
pens to the rest," I said, feeling very superior.

I was on the East Side of New York the day after our ar-
rival. Rion, Gorky, and Rada went out for a walk, hand in
hand, but wound up at the French consulate to ask to be en-
listed for the duration of the war. When the consul asked
Rada, who was seven, what she thought she could do in a war,
she answered, "I want to serve as an example, to teU the French-
men, 'See, I am only seven years old and I have come from
America to fight for France/ "

Opposed to Czarist Russia, the Jewish liberals, as well as the
non- Jewish radicals, were either openly pro-German or anti-
war. It didn't matter to them that France and England would
be wiped off the map by a German victory. The important
thing was to see Russia defeated.

Few, if any, American radicals, liberals, socialists, Democrats,
or Republicans paid any heed to the danger or tried to explain
to the immigrants the situation from the American point of
view.

Aleister Crowley, a renegade Englishman; Viereck; and
Ernst Hanfstangel were behind the peace meetings of the anti-
war societies secretly subsidized by the German embassy.
Von Papen, Captain Boy-Ed, and such Irishmen as they could

102 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

hire or pervert, even James Larkin, the famous Irish labor
leader, then in New York, spoke and wrote for them. Years
later, Larkin told how Hanfstangel had asked him to procure
hands willing to blow up our ammunition factories.

One evening I noticed a short, middle-aged, mustached man
having a copious dinner in the company of some ladies in a
Roumanian restaurant on Second Avenue. He wore a flowered
vest, a heavy watchchain, spats over patent leather shoes, a
three-inch-high collar, and a polka-dotted oxford tie, and
looked like a dressed-up jockey. My table faced his. When
I was the only other guest remaining in the restaurant, the man
came over to my table and introduced himself, "I am Frank
Harris. Come over to my table. You are a Roumanian. I
know Roumania. I have drunk Roumanian wines, and slept
with Roumanian women. They are both good, each in their
own way. The men are horrible. Come over to my table and
prove the contrary or confirm my judgment/*

He said all this at the top of his voice, with one eye on the
guests at his own table.

"Go back to your own table and stay there," I advised him.

"You wouldn't talk to me like that if you knew to whom you
are talking/' he said.

"Yes, I know who you are. You are the author of The Bomb,
a well-written bad novel/'

"I wrote The Bomb in two weeks/' he said, sitting down
somewhat nettled. "But have you read my book on Shake-
speare? It is the best ever written. My Contemporary Por-
traits are unequaled in any literature. To know me only by
The Bomb is to know the Bible by the "begats'; is to know the
perfume of a woman's odor by the sweat from under her arm-

.. 99

pits.

The little jockey was "high," but fascinating. He told me
what the Prince of Wales had told him, and what he had told
the Prince of Wales, on certain occasions; what Shaw had told

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 103

him and what he had answered; and how he had tried to
smuggle Oscar Wilde out of England, and why Wilde had
balked at the last moment. He suddenly remembered his
other friends and shouted across the room the truth about
Wilde from, so to speak, the horse's mouth. After four or five
hours of incessant self-puffing, Harris finally asked me, "And
to whom have I been talking aH this time?"

Harris 7 braggadocio prejudiced me against him. I felt
ashamed for his sake when the women snickered behind his
back and winked at each other.

"We all know you are a great man, but you don't seem to
believe it ... or you wouldn't be reminding yourself all the
time at the top of your voice/' I said, and left him to his friends.

I used my mornings to roam the streets and the market
places, stop at this and that little cafe along the wharf, sit on
park benches, talk to pushcart vendors on Mulberry Street, and
visit Syrian and Armenian rug dealers on Rector and Wash-
ington Streets.

Poles below First Avenue knew me well enough to invite
me to their weddings, which nearly always ended up with a
little shooting. No matter which girl was married, there was
always a disappointed lover. Eventually we moved to Beek-
man Place, before it became fashionable and hoity toity. In
those days the Czechs of New York gathered nightly in the
Sokols of the neighborhood to drill and to work for the inde-
pendence of their homeland.

The Poles, too, were working for their independence, but
they were already fighting among themselves as to which party
should govern Poland when Poland was free, and were dis-
cussing whether they should give citizenship to the minorities
in Poland.

IX

SUMMER CAME. The city was struck by an epidemic of
infantile paralysis. I moved the family to a house at
Croton-on-the-Hudson. Courtenay Lemon came with us. He
was working on his masterpiece, the perfect book, the book he
never finished.

Croton-on-the-Hudson had quite an intellectual colony.
Before we had made the acquaintance of our neighbors, our
children became acquainted with their children. The three
of them, with Rada trailing behind and screaming bloody
murder when her brothers got too far ahead, used to absent
themselves for a few hours every day and come back home with
mice, frogs, and lizards in their ^baskets. Mabel Dodge's son,
Max Eastman's son, Boardman Robinson's children, and Ralph
Waldo Trine's son were members of their company.

Two or three weeks after we settled in Croton, Courtenay
asked me to give him the manuscript of my "charity** book to
show to Max Eastman, then the editor of The New Masses, and
to John Reed, the stormy petrel of the magazine world. A few
days later, a tall, broad-shouldered, heavy, boyish-looking man
came up to see me while I was picking potato bugs in the
garden.

"Hello. I am John Reed, Jack to you/* he said, and sat down
on the wheelbarrow to talk to me.

He liked the "charity** book so much that he offered to write

104

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 10?

an introduction and find a publisher for it. He had also come
to tell Mrs. Bercovici that Mrs. Robinson had asked him to in-
vite us to dinner at her house that evening.

"Everybody will be there."

Boardman Robinson Mike, as we soon called him looked
like a handsome red satyr. His hair and beard were like young
fire. Mrs. Robinson and my wife, both interested in sculpture,
got on splendidly. Max Eastman, brown as an Indian, lean
and lanky, with a voice like the lowest register of a violoncello,
was the spirit of the party.

When the conversation turned to the war in Europe, they,
too, were against the Allies because of France's unholy alliance
with Russia.

Eventually Jack went to Europe as a war correspondent.
While visiting the French trenches, he reached for a soldier's
rifle and shot at the Germans. When he was in the German
trenches, he reached for a German rifle and shot at the French
... for the hell of it.

Inez Milholland, the famous suffragette, a Diana in action
when she played tennis on Eastman's court, told me that I
didn't grasp the underlying causes of the European war.

"Had the women of France had the vote, France would not
have gone to war."

"But the German women won't stop their men from going to
war," I argued.

"Get ready, Inez," Max Eastman shouted. "Let's play."

Ralph Waldo Trine dismissed the war with a few well-chosen
and unctious words. All this strife was due to wrong thinking,
to people not being in tune with the infinite. He was sorry for
me because I allowed myself to be disturbed by matters of no
consequence,

"Life is beautiful. Life is harmonious. The Germans are
not bad fellows. My book, translated into German, is selling
in the hundreds of thousands."

To the New Thought colony flocked middle-aged women in

106 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

flowing white robes to celebrate nature and Annie Bessant in a
glen in the woods overlooking the Hudson.

Mr. Slaving, an old farmer, was worried about the immoral
dresses the women were wearing "this them there days" and
the short tunics worn by the girls o the Duncan school, but not
about the war.

"What is this Europe I hear you talk about? Where is it?"

Courtenay, pegging away at his immortal book at the rate of
ten words a week, dismissed my anguish with quotations from
Marx and Engels and urged me to read a special brand of
socialist literature.

"The war won't end anything; the revolution will."

'What revolution? Where?"

"The World Revolution."

One day a publisher informed me that he had accepted my
book, Crimes of Charity,, for publication and asked me to come
to see him. I did, and signed on the dotted line without get-
ting a cent, spent a few days in New York, found the city in-
different to what was happening abroad, visited some Gypsy
friends in a cellar, and came home to my patch of greens.

Meanwhile the famous Frank Harris had become the editor
of Pearsons magazine, and Djuna Barnes, the poet, who was
one of his friends, asked me to send her a copy of the manu-
script Courtenay Lemon had talked to her about. Several days
later Frank Harris asked me to have dinner with him.

The dinner was magnificent. Harris was in great form;
spoke about his friends, Carlyle, Wells, Shaw, Wilde, Anatole
France, Rodin, Cecil Rhodes, and Churchill; and imitated every-
one's speech. Mrs. Harrisredheaded, thirty years younger
than Frank, and beautiful sang for us. Late at night die
editor of Pearsons offered me five hundred dollars for the serial
rights to the book. I accepted.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 107

After Pearson's had appeared with the first installment of my
book, The New Masses, edited by Max Eastman and Floyd
Dell, asked to publish some chapters of Crimes of Charity.
The Humanitarian, edited and owned by Misha Appelbaum,
also asked permission to use some chapters and promised to
pay for the privilege.

Early one morning, after a child in our immediate neighbor-
hood had been stricken with infantile paralysis, we dressed our
children, packed, asked Old Man Slaving to take us to the
station, gave him the right to our vegetable garden, turned the
key in the door, and were off without goodbyes to anyone. It
was the second time we had run away from the dreaded dis-
ease.

We found another apartment on Beekman Place, slept on the
floor until we bought new beds, and fed on milk and bread
until we bought dishes and cooking utensils. I didn't despair.
I had five hundred dollars coming from Harris, four hundred
from The Humanitarian, and expected some money from The
New Masses. I still had my job at the music school.

But Harris, so generous when he owed nothing, hated to
part with money he actually owed and postponed payment
from day to day. It was much later than I expected before I
eventually received a check from The Humanitarian. Finally,
The New Masses had no money. The manager, who later
absconded with a goodly sum, lectured me about taking money
from the holy cause.

Honors were coming thick and fast, but no money. The
music school closed because of the epidemic. For some reason
or other, Bob Davis returned my stories. Other magazines did
the same. There were no wrecking jobs to be had. I made a
few dollars here and there as an ambulant photographer. The
poor diet was beginning to tell on me that and my incessant
preoccupation with the war in Europe.

Naomi had meanwhile found a circle of friends, mostly of

108 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

French origin, who insisted that she teach their children by
the same methods she had employed in teaching ours.

I was rather surprised one morning when I was told that we
were to move to Hewlett, Long Island, where the newly formed
school had rented a house and that Naomi was to direct the
First Free School in the United States. As a sop to my feelings
I was told that a large garden went with the house and that I
would be free to teach the pupils of the school music in my own
manner.

The truth is that Naomi is a rather formidable person and
not to be thwarted in her plans. She had had her heart set
on such a school for years.

I didn't like the idea of our children being thrown together
permanently with a single group of children, but I had to
accept the situation.

The school, a rambling cottage on a three-acre piece of
ground, opened with fifteen children, three teachers, a cook,
and two servants. In addition to the main house, there was a
smaller cottage and a large barn. I took possession of the barn,
cleaned it, decorated it, put in a piano, and prepared to do some
work. Writing was now a passion.

When a story came back from an editor, I no longer searched
myself or doubted myself, but questioned the intelligence of
the editor. I knew what I was doing, and they didn't.

Naomi's method was a good one, but worked only with chil-
dren who had not been submitted before to another peda-
gogical system. Most of the children in her school had been
to other schools before and had been sent to her because they
were deficient or unadaptable. When they realized that they
wouldn't be punished for laziness or petty waywardness, they
ran around and disturbed even the few who would study or
listen to an explanation on some subject. It was like having
fifteen wildcats in a house.

The parents were even more troublesome than the children.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 109

When they discovered that their devils hadn't been turned into
angels in a month or two, they criticized the school.

Our own two sons ran wild with the other boys and became
secretive. We had answered their questions about sex simply
and truthfully without hedging, and had diverted their minds
from smut. But the boys and the girls of the school hadn't had
their questions about sex answered in the same simple manner
by their parents.

Rada disapproved of the whole school and wouldn't associate
with the other girls at all, clung to me from morning to night,
and sat on the floor of the bam and looked up at me while I was
working. She was still writing poetry, but of a different kind
from what she had written before. It was all about trees and
stars, very sad and somewhat mystical, as if she were trying to
tell me something that she didn't dare tell in simple, direct
language.

I called a conference of my own children in the barn, and we
analyzed the situation together. The boys were difficult to
handle for the first half hour. They shouted and argued
wrongheadedly, anxious to maintain their assertions even when
they knew they were wrong, but in the end their better selves
prevailed.

An hour later we talked as we always had, calmly and rea-
sonably, and called Naomi into our conference. I told her
that I was not willing to allow my children to come down to
the level of most of the pupils in her school. But Naomi had
already reached that conclusion by herself and agreed with me.

I sent Naomi away to town and undertook to liquidate the
affairs of the school. I wrote letters to the parents, asking
them to come and take their offspring, dismissed the teachers,
the cook, and the servants, and breathed freely three days later
when I was alone with my own children in the house* The rest
was easy except for several debts which I took upon myself.
We moved back to town when The Humanitarian finally did

110 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

pay me for the serial rights of Crimes of Charity and I received
a check of one hundred dollars for a water level I had invented.

Grist to the mill! The idea was a life saver. It was better
than discovering religion. I could be serene and calm in the
face of events that a short time before would have unbalanced
me completely. Humility I still had, but also a greater, if not
an absolute, belief in what I ultimately wanted to achieve. It
was hard work to write in a language that wasn't my own and
one which I had not studied systematically. It was an uphill
struggle to change to a new profession. My pockets were
empty and many obligations weighed on my shoulders, but
the mere anticipation of success despite these handicaps was
worth the price I was paying.

I was painting the floor of a tenement house on Nineteenth
Street when Frank Harris published in Pearsons a long article
to say that I had disproved one of his pet theories; namely, that
no one could do creative work in a language that wasn*t his
own. I read Frank Harris's encomium during my lunch hour
and worked with greater vigor for the rest of the day at painting
floors.

I was cleaning the windows of the same tenement house for
three dollars a day when Life printed an article by J. Kerfoot
saying that what he had read by me made him think of the
great Russians. I would have willingly accepted a job as a
sewer cleaner after that. Nothing or nobody could have
humiliated me or made me despair after that. Grist to the mill
indeed!

The intelligentsia were favorably impressed by the literary
quality of my book, but the contents meant very little to them.
I had expected a minor social revolution as the result of the
publication of Crimes of Charity, and they spoke of literary
quality. Theodore Dreiser was the only one to talk about its
social implications. I was still painting floors for a living.

Leon Trotsky came into the "Russian Bear" on Second Ave-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 111

nue and sat down at a table* I didn't know who he was any
more than did a hundred million other people in this country.
A few minutes later men and women rose from their tables to
go to shake hands with him and be introduced or introduce
themselves. While this was going on, a man came in from
the street waving the latest edition of a newspaper and shouting
jubilantly, "Another Russian defeat."

The headline was "Germans Advance Toward Paris/*

When I said that this should be no cause for celebration, a
man shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, "Are you an
agent of the British?"

I rose, went over to the man's table, and asked him to apolo-
gize. He refused. I hit him in the face. In another minute
I was in a free-for-all fight with tables and chairs overturned,
women screaming, and the waiters running to separate the
antagonists. Hyman Strunsky, the owner of the place, puffing
and spluttering, ordered the man and his friends out and
begged me to return to my table.

"There is a man who can take care of himself," Trotsky said
and then came over to shake hands with me without introduc-
ing himself.

"It's Leon Trotsky," a young man informed me from behind
him. "You are shaking hands with Leon Trotsky."

'Won't you join me," Trotsky invited.

He was a fascinatingly brilliant man, so brilliant he gave
depth to the shallowest thoughts. He was a born orator.
Even while speaking to me across the table, he spoke as if he
were addressing a large audience.

Yes, he was for the defeat of Russia, but not out of childish
vengeance because of the pogroms. He was for the defeat of
Russia because a social revolution was possible only in a de-
feated Russia. A victorious Russia would crush every effort
toward freedom. The defeat of Imperial Russia was the salva-
tion of the world.

"And what about a victorious Germany?" I asked. "Would

112 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

a victorious Germany tolerate a social revolution more readily
than a victorious Russia?"

Trotsky launched an armada of glittering arguments on a
muddy sea of complicated dialectics. But he was fascinating
to listen to. His admirers cried out in horror every time I com-
mitted the lese majesty of contradicting their idol.

Trotsky cited page, chapter, and line to prove that France
was degenerating, that England was the arch villain of the
world, and that Italy was still the same crumbling old Rome
under a new name. He admired German efficiency, Kultur,
technique, literature, and intelligence.

He hoped and wished to see Russia defeated, but became
ecstatic when he mentioned the muzhik, the same muzhik who
had slaughtered and butchered tens of thousands of Jews,
Trotsky's own people, in innumerable pogroms over several
centuries and had butchered revolutionaries with less regret
than when they slaughtered hogs.

I replied that I knew the muzhik, that we had him in Rou-
mania, and that he certainly wasn't destined to lead the world
to a better life, to freedom or democracy.

"If you have no faith in the muzhik," Trotsky asked, "then
in whom do you have faith? In the French peasant? The
English farmer?"

The "Russian Bear" was the rendezvous of German embassy
spies and secretaries. Trotsky's and Lenin's subsequent pas-
sage through Germany to Russia would never have been
allowed by the Germans had they not known from Trotsky's
caf 6 talks in New York that he was eager to see Russia defeated.
Trotsky, talking at the "Russian Bear," published his opinions
to the German government with which he later signed the
Brest Litovsk peace. No one can tell me that Trotsky would
not have signed a pact with Hitler, would not have invaded
Finland, would not have incorporated Latvia, Lithuania, and
Esthonia, or would not have reached out like a ghotd for Rus-
sia's share in the corpse of Poland. And let no one tell you

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 113

that Trotsky would not have sent HUers to Mexico to murder
Stalin if Trotsky had been in the Kremlin ,and Stalin in exile.

Fanatics have neither decency nor morality and are devoid
of scruples and humanity. Savonarola and Peter the Hermit
have appeared in the past and the present -under many aspects.
Trotsky was another reincarnation of the mad monk of the
Renaissance. Fascinating, yes, but a man with no understand-
ing of individual human rights or emotions except his own-
that was Leon Trotsky.

The present destruction of Europe is due to the fact that too
many of his type were born within a decade Lenin, Stalin,
Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini, and some lesser lights. Before ex-
terminating each other* they have allied themselves to destroy
the rest of the world.

I am heart and soul with Russia now and eager to fight be-
side her soldiers until the Nazis are crushed. After that has
been done, I will oppose a totalitarian Russia as strongly as I
will any other totalitarian government.

X

THE REVIEWS of Crimes of Charity were magnificent,
but no one lifted a finger to remedy the situation to which
I called attention.

Barondess was furious. Why hadn't I shown him the manu-
script before it was printed?

Although the Forward published two installments of the
book in Yiddish, Cahan stopped the publication of the third
chapter when he returned from abroad and ordered that my
name was never to be mentioned in his paper. The resident
managers of the settlements on the East Side denounced me as
a troublemaker and one who didn't understand the problems
of charitable institutions.

And then, manna from heaven, came a letter from Louis
Miller, the deposed editor of the Warheit, a Yiddish paper,
asking me to lunch with him and Mrs. Miller.

Miller, a man of boundless energy, had come here from
Russia at the age of twenty, gone to work in a sweatshop, and
first made a reputation as the fastest shirt maker in New York.
When the Forward, the first Yiddish socialist daily, was
founded, he was appointed its first editor-in-chief. When the
management later on asked him to share the title with Cahan,
he quit the editorship of the paper and returned to shirt mak-
ing, at which he was king. During the next few years he
studied law at night. When he didn't rise quickly enough to
the top as a lawyer, he quit law and organized the Warheit
(The Truth), an opposition paper to the Forward.

114

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 115

Mrs. Miller, a graduate doctor of medicine, wouldn't merely
practice medicine like other doctors, but aimed at being the
medical chief of a hospital. Either that or nothing.

Although they were terribly self-centered people, I under-
stood and liked them both at our first meeting. Before coffee,
Miller said, "I intend to publish a weeldy magazine. I can
only offer you $25 a week, but we'll have lots of fun together.
You'll be the editor. Full power. When you do something I
don't like, we'll fight it out. When I write an editorial you
don't like, you'll tell me so and we'll scrap. What do you say?"

I hesitated.

"Why the hesitation?" he asked. "Is it money?"

"No. But you are very self -centered and excitable, and I am
not an angel either. We agree about the European war, but
there are other subjects on which I am sure we don't agree.
And I am probably as crazy as you are."

Mrs. Miller laughed and laughed.

"You know,'* she said, "I heard what you did the other night
at the 'Russian Bear.* Louis will be afraid to lose his temper
with you." And then the three of us laughed, and I went up to
the office, a loft in a factory building, to begin my duties at
once.

I didn't particularly cherish the prospect of editing a weekly
in Yiddish, but I hoped to be able to enlighten the East Side on
the European war, about which they were misinformed and
misled by the other papers. The twenty-five dollars a week
steady income had some influence on my decision, but was not
mainly responsible for it. I was making almost as much paint-
ing floors and windows for the Excelsior Company.

The staff of the new magazine was composed of Miller and
myself.

We had fun for the next six months. Our first issue was
thrown off the stands into the gutters. Following the second
issue, all our windows were smashed by hoodlums. The
printers refused to set up what they called "pro-Russian" mate-

116 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

rial for the third issue and denounced us together and singly,
directly and indirectly by implication, of being in the pay of
the Allies. Yet somehow Miller's Weekly appeared regularly
every Thursday afternoon, and the circulation grew despite all
hindrances. We practically lived in the office. I wrote under
twenty different names and translated stories from French,
German, and English, When the children wanted to see me,
Naomi brought them up to the office to lunch or dine with me
at my writing table. Rion was particularly anxious to know
what I was writing and made me translate for him page after
page.

"Are you absolutely certain that everything in the paper is
for the right side?" he asked again and again.

When people asked Rada where her father was, she an-
swered, "In the front line trenches, fighting."

One afternoon a well-dressed man came in and said he
wanted to see Mr. Miller.

"I am Mr. Miller," the editor said.

"May I see you privately?"

"Sure, come into my private office."

That private office was separated from mine by a thin par-
tition.

A quarter of an hour later Miller called me in.

"Konrad," he said, "this is someone from the German em-
bassy. He wants to buy our paper and then hire us both at a
good salary. What do you say? I told Herr Fernholtz that
you are a co-owner of the paper."

Td like to speak to you privately for a moment," I said to
Miller. "The gentleman will excuse us."

"What shall it be, a bust in the jaw or a kick in the pants?" I
asked when we were alone.

"Aren't we partners?" Miller questioned. "You'll do one
thing and I the other.'*

Herr Doctor Fernholtz was six foot two and had a gun in his

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 117

pocket, but Miller and I managed with the help of a heavy
bronze ink-well, a couple of chairs, and an overturned table.
We had many other offers to sell out, one from Aleister Crowley
who was then editing the magazine, The Fatherland, with
George Sylvester Viereck. Cunningly enough, Crowley began
the proceedings by writing a glowing review of my book, which
he followed by extreme personal flattery.

When it finally began to dawn on the people of the East Side
that we might enter the war, German victories in France ceased
to be headlined as Russian defeats. I was pleased; Miller was
disgusted.

"What! No opposition! The cowards."

Then came the Black Tom explosion, the Lusitania sinking,
and our declaration of war against Germany. Louis Miller's
son, Alex, not yet twenty, enlisted immediately. Our maga-
zine's attitude was vindicated.

One day Miller said to me, "Do you want the paper? I give
it to you lock, stock, and barrel I don't want it anymore."

'"Why? Now when it is gaining in circulation?" I asked.

TL have done my work. I have just about lost everything I
had."

I didn't want the paper. Two days later Millers Weekly
went to press for the last time. We wrote the last editorial
together.

"Both of us felt that we owed this country a duty. We have
fulfilled it We shall look for other tasks "

After a conference with Louis Miller, Judge Greenbaum, the
president of the Educational Alliance, sent for me. The Edu-
cational Alliance on East Broadway had been organized in the
Nineties as an Americanization institution. It was, however,
headed by German Jews who were out of sympathy with the
immigrants from Poland, Russia, and Roumania, and it became
the most despised organization on the East Side. Its halls ware

118 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

always empty; Its English classes unattended. It was never
more than a shell. Judge Greenbaum wanted to know what
the Educational Alliance could do to correct the misinformation
that the foreign-born of this country had been given by the
foreign press. I was hired to do the work at the same salary
Miller had given me.

I went to see the editors of the foreign language newspapers
and explained that it was to their advantage to reverse them-
selves. The German and Germanified editors went pacifist on
me. They who had quoted Nietzsche on the manliness of war
now simply abhorred war. The editors of the Jewish papers
fell in line readily enough regardless of their former political
color. The editors of the Hungarian papers told me to mind
my own business, that this was a free country, and so on.

The Educational Alliance became my headquarters. From
there I sent out speakers and lecturers to parks and school halls.
Preceded by bands that I obtained gratis from orphan asylums
and other Jewish institutions, my lecturers spoke at a dozen
schools every night from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Fathers and
mothers whose sons were being drafted into the American army
were made to understand that their sons would fight on the
right side of the fence. Still, every once in a while I was
buttonholed by an old man or an old woman who accused me
of getting blood money from the Russians.

Not all the directors of the Educational Alliance were sympa-
thetic to the Allied cause. The German Jews in the directorate
of the Alliance tried to be good Americans without ceasing to
be good Germans, an impossibility.

One day I was approached by a man who told me that Otto
H. Kahn, the banker, wanted to see me. I met him at the
Brevoort for lunch and promptly disliked him, his manner of
eating, his arrogance, and his patronizing attitude.

"Why are you so bitter against the Germans," he asked, "any
personal reasons?"

*Why are you so pro-German?" I asked.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 119

"Don't ask such personal questions/' he replied.

"I am not more personal than you are/' I answered.

"I have a right to ask personal questions/' he said bluntly;
"I am figuring on employing you."

"You are ... well, well!"

"I have written a book to explain that I have changed my
attitude in regard to Germany/* he informed me.

"Have you?'*

"Of course. The book is written."

"But have you sincerely changed your attitude?"

He looked at me.

"I don't like your question, young man."

"You haven't answered my question, Mr. Kahn."

He turned in his chair and called., "Gorgon, gargon, the
check." Then he said to me, <r l have written a book to be
called Above Race, and I wanted you to look it over and make
suggestions/*

"George Sylvester Viereck is the man for such a job/' I ad-
vised. "He is probably somewhat expensive, but you can
afford him, I am sure."

Some days later, I heard of an amusing encounter between
Otto Kahn and Steinmetz, the electrical wizard. While Stein-
metz was visiting Otto Kahn's estate, his host showed him a
chapel which he had built on the estate.

"Don't you find it remarkable?" Kahn asked. "It's an Episco-
palian chapel."

"No/* the hunchbacked wizard said, "I don't see anything
emarkable about it.'*

TE was a Jew once," Kahn said.

**I was a hunchback once," Steinmetz replied and walked on.

Frank Harris dashed in on me one day.
**Leon Trotsky is in Canada, wants to go to France, and the
English refuse him permission to sail," he said.

120 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Good for the English/* I cried out.

"If I did not owe you a few measly hundred dollars for your
miserable articles in Pearson's, you would be more sympa-
thetic/' Frank said, sneering as only he could sneer.

"You can go to hell, as far as I am concerned, Frank. I
didn't suspect you of being anti-English because of Count Bem-
storffs visits to you and never said that Aleister Crowley, who
is Viereck's stooge, was the intermediary between you and tiae
German ambassador/'

"Have you been spying on me?"

"You yourself have boasted of BernstorfPs visits/ 7 1 reminded
him, "while mentioning other celebrities, die Prince of Wales,
Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Lord Douglas, Shaw, and the like/*

My propaganda labors brought me in contact with news-
papermen and politicians and made for me many friends as
well as enemies. In my quest for speakers and lecturers, I
sought the acquaintance of everyone who could help. But
even after we had entered the war, many people on the East
Side couldn't forget that I had been pro-Ally before we had
entered the war. The younger people understood the situation
well enough, but the older ones still thought in terms of Russia
against the civilized world. They were for America, of course,
but they also thought that it was too bad that America had
allied herself with Russia.

Our entrance into the war also brought to the East Side an
unhealthy prosperity and an unhealthy recklessness about
money, as well as an insatiable desire for amusement. Where
there had been two Yiddish theaters for New York and Brook-
lyn, six theaters were doing great business on die East Side and
two played in Brooklyn,

The Yiddish theaters had played mainly heavy dramas be-
fore. Now the demand was for comedies and musicals of the
lowest sort

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 121

Charles Woods of the New York World, who tad met me
before while gathering material for a series of articles he was
writing, came one day to tell me that John O'Hara Cosgrave,
the editor of the Sunday magazine section of the New Jork
World wanted to see me.

When I met Cosgrave, who was lanky and long-faced, and
had a benevolent smile, at the New Jork World office, the
former editor of Everybody's and the literary godfather of
Frank Norris asked me to write some of the East Side stories
which I had told Charley for the magazine section of the paper.

While continuing my job with the Educational Alliance, I
wrote a story a week for the New Jork Sunday World and also
worked on several novels, a play, a book on orchestration, and
a biography of Alexander the Great, and was planning a series
of Gypsy stories despite the repeated rebuffs encountered by
my first one. Of all my literary projects, the Gypsy stories
were paramount in my mind. My friendship with the Gypsies
in New York and my short trip to Toledo with Petru's tribe
had set my imagination on fire and revived my childhood mem-
ories. Thinking about Gypsies, I had to think about peasants.
The passing years had wiped out whatever desire for vengeance
I had had for my father's death. Instead of being objects of
hatred, the peasants became figures of romance, as they would
have been in reality, had they not been corrupted by scoundrels
and gangsters.

Charles Woods introduced me to his friends on the New Jork
World: Sam Cahan, who illustrated most of iny stories; Ed
Smith, the criminologist; Holland Thomas, the Texan, who had
won a literary prize with his first story, "Fatima/ > which ap-
peared in Cottiers and who kter broke the Ku Klux Klan with
his expose; and Huneker, the music critic.

Huneker, an American European, was a man of great culture
and unquenchable thirst. Anyone who has not been with him
after his tenth seidel of beer doesn't begin to know what good

122 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

talk is. He tad the size and the girth of a Gambrino, but his
mind was as nimble as his fingers were on the piano, and they
were of the nimblest.

I had been indifferent to food before. Even while doing the
heaviest physical work, I had been able to replenish my energies
with an apple, a few walnuts, and a handful of dry raisins. But
now, when I was doing only intellectual work, I craved food
all the time and became not only a gourmand, but also a
gourmet. Although we continued to be vegetarians at home,
I began to eat meat and fish outside and became very fond of
wine. There was a minor revolution in the house when Rada
discovered that I had become a "cannibal"; she refused to kiss
me goodnight and wouldn't even speak to me. Naomi's objec-
tions were not so strong, but she, too, was somewhat upset by
my defection.

The weekly stories on the New York World were good exer-
cises. They really were literary miniatures, sometimes only
studies for stories. I don't know anything better for a young
writer than the necessity to keep one's invention alive. Inven-
tion in literature is half of the ingredients out of which the pie
is made. My earnings were increasing. I didn't have to think
any longer in terms of one dollar bills. We moved into a better
apartment and often went to the theater and to concerts.
Charles Woods introduced me to the manager of the Province-
town Playhouse, a former stable on Mulberry Street, where the
first plays of Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, and Floyd Dell were
being produced.

I offered one of my plays, a Gypsy play, to the group, O'Neill
read it, and we discussed it over a long lunch and many whis-
keys and soda while on the stage the actors were rehearsing
Emperor Jones.

That play, destined to become one of the classics of the stage,
was almost dismissed as a failure after the first performance.
The drums disturbed the play. Gilpin, the Negro actor, was

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 123

superb in It, "But a play is not a monologue/* the pundits
argued. At the confab after the premiere, the consensus of
opinion was that all the drums should be discarded for the
second performance. I argued that they should be kept in, by
all means, but should be used dramatically; that the dynamics
and the rhythm should follow the development of the drama.
The drums were rehearsed again with the play, following my
suggestion, became an integral part of the play at the second
performance, and remained with it forever.

I had argued so well for Emperor Jones that my own play
was postponed and postponed again until well, until never.

I still believe I am a better dramatist than the best ones we
have, but I can't convince any producer that my plays are good.
I have written and rewritten my plays ad nauseam. Many of
them have almost been produced. At the last moment some-
thing has always happened to upset the apple cart. I have a
sneaking premonition that, if the capitalist system continues
long enough, my grandchildren will live in idleness and luxury
off the royalties of those plays.

XI

END OF THE WAR terminated my job with the
JL Educational Alliance and threw me entirely on literature
for a subsistence, at a time when the cost of living was sky high
and rent had been almost doubled. In addition to that,
Naomi was painting and sculpturing, the materials were expen-
sive, and she made no sales although the work was exception-
ally fine.

And then Mirel, the youngest of our children, was bom.
We often had to choose between buying an extra pair of shoes
and purchasing a few tubes of paint, new brushes, canvas, or
clay. The art materials usually won. And we were not an
economical family. We could not live on a budget. We
treated every check as a windfall and celebrated. We went to
concerts, plays, and circuses, and on excursions, bought expen-
sive toys, and often spent in one splash what we should have
kept for the landlord. Naomi's hospitality knew no bounds.
Two or three times a week we had a dozen guests for dinner.
When guests stayed late, she offered them her coats and shawls
to wear home lest they catch cold. Our children also had
acquired the habit of giving things and often gave away play-
things for which they cried afterward.

For those who hold the treaty of Versailles responsible for
the rise of Hitler, let them remember that the Brest Litovsk
treaty antedated the Versailles treaty. Had the Allies lost the

124

ITS THE GYPSY JA T ME 125

war then, they would have been no less enslaved by the Kaiser
than the nations Hitler lias conquered. Had the Germans de-
feated the Allies after we tad joined them, we would still be
the slaves of Germany. The chains were forged and ready
when the complicated Rube Goldbergian machinery that was
Germany went out of gear. The Germany of today also will
not be defeated from the outside. It will go out of gear within,
and the world will witness such an economic and spiritual chaos
as it has never seen before.

The signing of the Versailles treaty left Germany in a position
to rearm.

The Germans had thrown up their arms and yelled "Kama-
rad" to avoid the destruction of their land and homes and be-
fore the army had suffered a serious defeat. While the German
delegates were signing the Versailles treaty, the German mili-
tary command was planning the next war and laughing at the
stupidity of the Allies.

Brest Litovsk had taught the Allies little more than the occu-
pation of Austria did twenty years later.

After we won the war, the German propaganda became
subtle and masterful. To hammer into the minds of the people
and the rest of the world that they hadrrt been beaten on the
battlefield, the Germans elected the beaten general, von Hin-
denburg, who later scuttled the Weimar Republic and delivered
Germany to Hitler and his gangsters. The fake socialist repub-
lic, under Ebert, was only a sop to the world. Under Ebert,
the real socialists, the Liebknechts and the Luxembourgs, were
shot, or otherwise done away with, by Noske, Ebert* s chief of
police. Ebert, Noske, and the brothers Strasser paved the way
for the Nazis. The Strasser who is now in the United States
was one of the founders of the Nazi party and ran away from
Germany not because he disagreed with Hitler's policy, but
because he was afraid of the coming purge. A Nazi can never
truthfully say, T[ have been a Nazi"; he is always a Nazi*

Because the French used Senegalese troops to occupy the

126 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Ruhr, lie Germans took advantage of our prejudices against
the Negroes to complain that a white people was being sub-
jected to "niggers."

The peace movements, the youth movements, and the anti-
military societies in America were directly or indirectly spon-
sored and influenced by Germany and Germans in preparation
for the war to come. The youth societies and peace societies
in Germany were drilled by officers of the army, while the youth
of the peace societies of the rest of the world were being indoc-
trinated with theories of nonresistance. The International
peace societies took periodic peace polls in England, France,
and the U. S. A. and announced the results to the world, but
never took such polls in Germany. Why?

I tried to explain that to our public, but was told again and
again that the war was over, that there wouldn't be another war
in our lifetime, and that I had better devote my energies to
peaceful pursuits.

My liberal friends and my Jewish friends were as pro-Russian
as they had been anti-Russian before the revolution* John
Reed, who had denounced me as a friend of the Russians before
the revolution, now denounced rne as their enemy. He was
heart and soul for Russia. The Russians, he now said, were the
greatest people on earth, the most cultured and civilized. I
was guilty in his eyes of a crime against the workers of the
world after I had published several articles in the New York
Sun.

At about this time John O'Hara Cosgrave informed me that
Horace Liveright, a new publisher, wanted to publish the stories
I had written for the New Jork World in a book.

Horace, handsome, elegant, engaging, got up from his desk
when I came, asked me to sit beside him on the couch, and said,
*You ought to get some new clothes. I don*t like what you are
wearing/*

**Are you a tailor or a publisher?" I asked.

"Let's go to lunch and see about that"

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 127

For two hours we talked about everything under the sun
except the publication of the book. Suddenly Horace looked
at his watch. *"Good God! I have thrown away three hours.
Waiter/' he called, **bring me pen and ink,**

I thought he was writing a check to pay for the lunch, but
when he had signed the check, he said, '"This lunch is on you.
Give the waiter a good tip. Celebrate. Here is five hundred
dollars. Ill send you the contract in a day or so."

As usual the Bercovicis celebrated. New easels. A violon-
cello. A riding horse. Twenty friends for dinner at Mosco-
vitz's on Second Avenue, and a shawl for Tina, my favorite
Gypsy story teller and singer, a queen among women.

Horace was frequently brutally frank and often disconcert-
ingly sly, but he loved writers. He took over from other pub-
lishers authors who hadn't made a cent and made their names
famous and earned them wealth. It was a great loss to litera-
ture that unfortunate circumstances and temptations turned
him to Wall Street speculations, the theater, and other ventures
which ruined him.

While I was fingering the last of the five hundred dollars, the
New York World sent me to Boston to cover the Ponzi case.

'Here is the lay-out," Gavin, the city editor, said to me.
"Anybody who invests one hundred dollars with Ponzi gets a
hundred and fifty dollars forty-five days later. He has paid out
millions in the last few months, but he won't tell anybody where
he invests the money of his customers. Go to Boston and find
out. Ponzi often breakfasts at Young's Hotel. Goodbye."

I went to Boston, took a room at Young's Hotel, and asked the
waiter in the dining room to point Ponzi out to me when he
came in.

Ponzi, a slight, undersized, foppish little Italian, came into
the dining room that evening followed by a dozen reporters.
Something in the manner with which he handled the silver
suggested to me that he was an ex-waiter.

I also knew tittat every Italian waiter wants to speak French,

128 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

a language that enables him to serve in the more expensive
restaurants. When I addressed Ponzi in French as Monsieur
Ponzi, he answered in French and asked me to sit down.
Without beating about the bush, I told him why I had come to
Boston.

"Is New York talking about me much?" he asked.

"Owi Monsieur, beaucoup. The Italians of New York are
making up pools to send to you to invest/*

"They don't sen d it, they bring it," he interrupted me. "The
people of Lawrence, the plain workingmen, also make up pools
to give me the money to invest, but they bring it, they don't
send it."

"In what do you invest their money?" I asked.

"That's my secret/' he grinned. "Have you any money to
invest? N*ayez pas peur"

The following day a lawyer friend explained to me why Ponzi
had insisted that the Italians of New York brought and did not
send him their money.

"Using the mails would give the Federal Government the
right to ask to see his books, and he wouk^have to prove to
them that the money was actually invested in a business that
brings enough profit to pay 420 per cent a year/*

I visited the Ponzi offices. Behind cashier's windows like
those in banks, stood young girls, mostly Italian, who issued
printed and countersigned certificates promising to pay fifty
per cent more than was deposited when the certificates became
due.

The line of depositors extended down the stairs and clear
around the block and was kept in order by a dozen policemen.
The girls behind the windows took the money, issued the signed
certificates after filling in the bearer's name, and dropped the
dollar bills into a wicker basket at their feet.

From time to time, a customer would present a due certifi-
cate, demand that it be cashed, and the cash was handed
through the window without a word. But nine times out of

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 129

ten the investor reinvested at the next window what he had re-
ceived at the first one.

Twice a day Charles Ponzi transported sealed bags of money
to the Hanover Bank, a private bank, where the money was
dumped into a large safe,

Ponzi had bought the bank, lock, stock, and barrel, from its
former owner after the affairs of the bank had been more or less
liquidated. There wasn't a clerk or a cashier on the floor of
the bank. Charles Ponzi was its only customer.

Italian pushcart peddlers and storekeepers had mortgaged
their homes to invest with the great wizard. On Trenton Ave-
nue the haberdashers, opticians, dentists, doctors, and furniture
dealers turned everything into cash in order to hand the money
over to Ponzi.

In Boston, to know Ponzi was equivalent to being on speak-
ing terms with the president of the United States. Ponzi was
Boston's hero. Every time his open car passed a street, people
clapped their hands, and Ponzi bowed to the right and to the
left.

I had a long interview with Ponzi and quoted him verbatim
in an article I sent to the New York World. The following day,
in the Evening World, an interview written by one of the sob
sisters on the paper who had gone to Boston to ask Mrs. Ponzi
for a message to American womanhood, represented Ponzi as a
highly educated Italian, of the nobility, who spoke perfect
academic English.

**Who is right?" Gavin, my editor, telegraphed. "You report
him as speaking like a wop, and she like an academician*"

*He talks lawyer's English/" I replied telegraphically. "Uses
Vhereas/ and 'in consideration of the fact* when he talks to the
press.**

Mrs. Ponzi, interviewed again and again by the sob sisters of
the press, continued to deliver messages to America's woman-
hood.

130 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Meanwhile the Boston police had gone on strike and left
Boston at the mercy of thieves, thugs, crooks, gamblers, and
criminals of every shade. Calvin Coolidge, then governor of
Massachusetts, broke the strike eventually, but it was frighten-
ing to see Boston overrun by gunmen, their molls, and crooks
and becoming the paradise of all the human rats.

Few people realized that Ponzi was in a measure responsible
for the strike of Boston's policemen. A majority of the police-
men had invested in Ponzfs certificates and had become
wealthy, on paper of course, beyond their dreams. An original
thousand dollars had become $1500 in 45 days, $2250 in ninety
days, and so on. With money multiplying so fast, their salaries
appeared negligible. The policemen, from the captains down,
knew that Ponzi was a crook, but expected that Ponzfs body-
guards, who were allowed to carry on a major business in
alcohol under their protecting wings, would warn them before
the crash,

"What are you up to?" a desk sergeant asked when I told him
that I had gone to Providence and from there to Canada to look
up Ponzfs record.

"To put Ponzi in jail," I said.

"Don't you dare do it before my certificates are due, or I'll
break your neck," he warned me.

Fifty other crooks from New York and San Francisco, from
Milan and Rio de Janiero, opened offices in Boston to clean up
on the same swindle as Ponzi. There was no law in Massa-
chusetts to compel them to show where they invested the
money of the customers. They neither advertised nor wrote
letters to anybody and carefully avoided using the mails.

Success had so completely turned Ponzfs head that he actu-
afly believed he had discovered something new in banking,
something as simple as taking money from Peter to pay Paul,
who turned it back to pay Peter, who reinvested it. Even the
school children of Boston broke their clay banks to take their
savings to Ponzi, their hero.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 131

When the undersized little Italian appeared at a motion pic-
ture Louse, the audience rose to its feet, applauded him, and
made Mm take a dozen bows. I have seen Mm standing up in
an open car and riding through the streets of Boston like a
conquering hero in his chariot.

Eventually, Ponzi, against the advice of Ms lawyers, sent a
letter to a friend in New York, asking him to organize a New
York branch of Ms bank.

The letter fell into the hands of the Federal Government,
who stepped in and found that Ponzi had never invested a cent
of the money that had poured into Ms coffers except for buying
the defunct Hanover Bank. Ponzfs financial tangle was never
disentangled. A few people were compelled to disgorge the
profits they had cashed, but thousands of little people lost all
their savings. Many a father committed suicide. Many a
mother went mad with grief.

Ponzi went to jail for five years.

"Stay on and write me the story of how Ponzi started the
business and all his antecedents/' Gavin, my editor, tele-
graphed.

Ponzi had come to Boston from Providence, after a stretch
in a Canadian jail for swindle, and brought with Mm a buxom
girl friend.

A middle-aged furniture dealer, a widower, befriended the
girl. One day Ponzi asked the man for a loan of three hundred
dollars and promised to pay 450 in a month and a half. When
the furniture dealer refused to give up so much money, the girl
closed her door to Mm. The middle-aged Lothario was too
young to do without a woman and too old to be seen running
after one. A few weeks later he gave Ponzi the cash, never
expecting it back. The girl agreed to pay it back in nature, ten
dollars for every time the Lothario paid her a visit Ponzi used
part of the money to buy himself some flashy clothes and began
to do a little gambling in an Italian gambling house. Lady

132 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

Luck favored him so well one night that he won a thousand
dollars or more.

In the morning, when the furniture dealer came to pay his
visit to the lady, Ponzi, who didn't know that Carma had al-
ready paid back a good deal of the money in her own coin,
handed the Lothario $450 and told him to go to hell.

Instead of putting the cash in his pocket, the elderly Lothario
handed It back to his dear friend Charley, begged him to re-
invest it at the same rate of interest, and added another few
hundred dollars to make it a round sum.

Unable to keep a good thing to himself, the old gallant told
his relatives and friends that he had discovered a financial
genius. The news spread from mouth to mouth in the foreign
quarters and was carried to other cities from New York to
San Francisco. A month after Ponzi had paid back four hun-
dred and fifty dollars to the furniture dealer, he was taking in
twenty thousand dollars a day. His old pals from Providence,
Canada, and New York, thugs, pimps, card sharps, and white
slavers, descended upon him and muscled in on the take. The
Maffia, the Italian Black Hand, also came in for a share of the
boodle.

The Ponzi affair was part and parcel of the era of rugged in-
dividualism. Even after the blatant, empty-headed crook was
convicted, my editor said to me, "Do him justice, man. He is
a genius.*'

Too obtuse to notice the scientific and artistic giants of our
epoch, people hail every conspicuous, beady-eyed rat crawling
out of a sewer as a genius.

I brought back a reputation for colorful journalism when 1
returned to New York and had several offers from newspapers.
I refused them all. My experience had been grist to the mill,
but that was all. I had a mind and a notebook full of stories
ttat tad nothing in common with journalism. I wanted to stay
home. My own family was becoming daily more interesting

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 133

and exciting. They were all working. Naomi's work was
really remarkable. Mirel was painting like a grown-up. Rion
and Gorky were writing, falling ta and out of love, and coming
to me with their troubles. Rada was studying music and
showed great promise as a singer. Home was more exciting
than a circus. I wanted to write all the time. Writing intoxi-
cated me. We intoxicated each other at home talking about
our plans. An hour after promising Rada to write and compose
for her the first opera she would sing, I was working on Tinka.
I gave up working on this opera only after Rada had given up
singing.

Horace Liveright published The Dust of New York, and the
book did splendidly. There wasn't a day in which I didn't get
a dozen letters from people who had read the book.

Herbert Gorman, then writing book reviews for the Sun, and
the late John Weaver of the Times were my most enthusiastic
reviewers. John Farrar, now of Farrar and Rinehart, wrote a
long article in Time to tell the world about the Gypsy who had
learned to write English.

The legend of my being a Gypsy was growing, and I didn't
care to dispute it. I wore flamboyant cravats and vests and
welcomed the excuse to wear them; everybody said I was a
Gypsy.

Bob Davis, a literary agent then, called me one day to his
office in the Selwyn Building, and said, handing me an enve-
lope, TListen, boy. I am giving you six stories by ... ^ and
he named a famous woman story writer. *1 want you to read
them carefully and study her technique. Her technique and
what you have to say is an unbeatable combination. It will
make us both rich. We'll live in palaces and travel in Rolls-
Royces. Now go home, read her stories carefully, and come
back in a week with a story of yours with her technique. 7 *

I couldn't make myself read that famous writer's stories
despite the prospect of palaces and Rolls-Royces.

A week later I handed the envelope back to Bob Davis and

134 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

said, "I haven't brought you a story, but I have written an
epitaph for the tombstone over my grave/'

"What is itr Bob asked.

"Here lies a man who died in poverty because he couldn't
read six stories by Mrs. G."

I had decided to do my own work in my own manner and
style. It was a wise decision even from a practical point o
view. When one writes or paints or composes in the style of
some successful artist, one comes naturally in competition not
only with the successful artist but with aU his imitators. But
when one does work in his own original style, he is unique and
therefore in competition with no one. Then, if one's work is
only half as good as it should be, it stands a much better chance
of winning a place for itself than when it is very good but
imitative.

The only times I went to the trouble to reply to critics were
when one compared my work to de Maupassant's and another
one wrote that I was as good as Chekhov. I had unbounded
admiration for de Maupassant and Chekhov, but wouldn't be
compared to either. No matter how fine a work is, if it can be
compared to the work of another writer, it is on the road to
nowhere.

One morning as I was about to leave home to take the train
to New York, the postman handed me a letter from the edi-
torial rooms of The Dial, which under the editorship of Roscoe
Thayer had moved from Chicago to New York. In that letter,
Gilbert Seldes, the managing editor, inquired about the Gypsy
story that was making the rounds of the magazines.

"Let's see it," Seldes wrote.

I placed the manuscript in an envelope and sent it to Seldes.
Three days later I found a fat envelope from The Dial in my
mail box. Certain that the Gypsy story had been returned
again and in a hurry to catch a train* I left the envelope in die
jnafl box and went my way.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

I forgot all about The Did envelope when I returned home
that night, and did not take it out of the letter box the next
morning. As I sat down at my desk in the editorial rooms,
Sam Cahan, the illustrator, told me that The Dial office had
called several times and asked that I call them back.

"What about the proofs?" Seldes scolded me over the phone.
"Have you sent them back? We must have them today.**

I took the train back to Morristown, New Jersey. The en-
velope was still in the mail box. With the proofs was a check
for $50.00. Ghitza had been sold.

The lesson I learned was worth a thousand times that.
When one has written a story one considers good, he should
send it out again and again.

Most editors have an entirely different slant on a story after
they see it in print. Though Ghitza had been returned by their
readers, half a dozen editors wrote to ask me for Gypsy stories
when they saw Ghitza in print I had six other Gypsy stories
in my desk. I now sent them out and sold them all for what
I thought were fabulous sums of money. They were some-
thing new in literature, romantic, philosophical, colorful, and
vigorous. When they were reprinted by magazines in Eng-
land, the journals of Gypsy folklore said that I must have heard
the tales in Gypsy camps, for "no modern writer could possibly
have invented them.* 7 The truth is that I hadn't heard those
tales in Gypsy camps, but had often told them to Gypsies to test
their truthfulness as to character. The Gypsies have been my
test stones after having been my inspiration.

I continued to frequent the homes and cafes of the immi-
grants of New York, spent all the time I could with them, and
one day discovered that a number of physicians, some very emi-
nent ones, were using the babies in orphanages as guinea pigs.
One of the medicos, who had written copiously on scurvy and
rickets, described in a book he had published tow he had
been able to provoke scurvy and induce rickets in healthy

136 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

children, and how he had cured some of them by Ms methods.

In order to understand the immensity of the crime better, I
read every book on scurvy and rickets available, acquired the
friendship of an eminent metabolist, and sat for hours listening
to his explanations of what caused scurvy and rickets.

The medical profession knew and had known for hundreds of
years an infallible cure for scurvy* A direct descendant of
Shakespeare, Captain Hale, during a long voyage back from
America accidentally discovered the cure. As to rickets, that
dreadful deficiency disease that attacks the bones of children,
it was known that any female who had had rickets in her child-
hood was in mortal danger when she bore a child herself. Yet
those hyenas of the medical profession induced rickets in per-
fectly healthy babies to experiment on them because there were
not enough ricket cases to supply their thirst for fame.

Armed with proofs, affidavits from nurses, extracts from
books and papers, I offered the expose to the New York World
for publication. The office checked and rechecked the facts,
and I was given galley proofs to read a week later. But it
wasn't in the paper the following morning. Someone had
reached someone and suppressed it. When I inquired what
had happened and why the stufi wasn't 'published, I was told,
"It will appear soon. Don't you worry."

That same evening one of the doctors implicated pleaded
with me in the name of his own children to withdraw what I
had written.

When my expose hadn't appeared in a month, I took my ma-
terial to the New York Evening Post, whose editor reinvesti-
gated the facts, found them as described, and let me read galley
proofs* but that was as far as they went along with me.

In the end, condensed and abbreviated, "Orphans as Guinea
Bgs" was printed in The Nation, under the editorship of Doc-
tor Graening, now chief of our Territorial Possessions. The
district attorney and other authorities were aroused. How-
ever, nothing ever came of their indignation.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 137

One prominent doctor had a few unpleasant moments with
someone from the district attorney's office, and the affair was
squashed.

In retaliation, the owner-editor-publisher of a scurrilous little
magazine was tired to denounce me as an anarchist, to tell
the world that I was really a Moslem, that I had four wives,
and that my Gypsy stories were "probably* translations from
the Turkish. As a postscript he added that these stories were
only signed by me, but were done by my official wife who was
in mortal fear of me.

"Pops," Rion, my oldest son, asked, "what are you going to
do about this?'*

The rest of the family, too, was up in arms. The honor of
the Bercovicis was at stake. But I was too busy with several
Gypsy stories to devote my energies to a quarrel just then.

Emboldened by my silence and eager for more boodle from
the hyenalike medicos, the rat published another chapter on
me. This time he said that I was an Albanian and here for no
good purpose.

Feeling in excellent spirits one day after a steak and a bottle
of wine, I invaded the editorial offices and trounced the editor
so hard he had to go to a hospital. One simply cannot go to
court with, every human rat. Yd sooner be fined for assault
and battery than have a jury or a judge listen to me as a party
in a dispute between me and a slimy rat

We had a family party and the escutcheon of the family was
declared undented after I gave an exact account of every blow.
What I didn't tell them was that a blow on my left shoulder
had made my arm practically useless for the time being and
that I should have to see the doctor every day,

I was always like that after a fight. I gloried in the blows
I had given, but tried to minimize the ones I had received.
Bad bookkeeping.

XII

THAT GYPSY PLAY which O'Neill had read was Mcked
around until it came into the hands o Al Woods, the
Broadway producer, Sam Hoffenstein, the poet, whose book,
Poems About Practically Nothing., was yet to appear, was Al
Woods's press agent. Sara had read many of my stories, liked
them, and fearing that I might be shocked or offended by his
boss's manner, he took me to his cubicle before introducing me
to the great man.

"He is a diamond in the rough/' Sam explained, "and not
such a fine diamond at that. You get what I mean, don't you?
He'll call you sweetheart, bastard, and other endearing names
and most likely tell you the story of his life, how he has risen
from peanut vendor to peanut vendor. A diamond in the
rough."

Woods was at the phone when we came in. The great
Broadway producer, his mouth loose, his eyes loose, his coat
and his pants loose, his talk loose, was talking to an actress at
the other end of the wire, "Listen, sweetheart . . . you gotta
bitch the part up a little. Don t fine lady it ... no, sweet-
heart. Love me? O. 1C Bitch it up. I ain't gotta tell you
more. It ain't coming hard to you to bitch up the part a little,
is it? O. K. That's a good girl. If you do it right tonight,
111 buy you a box of candy . . . atta girl."

When he put the receiver down, he looked at me and said
to Sam, "Hello, Samke ... is this the sweetheart who wrote
the Gypsy play? Sit down . . . what's your name? Sit

138

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 139

down, sweetheart. So you wrote a play ... eh? A Gypsy
play, eh? I like Gypsies. I ain't read it. Fay, my star, has
read It. Know her? Sure you do. Who don't? Some girl!
Redhaired all over. Says it's got something. Have a drink?
No? What's the matter? Liver? Sit down, sweetheart
Got a wife, lads? You ain't just off the boat, are you?' 7

The manner and the tone were inimitable.

After two hours of palaver we were just where we had been.

Sam Harris, the famous Broadway producer, also liked my
Gypsy play, but when I went to see him, he said:

"It is too bad that Madame Naziinova is at least twenty years
too old for the part! Brother, you should have shown me a
play like this twenty years ago."

"You weren't producing plays twenty years ago/' I said.

"That's right. What was I doing then? Yes, promoting
prize fights. It wasn't so bad. It's a good little play, but it
does need a lot of work yet/' Harris remarked. "Play around
with it for a couple of months and show it to me again when I
am back from Florida."

And that was that. To this day I can't understand why he
had sent for me!

The tables of the Brazilian coffee house on West Forty-fourth
Street were occupied mostly by young hopefuls of the stage.
Blonds from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Dark-eyed ones from
the Carolinas and Louisiana. It was also the hang-out of Her-
man Shumlin, Paul Streger, Luther Adler, Jed Harris, and Alex
Miller, Louis Miller's son.

One day Alex brought Jed Harris over to my table and intro-
duced him, "Jed Harris, Konrad. Now still a zero, but some
day soon a great producer on Broadway/'

"What do you mean a great producer?" Jed said, sitting
down. **A great producer nothing! The greatest/'

"Expect no modesty from Jed/* Alex said, sitting down be-
side him.

140 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Let's have some coffee first. I want to talk to you."

When the coffee was brought, Jed leaned over the table and
said, "I have nothing in my pockets and nothing in the bank,
but I know die theater. That's rny capital"

Spare, lean, dark, thin-lipped, not too clean, coarse-haired,
and feverish, Jed spoke incessantly for two hours. At the end
of that time, he pushed me back in my chair, "Now, what about
your play? Let's talk about your play. If I had the money,
I'd buy an option on it and see whether I couldn't raise the cash
to produce it."

"I can get the money," Alex spoke up. "If Konrad has
enough confidence in us . . ."

"Us. Who's us?" Jed asked.

"You and me," Alex said.

"You? What the hell do you know about the theater? I'll
let you raise the money, give you a percentage, but for you to
say us, including me! What the hell!"

Some days later the American Play Company called to tell
me that Jed Harris and Alex Miller were ready to put up the
option money on the play. That night the new producing com-
pany were my guests for dinner at Moskowitz's.

Mary Fowler, a very beautiful and gifted actress who had
had a great success in Roger Bloomer, was to play the tide part
in my play. Jeanne Cassals, the wife of Alexander Sachs, die
economist, was to play the other female lead. Between the
time when the contract had been signed, at two in the after-
noon, and the dinner hour, Jed Harris had broken with his part-
ners and didn't come to dine with us. Another hope gone.

Writing plays is one thing, selling them is anodier. And it's
the selling that is the more important of the two talents.

While I wasted time on the play, Otto Liveright, my literary
agent, sold three Gypsy stories to Arthur Vance, the editor of
Pictorid Review. I wrote two more the following week and

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 141

sold them to Pictorial immediately. Tliere were days in which
I finished the whole first draft of a short story at one sitting.
\Vhen work went well, I wouldn't leave my table until I had
revised the story again and again and made it presentable.

Bigelow, editor of Good Housekeeping, bought four Gypsy
stories and paid me five thousand dollars for the lot. Vance of
Pictorial then upped the price to $1500 a story and bought
every one I wrote for the next two months. The stories sang
themselves into me while I was asleep, ate, talked, walked the
streets, or listened to music. Everything I had ever thought of
translated itself into Gypsy and Tartar stories. Color, odor,
snatches of conversation which I had heard as a child on the
banks of the Danube, the memory of a bear tamer in the market
place, the shrug of a Gypsy woman's shoulder, or a gesture
integrated itself into a complete tale and practically wrote it-
self. Naomi and I roamed the lower East Side where we met
Gypsies and more Gypsies, listened to their talk, their music,
and their quarrels, went to their christenings and their wed-
dings, and gathered more inspiration for Gypsy stories.

These stories formed themselves into epics of love, of
strength and truth triumphant. I wasn't concerned with plot,
but with the philosophical content of a story. What made
these stories Gypsy stories was the color in which I encased
them. They were universal melodies played by a Gypsy or-
chestra.

Those were the golden days of the magazine editor. He was
king. When he liked a story or a serial novel, he bought it
without consulting anyone. He was sole arbiter of what he
wanted, and he fixed the price for what he bought. To be
sure he had readers who winnowed out the stuff that came by
mail ( and often sent back material they should have kept), but
when a story reached him, he was the only one to decide
whether the decision was for sixty thousand dollars for a serial
or two thousand dollars for a short story.

The touch of the great editors led the circulation of their

142 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

magazines up into the millions. Not everything they pub-
lished was literature of Class A, but they had an eye out for
the best to be obtained and didn't hesitate to publish from time
to time a novel or a story that was somewhat above the heads
of their readers.

Men like Vance, Arthur Hoffman, William F. Bigelow, and
Loring Schuller, to mention only a few of the editors of
women's magazines, had comparatively high literary standards.
When they bought trash for popular consumption, they didn't
fool themselves about the quality of their purchases.

When, however, the circulation of magazines began to fall
off as a result of the depression, the promoting geniuses of the
business departments began to take an interest in the stuff that
was published and began to interfere with the decisions of the
editors. The promoting geniuses refused to admit that the cir-
culation fell because of the depression and believed that if they
were able to spend on promotion some of the money that was
spent for literature, they could raise the circulation back to par.

A magazine is a business. Those who own it are chiefly
interested in profits, dividends. Some of the geniuses of pro-
motion had their way and sheared the editors of their powers.
And then the trash crowded out whatever good stuff might
have gone in. Instead of one editor with a decisive voice,
many magazines instituted a new way of buying material.
Every story was read by five or more readers who gave it
points. A hundred was the ideal. Every story was judged
separately for plot, for novelty, for suspense, and for timeliness,
and each item received so many points. When all the points
received by a story from all the separate readers averaged more
than sixty, the story was acceptable.

A group of us once sent one of de Maupassant's best stories
to a magazine having such a system. It averaged less than
thirty points and of course was sent back as unacceptable.
There would perhaps be little cause to protest if this new sys-

ITS THE GYPSY LV ME 143

tern helped the circulation of most magazines, but it doesn't.
Where are the Delineator, Designer, and Pictorial Review, to
speak of only a few women's magazines?

The Century was one of the oldest magazines in this country,
and one of the best. When the promoting manager, Glenn
Frank, was made editor, he spent so much of the budget on
promotion that he had little left to buy literature with and
could only buy what was cheap to fill its pages. In the end
The Century was promoted to death.

Shorn of his powers by the business department, Arthur
Vance died a brokenhearted man, watching Pictorial Review,
his creation, go to the bow wows. I have seen him weep like
a child when the business department refused to confirm one
of his purchases for the magazine.

Some of the best story writers this country has produced
haven't had a story published in magazines in four or five years.
And since books of short stories are not profitable for publish-
ers, some of the best literary efforts in the country are wasted
unborn.

Most of what is published in the majority of magazines is
mechanical, written to formula, and has little value as litera-
ture.

I know that this is only a temporary condition, but in the
meantime the standards are lowered continually. The day
may come when there won't be many who know how to write
a short story that is a short story and not a hair raiser or a
thriller. We know what happened to the machine tool trade
because the old mechanics could find no work during the last
decade, and no new ones had been apprenticed. Now, when
they are badly needed, the old ones have lost their skill, and
the new ones haven't acquired any yet

The most pitiful thing is to watch the growth of a thousand
and one pulp magazines whose owners have never had any
standards and are reaching ever lower and lower for new read-

144 ITS THE GYPSY IN A1E

ers. In the end many of them published, and are publishing,
magazines for those who cannot read at all, picture magazines.
How much lower can they possibly go?

The wheel of fortune was certainly turning in my favor!
Dame Luck was catching up with me. Had The Dial not come
to New York and changed its policy from a book reviewing
magazine to a general magazine, the first Gypsy story might
still be imprinted. Had that story not taken the fancy of
Roscoe Thayer and Gilbert Seldes, it might still be kicking
around in editorial offices. And who knows whether I would
have written more of them without the encouragement of pub-
lication!

Perseverance is a great virtue no doubt, but often a combi-
nation of circumstances defeats all virtue or prospers all vice.
I am not ashamed to say that luck has played a fair part in
"whatever success I have had.

We moved to a larger apartment. I bought a dozen of the
most vivid scarfs and cravats and let my love for color run riot.
No one had ever worn such red, yellow, and green shirts as I
dared to wear at that time. I bought the best piano money
could buy. I had my hands in my pockets all the time. No
one who came for money was refused. Relatives. Friends.
A thousand dollars to one. Two thousand to another. Every
time I received a check I went down to the East Side and paid
the check of everybody who happened to be at this or that
restaurant; or remembering a woman I had investigated for
the charities, I pretended that I represented a new organiza-
tion and bought her groceries and paid her rent. And lest our
children forget what poverty was like, we used to send them or
take them along on such errands. Although conditions had
improved on the East Side since my first arrival, they were
still heartbreaking and hopeless. I was often deeply ashamed
of my prosperity.

Now that the war was over and the Czar was driven out of

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 145

Russia, the Russian Jews were greater Russian patriots than
were the Russians. Every Intellectual Russian Jew wrote
about the "soul of Russia/* the "heart of Russia/' the 'literature
of Russia/'

Prohibition was on. Corruption and gangsterism reared
their hydra heads. Idlers and bums were wearing ten dollar
shirts. There wasn't a chicken in every pot, but there was a
still in every other basement. You could buy whiskey and
gin in every candy store and in every Italian, Polish, Czech,
Syrian, Hungarian, and Jewish restaurant.

An old lady, whom I had known as terribly destitute, laughed
at me when I bought her a bag of groceries. "Meester, you
wanna gallon or a quart?" she asked. "Mine son is in business.
I deliver for him."

The son wasn't sixteen.

An Italian woman told rne that "Prohibish" was made for the
poor "to sell vino and pay no tax's."

I spoke to several editors of the foreign language press and
attracted their attention to the bad reputation their nationals
were acquiring.

"Brother, bother about your own business/' they answered
each in his own tongue. "Well attend to ours,"

And what was their business? The Italians in New York
were told to hate the French and the English because Italy
didn't get enough out of the war, the Germans to hate the
Poles in New York because of Danzig, the Hungarians to hate
the Roumanians because they had lost Transylvania to them,
the Russians to demand Bessarabia, and the Slovaks to demand
separation from the Czechs.

A backer of Rain, the play which elevated Jeanne Eagles
to fame, invited me to have dinner with him at Sheriff Bob
Chanler's house on East Nineteenth Street That liouse was
something out of Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and the Walpurgis
Night The walls were decorated with giraffes, birds of para-

146 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

dise, and parrots, painted by a mad genius, Bob himself, who
was as fantastic and exotic as his paintings.

Six foot four tall, with a head like that of Dunias pre, enor-
mous and woolly, he met me in his slippers and open shirt and
put out one paw while he held up his pants with the other.
Pushing me into a room and speaking as if he had a potato in
his mouth, he said pointing to another room from where I heard
loud laughter and screams, "A lot of fools. They come to drink
my wine, eat my food, and fornicate. Just fools. I was mar-
ried to Lina Cavalieri, the opera singer, once. Cost me a mil-
lion dollars to get rid of her. Cheap at that. Very cheap.
What a fool. Well! Slept with Lina twice. No good. Got
better service for a dollar. Gave her a million dollars because
she wasn't worth fifty cents. Isn't that fanny?"

And he laughed and slapped his enormous thighs.

"I put up some money for Rain. Interested in the woman.
Ha, ha, ha. Read the play. It doesn't look so good on paper
but how it plays! I read your play. Good. Ill put up the
cash. I say to him what the hell, why do you want a blonde
Gypsy for? What the hell . . ."

"What blonde Gypsy?" I asked.

"Youll see. Blonde! Blonde! Beautiful blonde. His
whore. But no Gypsy. Well, you'll see. Hope you spit in his
face." And Bob Chanler spat to show me how, left me alone
for a moment, and returned to the room with a copy of Crimes
of Charity which he wanted autographed.

'The poor poor. Why the hell don't they come here to dyna-
mite this place? Rich. Too rich. My father was robber
baron. I am the same. This is like Rome. Debauchery.
Why the hell don't they throw dynamite on this place? I have
no respect for them. That's what I would do if I were poor.
Dynamite. Zuin, boom. Dynamite. Dynamite."

There were about twenty people in different stages of drunk-
enness in the next room, women of doubtful sexuality and
painted young boys sitting on the laps o elderly men. A
famous pianist, drunk to the gills, was playing a Chopin noc-

IT'S THE GYPSY IX ME 147

turne and crying. Two females were drinking from one glass,
looking sonlfnlly into each, otter's eyes and whispering, "Dar-
ling! Sweetheart."

"That's enough/' Chanler thundered, crowding his guests to
the door.

"Get out. Get out!" he yelled, still holding up his falling
pants.

"Hey, there/' he called to two girls on a couch, "you two
bitches in heat, no fornication today. Come Thursday. To-
day is Tuesday/'

When they were at the door, he asked me: "Sodom and
gonorrhea! Why the hell don't your poor dynamite this
house. Every form of vice, every degeneracy nests here/*

"Why do you let them nest here?" I asked.

"Why! Why, he asks! Because this is a puritanical coun-
try. These lepers have to have some place to go. And some-
times they amuse me. I like to see people eat, drink, and
fornicate in and out of order, to revenge myself, as Freud or
who the hell says so, on my puritanical ancestors. Have a
drink."

He poured a pint glass full of champagne for himself and as
the street door opened, he bellowed, "To the death of the
sonofabitch who comes in now/*

My tost waddled into the room, stewed, and accom-
panied by a young woman with a golden head of great purity
on a sturdy Polish peasant body.

"And this bitch/* Chanler said, grabbing the girl, throwing
her across his knees, raising her skirt, and slapping her dimpled
buttocks, "this bitch wants to play a Gypsy/*

Screaming and clawing, the girl got to her feet and called
Chanler names a truck driver would have hesitated to use.

Her escort slumped into the nearest chair and watched what
was happening out of his big bleary eyes.

"Go to sleep,** Chanler yelled at him. "Get out of my sight
before I kfll you.**

When my host had stumbled into the adjoining room,

148 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Chanler said to me,- "Take her to the other room and tell me
how she is afterward."

"Please! Please, Bob!" the girl pleaded, raising her eyes like
an offended Madonna.

"Oh," Bob said, "you want to pray! Good. Go upstairs
and pray. To hell with you/'

A few minutes later Bob beckoned me to follow him upstairs.
In a niche in the wall, at the first landing, was a statue of the
Virgin. The blonde Madonna, with her golden hair loose on
her shoulders, was on her knees before it.

"Whenever she is drunk, I spank her. When she is spanked,
she prays to the Virgin. A chacun son gout."

Bob and I had dinner alone, and he talked. Art, music, liter-
ature, history, and politics. He was tremendously interested in
the Russian experiment, chiefly "because the poor have blasted
hell out of the rich. Great people, the Russians. Guts. Sav-
ages. Asiatics. There must be some Asiatic blood in me.
Maybe African. Look at me. I look like Dumas pere. Half
African."

The colored servant girl came in.

"Look at her. Beautiful, isn't she? Don't try no monkey
business with her. She'll stick a knife into you. Won't you,
Liza? Tell him. Some day the Africans, Liza, the Africans,
will do to us what the muzhiks did to the Russian noblemen.
Won't they, Liza? Don't stand there and look at me! Get
the hell outa here and bring us some more wine.

"The wealth of this country ought to be redistributed again.
I am getting too much money. My relatives are getting too
much money. My ancestors were all pirates.

"Have some more caviar. Twenty dollars a pound. I eat
a pound a day. It's bad for the stomach, but it's good for my
virility. One day I say to hell with sex and save twenty dol-
lars. The next day I say to hell with the stomach and it costs
me a million.

"Don't let that louse have your play. He'll never do any-

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 149

thing more. He'll live for the rest of Ms life on Rain. A
great play played by a great actress. Shell be here after the
theater. Glad he brought you here. Want to see you often.
Come whenever you feel like it. Call me when you want to
have dinner. And if you want to sleep here . . . good. If
you want to bring your own bitch, it's O. K. with me. If you
don't, you'll always find one here."

By the time we finished our dinner, the rooms were again
filled with people, and two colored girls walked about with trays
of sandwiches, bottles, glasses, and packages of cigarettes. All
New York was there. Ethel Barryinore, resplendent in her
glory and maturity. Rubenstein, the pianist, on his first visit
to this country. Tallulah Bankhead, flaming youth, saucy,
piquant, was giving an imitation of Ethel Barrymore to Ethel
Barrymore's face.

When Jeanne Eagels came in, looking smaller than she really
was, and blonder than she was, Chanler, the millionaire genius
and playboy, lifted her high up in the air and shouted at the
top of his barrel voice, "This is the greatest actress of all time.
And who don't like what I say can get the hell out of here."

Ethel Barrymore applauded.

A colored orchestra appeared, as if from nowhere, and began
to play dance music. Bob tore off his coat, threw the slippers
off his feet, grabbed Jeanne Eagels and danced with her out of
step, out of rhythm, a sort of savage dance, until he collapsed
puffing to the carpet. Jeanne Eagels sat down beside him, and
the two talked seriously, there on the floor, while the music
played and couples danced around them. I had a good look at
her. Her face was commonplace, but her eyes weren't; they
had fire and strange vacancies. When the music stopped. Bob
helped her to her feet, and the two went to a corner of the
room and continued their conversation, undisturbed by the
noise, the going and the coming of people, the drunken cries,
and the love shrieks in the adjoining rooms.

I looked upon all human emotions with tolerance and under-

150 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

standing, but that night I saw more than I could stand. I am
not speaking of all the guests, but only of those hermaphrodites
sprawling on couches behind painted screens and swilling
whiskey between lascivious kisses. I was near vomiting when
I left.

A few blocks away I came upon a long breadline which
stretched behind a truck distributing coffee and sandwiches
an hour after midnight. Hundreds of thousands of people
were starving in New York that winter. I convinced fifty or
more of those derelicts to follow me to Chanler's door.

When Bob heard who was outside, he invited them to the
basement, gave them a separate party, and even sent the col-
ored orchestra down to play for them.

When the derelicts were gone, he said to me, "There were
fifty of them. They could have smashed us all to a pulp.
Goddam the poor. They'll never amount to anything. They
have no guts. Give them a sandwich, and they kiss your
hands. It would have been fun if they had run upstairs and
held up the bunch and beaten them and raped the women and
smashed and set fire to the place. But they are no good.
They have no guts. Some night you should come in with a
bunch of real men, muzhiks from Russia."

The whole affair left a bad taste in my mouth. I liked
Bob. There was something gargantuan about him and his
amorality. He was above man-made morals, but most of the
others made me feel that they were below the lowest standard
of morality. It's the same with nakedness in art. On an im-
mense scale it is hardly noticeable; in a miniature it can be
very offensive and smutty.

XIII

I WENT to tear Clare Sheridan, who had just returned
from Russia, lecture on the Soviets. Six foot tall and lean
with a chiseled blonde face and large blue eyes, a peach-and-
cream complexion, and golden hair, she lectured beautifully,
but when people fired questions at her, she became confused
and looked to the chairman for help.

A Russian friend took me backstage after the lecture. Al-
though this was the first time she had seen me, she reached out
her long bare arm, touched my fingers with hers, drew me close,
and said, "You look like Maxim Gorky. Stay near me. Don't
go away. I am leaving for California tonight. Come to the
car and see me off."

Four other cars followed us. We were old friends when
she kissed me goodbye.

"Have you known her a long time?" one of her communist
friends asked me when the train had gone.

"Years and years/* I answered.

"Then you must have known her before she. . . ."

"Before what?"

"Before she saw the light. She is a great power, an aristo-
crat that has seen the light. She can go everywhere. She can
speak to everybody. We need women like her. Russia needs
her."

"And what wfll happen to her when Russia no longer needs
I asked.

151

152 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Well, what am I, a prophet?" he questioned as he walked
away.

As soon as she reached California, she was reported engaged
to many Charlie Chaplin.

A month went by. Two.

The night before leaving for California to join my family,
which was there, I went to see The Tidings Brought to Mary
at the Guild Theatre. Just before the curtain rose, Clare Sheri-
dan, in a fur cape, rushed down the aisle, followed by a very
short man, and sat down on a seat in front of me. I tapped
her shoulder. She turned, recognized me, shrieked, and turned
again and again to smile at me while the first act was on.

During the intermission, followed by the short man, we
walked out into the lobby, where I told her that I was leaving
the following day. She begged me to take her home after the
performance.

We went to her studio. Within five minutes it was crowded
with actors and bolsheviks. When her little son, Dicky, came
down from his room, awakened by the noise, she handed me
over to him and told him not to let go of me under any condi-
tion. I went up to Dicky's room and listened to his stories
about California and Mexico. Dicky was fascinated by
Mexico, but above all he was fascinated by Chaplin!

"So amusing, so entertaining, don't you know," the little
Englishman said.

By the time Clare came up to put her son to bed, Dicky and
I were fast friends. Clare and I went down to the enormous
studio, which was littered with trays of leftover sandwiches
and empty bottles, and sat down to talk. She sobbed out her
Russian and California adventures. She told me how she had
studied sculpture during the war because time had weighed
heavy on her hands after the death of her youngest baby.
How and why she had gone to Russia. How Wolodarsky,
Trotsky's alter ego, whom I had known in New York, was shot

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 153

before her eyes in Moscow, How she had stood before the
Kremlin at the funeral of Jack Reed,, and had tried to comfort
Louise Bryant, Reed's wife, who had arrived in Moscow a few
hours before Jacks death.

Frightened by these events, yet fascinated by them, she had
been telling herself that she was an active participant in a
world-shattering drama. She didn't really understand bolshe-
vism, but she was for it. She didn't have to understand,
Trotsky understood. That was enough for her. But now
people questioned her. She had to answer theoretical ques-
tions about communism!

She talked on for hours in a torrent of words mingling the
past with the present, memories of her husband killed in the
war, snatches of conversation with her American relatives, who
were scandalized by her Russian adventures and now more
scandalized by the publicity resulting from her engagement
to Chaplin. While we were talking, someone knocked dis-
creetly at the door and entered. A Russian.

"Oh, excuse me > comrade," he said, backing out after seeing
me. "I only wanted to ask Comrade Sheridan one thing. Is
Mr. Chaplin a comrade?"

"Why don't you ask him?" Clare Sheridan said, rising.

"It is too far, California, three thousand miles, you know/*
he said, edging forward as he picked something out of the tray
of sandwiches and filled himself a glass of scotch from a bottle.
'Too far, you know," he said, throwing his head back and toss-
ing the drink into his wide-open mouth. Then pointing the
half-munched sandwich in my direction, he asked, "Is he a
comrade?"

"Why don t you ask him?" Clare said. "He isn't three thou-
sand miles away."

"Well!" the man asked, coming closer to me. "Are youF

"No. I am not."

"No? Bozshemoi! No? Why not?"

"Tell me/* I asked. "Why are you a comrade?"

154 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"It's natural, no? The best people are comrades. No?"

"No. They are not. Get out now."

Retreating to the door, he grabbed a few more sandwiches,
shrugged his shoulders, and left.

"That s how it was in Russia. People walked in and out of
my room at aH hours. You were not supposed to close your
door. Conspiracy. Counterrevolution."

"Then why do you go on praising the Soviets?"

"Because it is a fascinating experiment. Because they are
everywhere. Because I don't know why."

Poor befuddled human being.

The next moment she was talking about Rouinania and
laughing about her adventures there.

"They are a crazy romantic lot An hour after he met me,
an army officer threatened to commit suicide when I refused
to elope with him/*

"Did he?"

"No. He only got drunk."

At daybreak we had breakfast together at Childs at Colum-
bus Circle. On the front page of the morning newspaper was
the world-shattering news, that, when asked whether he was
going to marry Clare Sheridan,, Charlie Chaplin said, "Ask the
lady."

"And what does the lady say?" I asked, showing her the
paper.

"That it is so sudden," Clare laughed.

I bought five magazines on the train. I had a story in each
of them. I read them in a row to see what effect they would
produce. I was as objective as one can possibly be about one's
own work. In the end I was somewhat confused. They were
good stories, but wasn't the color a little forced? Separately
the color was pleasant, but read one after the other, the riot of

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 155

color they presented obliterated the design. Living in plenty,
as I did, I was much more concerned with the beauty than with
the more sober aspects of Gypsy life. One simply cannot dine
on caviar and champagne and keep a sober eye. I had been so
proud of my ability to write story after story. On that trip to
California I concluded that I was driving myself too hard and
living too fast. Money had dug its teeth into me.

The editors drove me to write more and more while the going
was good, as if they wanted to squeeze me out before the source
had gone dry, and I was too proud of my virility to say, "No,
I am tired." Some of the stories I read on the train were the
product of that pride.

I was having dinner with Ralph Block, once a shining light
on the New Republic, but then a motion picture story editor,
and Paul Bern, who, later, after marrying Jean Harlow, com-
mitted suicide, when Chaplin came in.

Bern, who bad the complexion of a girl and the soft eyes of
a fawn, adored Chaplin. Any opinion of Chaplin on any of a
hundred subjects lie knew nothing about was eagerly accepted
as gospel by Bern. Chaplin was not to be contradicted on any-
thing. He was the genius. The one and only one. I called
Chaplin on all his misstatements.

Feeling like an animal trainer who had tamed all the animals
in the cage but one, he set out to conquer me also and by any
means. After placing a disk in the phonograph, he grabbed a
tablecloth, draped himself in it, and danced a Pavlova dance,
better than Pavlova herself had ever done it. When the music
stopped, he grinned all his teeth at me and said, "Pretty good,
eh? Pretty good, I calls it. How about you? Give us a
dance. Show us, eh/* and he grinned.

An hour later he rose to go and asked whether he couldn't
drop me off somewhere. I mentioned where I was staying.

Perfect Ifs on my way. Come along.** In the car he
asked, "A cup of coffee, eh? Coffee and cheese cake at Lewis's.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Best cheese cake in the world, eh? Yes? Good car, eh? Yes?
Locomobile. Very expensive. Marvelous shock absorbers.
Travels like on air."

Across the table from me at Lewis's, Chaplin said, "Got a
wire from Clare about you. Didn't answer it. Figured we'd
ran into each other some day. Same people gravitate to the
same places, you know. How is Clare? Don't know how that
rumor about our getting married got into the papers! Don't
do any harm to me or to her. Good publicity. No harm.
Marvelous woman, Clare. I'll show you the bust she made

l y>

or me.

When we left, Chaplin insisted that I accompany him to his
house up in the hills.

In the car he talked to me about the autobiography he was
writing. But even as he talked, he told four different versions
of one early childhood incident. Even as he affirmed that he
intended to tell the truth, the absolute truth about his life, he
told two or three different truths. In one and the same breath
he said he had never known his father and also that his father
had been a famous music hall performer.

"I can still see the poor man coming home after a wretched
night at the theater/'

It was all play-acting, a thousand Chaplins all revolving
about a nonexistent axis. No one applauded Chaplin more
abundantly than Chaplin. No one's disapproval threw him. in
so deep a gloom as did his own. When he gave an imitation
of himself at the age of seven when he had run away from the
workhouse in London, he looked a forlorn, undersized seven-
year-old street urchin.

"I danced in the streets, Sidney went around with the hat.
We shared the coppers with the Italian organ grinder. How
do you like that in an autobiography? Knock *em for a goal.
They want truth, eh? Ill give them truth up to their eyes,
ft tell them how the children of the poor find out the facts of
life by themselvesf*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 157

Hollywood was but a sprawling village with a Main Street,
Hollywood Boulevard, not more than ten blocks long. Intel-
lectually it was smaller than that. The movies, with their
nefarious beauty contests, had attracted young girls from every
corner of the world. For the few who got employment, thou-
sands lingered on, haunting the studios, die coffee houses, cock-
tail parties, and ultimately winding up at Mme. Florence's
establishment in Los Angeles,

The winners of beauty contests carried their prizes and their
clippings in their bags and made you look at them and read
them while they whined for a few dollars to pay a week's rent.
There were a dozen cults on the hill, Bahais, New Thoughters,
Sunworshippers, Nudists, Balthazars, Moonworshippers, Bud-
dhists, and Rosicracianists, but not a free cup of coffee in any
of them.

To be sure, there was a small group of more serious men
and women, who shied from parties and cults, but they were
few, pitifully few. I spent fine evenings with Leatrice Joy,
John Gilbert, Pearly Poor Shehan, and Aileen Pringle.

Chaplin was interested in Pola Negri while beauteous Claire
Windsor was interested in him. Just before Chaplin and Pola
were about to be married, they quarreled because Pola had ex-
pressed herself in a derogatory manner about the Jews.

*TThank God that is over,'* Chaplin said after he had broken
the engagement. And as an afterthought he added, TDidn't
hurt her. She got barrels of publicity. Never hurt anybody."

While he was filming The Pilgrim* Chaplin insisted that I
work in a bungalow on his lot I watched him work when I
was not working on my book Murdo, which I dedicated to him.
He told me that ids mother was a Gypsy, a Romany, and that
his grandmother, whose photograph he showed me> liad lived
in a "vardo/* a Gypsy wagon.

Chaplin was already a millionaire, but when a restatmmt
check came to five dollars, he never failed to exclaim, **A whole
f amfly cotild live on that for a week.**

158 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Paramount bought a story of mine for Rudolph Valentino,
and I met the Sheik. He looked like a million dollars on the
screen, but was absolutely insignificant off it. He had sur-
rounded himself with worshippers, male and female, and acted
the Sheik even after work hours. The promise that was in his
eyes on the screen was but a vacant stare across the table. He
had no more intelligence than a ten-year-old, but he was shrewd
and calculating. He bathed in cheap perfume, used cheap,
highly scented soaps and lotions, but wore twenty dollar shirts
over unlaundered underwear.

His table was set like one in the movies. The butler was a
movie butler. His bedroom was a motion picture bedroom,
with a four-poster baldachined bed inlaid with gold and silver.
The black marble bathroom was an Elinor Glyn dream.

The poor man wasn't living. He was acting out an en-
chanted life. He didn't even die. Someone was just buried,
and I am afraid he'll have to play the part of a buried man a
long time. June Mathis, his discoverer, mentor, and screen
writer, came in every night to read the publicity notes to her
cardboard god.

Poor June! She, too, was leading an enchanted life. With
no talent and no ability whatsoever, she was making several
thousand dollars a week as Valentino's special writer.

"Isn't he the most wonderful thing on earth?" she asked
while Valentino looked at me to hear the answer.

Why did females lose their hearts and heads over this tenth-
rate male? Suddenly somebody riding by shot a bullet into
the door. Valentino wasn't scared at all. Why should he
have been? His own publicity man had done it

"Some jealous husband," the Sheik said calmly and pro-
ceeded to fill his wine glass.

At the Paramount studio the publicity man asked me to write
something about the imperturbable courage of Rudolph Valen-
tino.

**What courage?"

ITS THE GYPSY LV ME 159

"That bulet ? man. And tow his hand didn't even tremble,

and he continued to fill his glass."

I laughed.

"You ain't co-operative/" the publicity man complained. "It
ain't going to do you any good, Mister."

Frank Woods and Thompson Buchanan, Paramount^ story
editors, suggested that I give a party to celebrate the sale of
the story for Valentino.

The party was held in Thompson's house while his wife was
away in Chicago. At midnight, all the guests, except four,
were in horizontal positions on the floors, on the staircases* in
the beds, and on the couches. Two beauties quarreled and
pulled one another's hair. A wife came to take her husband
home, discovered him with an arm about another woman on
the staircase, and made a scene that woke up the neighbors.
Chaplin, Aileen Bringle, Penrhyn Stanlaws, the artist, and I sat
in a corner and discussed music and art. At four in the morn-
ing we turned down the lights and left. More than half of the
guests were in the arms of Morpheus.

After I paid the bootlegger's and the caterer's bill, there
wasn't much left out of the first payment on that motion picture
story.

Chaplin became a regular dinner guest at our house and told
his life story to my wife and children over and over and every
time differently. I suggested that he call his autobiography,
Variations on the Theme of My Life. Rada and baby Mirel
adored him. He and Gorky, my second son, became fast
friends, but quarreled continually over art and literature.
When Chaplin offered Gorky a part in one of his comedies, the
boy replied that acting was the lowest of all art forms and that
he would never demean himself to that extent. Chaplin was
furious, but took long walks with him to convince him that
acting was a great art. Naomi and I kept aloof from their
quarreL We saw no reason to interfere with Gorky's opinion.

160 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

The Fairbankses had built Pickf air on the top of a MI and
were receiving only distinguished guests, patterning themselves
after royalty. Doug got his intellectual patter by osmosis by
his constant association with Chaplin, who got it by associating
with the passing intellectuals and lecturers. They were great
friends and admired each other. Doug looked upon Chaplin
as a great philosopher, but disapproved of his radicalism.

What a curious perverted, inverted, convex little world
Hollywood was! Because I was seen with Chaplin, I was
asked out for tea and dinner by the elite of the industry. I
was much more interested in the people of Boyle Heights in
Los Angeles than I was in the Hollywood fraternity. The
Mexican quarter and the Mexican theater of .Los Angeles fasci-
nated me.

Enough was enough, We bought a car and were off to
Carmel-by-the-Sea to meet Fred Beckdolt, Van Wyck Brooks,
Harry Leon Wilson, and Adreana Spadoni, who had been cor-
responding with me.

There we rented a bungalow at the seashore, and I was be-
ginning to do some real work when I was called back to Holly-
wood to close a story deal with Joe Schenck. At the last mo-
ment something went awry, and the deal was off.

We returned to New York by boat, by way of the Panama
Canal, Mexico, Cuba, Florida, and Baltimore. We really trav-
eled. While in Panama, I wrote two stories in two days and
mailed them to Harpers.

As soon as we were back in New York, I set to work and
wrote ten stories, half of them Gypsy stories, in three weeks,
and sold all of them as fast as they were on paper. Latin
America had set my imagination on fire again.

I worked from six in the morning to one in the afternoon on
an empty stomach. After lunch at the Algonquin, at the
Brevoort, or at some Greek pkce, I kept appointments with
editors, publishers, and interviewers. It was good to earn a lot
of money by one's work in New York. Hollywood had been

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 161

the graveyard of literature. The talent of more fine writers
was buried there than in any other place. Many empty human
shells are strutting around in fine clothes there and living
in gorgeous homes while their souls are in Potter's Field
graves.

When Clare Sheridan came back from a second visit to Rus-
sia, the New York comrades accused her of having come away
with many expensive fur coats that the propaganda department
had lent her.

Poor Clare. For one~reason or another the order had come
from Moscow that she should be smeared in America and
smeared she was. The smearing technique was not yet per-
fected, but it was done with great gusto.

When Isadora Duncan was no longer useful to the bolshe-
viks, they assassinated her character also. Character assassi-
nation was one of the great lessons taught by the great Lenin,
who was past master at it.

Poor flaming Isadora! I have seen her tear her hair and
rage like a madwoman.

"Have they no scruples! No hearts! How can they do that
to me, me, Isadora Duncan! After what I have sacrificed for
them."

I have seen her throw herself on the floor and scream, while
her Russian husband, a peasant poet, laughed, kicked her in
the shins, and called her "Arnenkansky curoa?

My London agent cabled to tell me that he had sold the
Scandinavian rights to four of my books, the French rights to
three, and the Italian rights to one. What a haul! We spent
all this money buying some paintings by modem American
painters.

Rion was writing a novel One day he read me two chap-
ters. I disagreed with the contents and the style and was prob-
ably too violent in nay expressions. In self-defense he said that

162 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

my style wasn't so hot either and that he often disagreed with
the contents of my stories. I bore him no ill will for not liking
what I was doing, but he, I am afraid, has never forgotten what
I said about his first literary labors.

Gorky, too, thought he could do better than his father and
said one day that I would be remembered as his father only.
He was reading Walter Pater at the time and had no use for
anything else. Naomi appraised these discussions better than
I did. I enjoyed disagreeing with my own sons. I liked their
independence.

The truth of the matter was that three males in one house-
hold were as bad as three females in one kitchen. And it hap-
pened that we were all three of us pre-eminently male.

At the next Authors* League ball I was introduced to Rebecca
West, the English author. I had read Rebecca's novel, The
Return of a Soldier,, her criticisms, and her essays and wasn't
prepared to meet one so young, so gay, so vivacious, so dark-
eyed, black-haired, and so like a bouncing peasant girl. She
said something complimentary about those of my stories that
had been published in England and asked me to dance with
her.

"Your friend, Clare, has spoken to me about you."

"How is Clare?"

"Still blonde and beautiful/'

A little later Lawrence Langner, the lawyer, dramatist, and
guiding spirit of the Theatre Guild, asked us to join him at the
bar. After Lawrence had told her that I knew New York well,
Rebecca insisted that we go sight-seeing immediately. Poor
Lawrence! We walked him off his feet, going from one place
to another, to a Jewish actors' cafe, to the Gypsy rialto, to a
Harlem night club, and back again to the East Side. At break
of day we were at the Coptic Church on Rector Street to hear
early morning services. And how Rebecca could laugh! Be-
tween laughter and laughter she told amusing tales about Shaw

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 163

and D. H. Lawrence and discussed James Joyce, whose work
was still contraband here.

Her conversation was scmtillating. Her impromptu remarks
were perfect. Her must cutting remarks were gems. And she
knew literature., philosophy, economics, politics, and people.

We dined together the following evening in a Roumanian
restaurant After dinner she wanted to see the Gypsies by the
East River again and have her fortune told.

The next evening she delivered her first lecture from the
stage of the Times Square Theater, to an enormous public.
It sounded like improvised music. But the feminists were
furious with her. Ruth Hale, Heywood Broim's wife, thought
Rebecca had committed an unpardonable sin because she had
lectured in an evening gown, decollete, and had had her hair
marceled for the occasion.

After the lecture I accompanied Rebecca to Langner's home.
Poor Courtenay Lemon had been so eager to meet Rebecca
West that he had come to the party ahead of all and was al-
ready drunk.

"You Roumanian barbarian,** he shouted at me. ""Tell her
who I am. Tell her that I am not an ordinary drunkard.**

Poor Courtenay! What a far day from the day when we
had first met, when he was everything and I nothing. I intro-
duced him to Rebecca, said he was a most magnificent writer,
and went overboard in my praise. But the more I praised him
the somberer his face became. My praise was gall; for he
knew he had done nothing yet to deserve the praise.

Horace Liveright joined us to inquire about the European
situation. Rebecca told us.

"We are headed for another war. The trouble with the Ver-
sailles treaty is that it is not enforced to the limit This is not
peace. It is an armistice from which only the Germans will
benefit. England wfll not arm itself. The upper crust is so
afraid o communism, it wfll hand England over to whoever
will promise to save them, not England."

164 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

When those around her were very serious, site wanted to
dance. She was an indifferent dancer, but she was always
eager to step out to the center of the floor. Men adored her.
Women hated her.

XIV

HAVING WRITTEN twenty stories, a play, and a number
of articles and edited a book of short stories in twelve
weeks, I felt exhausted. One evening at dinner, my wife said
to me, "I have booked you on the Paris. You are sailing for
France on Saturday. YouH work some more when you come
back. You have worked enough this stretch. You need some
relaxation/*

Wise Naomi! I wouldn't have dared to suggest such a trip
for me alone just then. The children had grown, were more
or less headstrong, and needed considerable and delicate man-
agement to fit them into the grooves of life. Their education
had been such that the process of adapting them to life was no
easy one. Neither Naomi nor I had ever held back our criti-
cism of society, its injustices, inequalities, and stupidities. Our
prosperity had not changed our attitude. The children had
grown up in this spirit of rebellious criticism. I knew it was
a handicap, but would rather know them handicapped by truth
than by lies. Their very vegetarianism was in the nature of a
rebellion. They weren't easy to get along with. None of us
was, though we loved each other. We were intellectually al
each other's throats when we disagreed on anything, and the)
never gave in to me or to Naomi because we were their elders
or their parents.

I felt uneasy about leaving Naomi alone with them, but tibe)

166 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

scoffed, "Naomi can take care of herself. She can hold up her
end better than you can. You don't have to ask mercy for
her"

At a goodbye luncheon at the Algonquin, F. P. A. asked me
to communicate with Esther Root, care of the American Ex-
press in Paris and Granada.

"Look up Joan M ," Horace Liveright said in the same

tone of voice, "care of the American Express."

At the end of the luncheon Horace leaned over to tell me,
"I am going to learn how to play tennis. I'll get myself the
best teacher and work at it day and night."

'What for?" I asked.

"Just so that I beat F. P. A. at it. Good God," he cried out,
his eyes raised to the ceiling, "just one set, please, one set.
That's all I want; to beat F. P. A. one set at tennis. That isn't
asking too much, is it, God?"

Ludwig Lewisohn, a guest at the luncheon, was eying me
across the table. He had written a very laudatory criticism of
my latest book, in the Literary Review, and wondered why I
hadn't said a word of thanks.

"You ungrateful wretch," he finally blurted out, "I haven't
praised a book so in years."

The review in question was not signed, but Ludwig said that
I should have recognized from the style who had written the
piece. "A man with your style should recognize the style of
another."

Ludwig was always the writer. He went about being the
writer while he ate, danced, or talked with friends.

I gave another farewell luncheon on the East Side to my East
Side and Gypsy friends, at which we ate, drank, and sang until
the morning, when the Gypsies accompanied me to the boat
and played until the anchor was raised.

I traveled in a cabin de luxe on one of the most luxurious
boats afloat. The late Ernest Schelling, the famous pianist,
was a fellow passenger and helped me raise hell. We had fun

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 167

mystifying people with talk about the occult sciences, politics,
economics, and genetics.

On the fifth day out we discovered that our captain was a
poet. Schelling manoeuvred an invitation to his quarters,
where we were served very good champagne and cognac and
some very weak poetry, sentimental trash recited in the grand
style.

Another one of the passengers, also traveling de luxe, had
been a passenger with me on the boat on which I had come to
the United States. He had made a fortune in the plumbing
business.

"It's good to see that another ship's brother has been success-
ful/* he said, "but what's your business?"

When I told him, he said, "America! Everything is a busi-
ness in America! Even telling stories. Who would have
thought of that!"

Paris again! Paris again after so many years. The Paris of
1923. Early morning. Outside the Gare St. Lazare. The
smell o fresh vegetables and -fromage de Brie. The odor of
freshly brewed coffee and the scent of fresh bread intoxicated
me. The midinettes, with saucy little noses and inviting eyes,
trotting hastily on their way to work in their rhythmic gait,
quickened my pulse. The iron tables and chairs in front of the
brasseries with the bearded men in corduroys reading their
papers while dunking croissants in the coffee cups, reminded
me of my own mornings before those cafes. Couples kissing
as they separated at the street corners; a wide-hipped, red-
headed woman in wooden shoes pushing a pushcart heaped
with ripe dark red cherries; the urincnres; the circular tin fence
covered with medical advertisements; the double-decked cars
aE this was Paris.

I left my bags at the station and walked to the coffee house
I had dreamed about for my first breakfast in Paris, the Cafe du
Palais Royal.

168 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

I was walking on air. It was almost indecent to love a city
so.

If any woman had made me suffer half as much, as Paris had,
I would have abandoned her forever., no matter how much I
loved her, Paris I adored despite hunger, humiliation, and
pain. Paris was filthy, dirty, casuistic, rapacious, whorish, but
I adored her. What is Paris? Not the Opera. Not the Cafe
de la Paix. Not the heavy set woman with the long black ear
pendants behind the cash register of Procope. Not the Seine,
the Louvre, the Porte Maillot, or the cancan dancers at the
Moulin Rouge. Not the Halles, the Pere Lachaise, or the glue-
smelling Faubourg St. Antoine, and certainly not the one-
legged, pale prostitute whose wooden leg is heard all around
the block when you sit at the Deux Magots across from the
Church of St. Germain. Paris is none of those. All of them
and more, a thousand times more, are a little bit of Paris.

The voice of the tolling bells. The curses of the taxi drivers.
The "allors, allors" of the policemen. The black-aproned chil-
dren running to school. The chaussons, croissants, and the
long breads in the windows of the bakery shops. The Bries,
Camemberts, and Gruyeres outside the grocery stores. The
baskets of oysters against the walls of the bistros. The bitterish
odor of morning wine. The goutte du matin in the coffee.
The sloppy waiter. The wide-awake girl at the next table who
measured you from head to foot with a discreet eye. The
slinky, fish-eyed peddler of pornographic postal cards. The
Place de la Concorde. The Pont Alexandre. The Arcades on
the Rue de Rivoli. Youth. Old Age. Wisdom. Foolish-
ness. An aphrodisiac of the mind and body. A quickening of
all the senses. That is Paris, the most beautiful city in the
world. A saint and a whore.

After breakfast I went to the Hotel Regina and registered.
I had always wanted to stay there, close to the Vendome, facing
the Louvre. I took the best room available, and then went to
see my sisters and my brothers, who weren't expecting me.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 169

At the end of ten hours of almost continual walking, I dined
alone at the Madeleine and then went to the Moulin Rouge to
see the cancan dancers, and stayed there until morning because
I had a breakfast appointment.

I interviewed Clemenceau. The old tiger was fierce, ironi-
cal, clear-sighted, and cynical.

"Listen, my friend, and don't say that it was I who told you
this. There will be no peace in Europe as long as there are
Germans. And not only will there be no peace, but there soon
will be no Europe, only a province of Asia, of the Asiatic spirit.
The European is an individual. The Asiatic has no individu-
ality. The European counts himself a man; the Asiatic, a
particle of a man. Ah! Your Mister Wilson . . . Quelle
affaire! A book historian and a Methodist, He preached
humanism to me, he who was so good he was no more human
than are the Germans, who are so very bad. *We mustn't press
too hard on the vanquished/ he said to me. 'Forget Vae Victis.
This is the Twentieth Century/

"Votre Mister Wilson! All the consideration for wolves, but
none for the brdbisl *Elle est belle IfAmerique! Tr&s belle,
Monsieur Wilson/ I said. 'But do you know what is the most
wonderful thing about the United States?* < WhatF he asked.
That she is not a neighbor of Germany. It would not be so
good if Mexico were Germany/ Your Mr. Wilson was con-
fused. He hadn't read that in a book.

**I look at our young people, and I am sorry for them. I am
glad I shall die soon. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! What they will
see, those pauvres diablesl Wolves out of a forest by the
thousands. By the millions. Barbarians who will use all the
science invented or discovered by others to destroy the very
laboratories where these inventions were made. Predatory.
Destructive. Unimaginative. Absolutely immune to horror.
Without conscience. Begging for pity before they are hurt,
but themselves without mercy. Votre Mister Wilson said I

J70 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

was too cynical; that les baches were not like that. Alors,
vous comprenez, I threw up my hands. When you tell a man
what you have seen, and he, instead of demanding proof, says
you are too cynical, there Is nothing you can say or do. And
when the fate of your country happens to be in that man's
hands and not in yours, dors, vous comprenez, there is nothing
you can do, you can only weep."

And the old tiger's eyes filled with tears, and his Mongol face
twitched and twitched.

"Oh, la salope, la salope de vie. There is a good man who
loses our country for us, and there is nothing you can do!"

We had la soupe together, and the old tiger was amused be-
cause I had as much trouble with my mustache as he had with
his, drinking la soupe from a bowl!

"Soup is good in France. You have to come here to eat it."

And suddenly angry he shouted, hammering the table with
his fists.

"Everything is good in France. Women. Wine. Soup.
Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu! If only we didn't have the boches as
neighbors. They came here in 1870, and Paris is still em-
puante?

When I repeated Clemenceau s words to my sister, she cried
out, "Papa La Guerre. What does he want? War again! We
have had enough of it. I have a son. I don't want him to go
to war. The Germans are men just as we are. Papa La
Guerre would want to lock them all up behind bars."

My brother, who had been in the war, said, "Monsieur Clem-
enceau was all right during the war. Now he should keep
quiet. That's why we didn't make him president of France.
He deserved the honor for what he did for France during the
war, but we were afraid of what he might do as president in
peace time. You understand? I, too, have a son. With Mr.
Clemenceau as president he has all the chances of dying in the
trenches. Ce nest pas gai, tu saisF

And wliat happened fifteen years laterl Where are the

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 171

bones of my brother's and sister's sons? Where are my poor
sisters! My letters to Paris are returned to me by the post
office with "no mail service" stamped on them.

At dinner Paul Morand, diplomat and author of best sellers,
directed the conversation to the women of Bali, the cocottes of
Bucharest, the quality of Praises at "La Rue/' and the better
souffle at Foyot. When I told him what Clemenceau had said,
he exclaimed:

"At Mont St. Michel in Bretagne there is a woman who
specializes in omelettes. It's worth going there for an ome-
lette. By the way, do you know Dijon? The Hotel de la
Cloche in Dijon is famous for its pite and its wines/'

T* i y>

But . * .

"Oh, man ami, forget about all this. Let us Frenchmen
worry about the future of France. Eat, drink, and spend your
dollars while you are here. Paris has the best food, the best
wines, and the gayest women. What are you doing tonight?"

The Boulevards were crowded with German tourists. The
Parisian workingmen hated the sight of them, of their heavy
boots, and the guttural sounds they made when they spoke, but
French businessmen said, "Let them come in masses. It is
good for the commerce. Ah, ah, monsieur. Le commerce et
la politique don't mix. Nan, monsieur, don't mix. Let them
come. The more, the better. They bring gold. They spend
money. Our hotels are empty without them. We should
lower our franc to make France more attractive, interesting, to
the Germans, the English, the Americans, and to the others.
I, too, was in the war. But now we are at peace. When I see
a customer, I am glad. It matters not to what nation he be-
longs when he buys something from me/*

Prince Anton Bibesco, the Roumanian ambassador to Wash-
mgton, who was then in Paris, looked me up at the Regina and
said > TPrincess Martha Bibesco, my sister-in-law, has ordered
me to bring you to her. So, come/*

172 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

As a young boy in Roumania, I had looked at the outside of
the Bibesco castles and wondered about the people within.
And now the princess asked that I be brought to her; it was
like a fairy tale!

Princess Martha Bibesco lived in the Faubourg St. Honore
in an old French house, porte-cochere, paved courtyard, belle
etage, and everything.

Although the Germans had occupied her castle in the Car-
pathians, while they were in Roumania, and had partly wrecked
it, her opinon of les Mlemands was not the same as Clemen-
ceau's, not by a long stretch.

"You cannot judge a people by its soldiers/* she said, looking
out of her sky-blue eyes. "War is barbarous. Our Roumanian
soldiers in Hungary were as destructive as the German soldiers
in France. France was lucky to have had a Clemenceau dur-
ing the war. Mais . . . apres!"

She spoke French, German, English, and Italian perfectly,
but Roumanian, the language of the country of which she was
a princess, only haltingly.

"I was telling Monsieur Herriot only the other day,'* Princess
Bibesco informed me, "the political direction of France ought
to be one of conciliation now. France ought to disarm and
show her neighbors that she has no further grievances against
them"

"And what about the neighbors?" I asked. "Will they dis-
arm and stay disarmed?"

"Ah, mon ami, we shall find out."

I was somebody in Paris now! Newspapermen came to in-
terview me and published my picture on the front page. It
was good to know that my reputation as a writer had crossed
the ocean. I thought of the days when I had first come to
Paris from Roumanial

I remembered that two years after my first arrival in Paris, I
came in contact with the reallv ereat French poets. lean

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 173

Lorraiii, Jehan Rictus, Xavier Privas, Aristide Braant, Monte-
hus, and Jean Richepin. They were not rhymesters who
rhymed "late" with "mate' 7 and "soon" with "moon?* They
were poets. Their conceptions were of the stuff of the gods.
They were the spiritual descendants of France's Villon and
Rabelais. They were France, not the fumbling degenerate
clique that has surrendered to the Nazis, but the real France,
the France of Martel, the one who stopped the hordes of Osman
before they became complete masters of Europe.

I had written music for many vigorous poems my friends had
written. It wasn't pretty music. The poems weren't pretty
either. They were not for the salon of comtesses and prin-
cesses > but for the factory worker and the peasant, the sailor
and the soldier.

We were all poor, dreadfully poor, and shared each other's
rooms and shoes and divided with each other the bread and the
wine that came our way. And then one by one they began to
succeed financially. People began to buy these street songs.
They became fashionable.

Musicians and poets were engaged for private parties. The
rich bourgeoisie loved to be insulted to its face. Jehan Rictus,
the poet, whose invective was stronger than that of any man
alive or dead, became the most sought-after entertainer. The
women of the Haut Monde in evening gowns and furs loved
to hear themselves called whores and heartless bitches while
their men looked soulfully into their eyes or filled their glasses
for them.

I preferred the company of the peasants and tie truck drivers
to tie company of the bourgeoisie. It repelled me to make
money out of the degeneracy of the spiritual masochists. The
risky job of painting the top of the Eiffel Tower was preferable,
very much more preferable, than I could telL

And I was in love, always in love. And whenever I was in
love, I questioned my purity and fitness and worth. Whenever
I was in love* I analyzed my manner of living and corrected it*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Peasant-bred, love to me meant a home and children, and not
corsages and lies. I admit I wasn't a comfortable lover for any
girl. I was strong and buoyant, but I was too serious, espe-
cially for Parisian girls. I danced them off their feet and kissed
them until their heads swam, but in the end I made demands
they were incapable of fulfilling. I wasn't concerned about
their pasts, but I painted the future for them. "We'll go to a
small town, get a house and a piece of ground and work and
raise a family," or "We'll go to the Indies or to Africa, and de-
vote our lives to raising the standard of living of the natives."

When I did find the one and only woman, I took her away
from her studies and left with her for the United States.

One of the girls I had once been in love with appeared at the
door of my hotel room to bring me back a heavy cane which I
had left in her room years before. She had grown into a stout
middle-aged woman, had eventually gotten married, and had
two children, but remembered me well and had spoken to her
children about her youthful lover, who had now become
famous.

We wept a little and then hugged and kissed and shouted
and laughed. Suddenly she remembered that her daughters
were downstairs. She had brought them to meet the "Mon-
sieur de rAmerique, autrefois Tamant de Mama"

"Because of the victory to which you helped us, we are going
to have bolshevism in France. Forty-four hours a week!
Who ever heard of such a thing! Forty-four hours a week!
Better the Germans. Oui, better we had lost the war," the
owner of an automobile factory told me.

I can understand the fall of France, better even than the fall
of Poland, whenever I remember that conversation. I am sick
and tired of hearing and reading the explanations of the apolo-
gists for the French army. France didn't fall because the
soldiers didn't fight as well in 1940 as they had fought in 1914.
France fell because its great financiers and industrialists pre-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 175

ferred German domination with profit, to an independent
France that was unprofitable.

For twenty years the Germans armed themselves to conquer
France and during these twenty years the French financiers
and industrialists prepared, too, but for the eventual capitula-
tion to the Germans.

France wasn't conquered; France was handed over. Like
the proverbial Chinaman, Monsieur Petain and company have
burned down the house to roast the pig, Petain, Laval, Bon-
net, and Weygand were ready and willing to surrender France
to Germany in 1935, but Hitler wasn't ready to take it over.

I saw it then. It is clearer now. The Germans have made a
practice of introducing the rot of greed and dissension in every
country they intend to overpower. The Nazis didn't invent
the method. They took it over from the gang before them and
perfected it. Great God! Why don't proud nations commit
mass suicide rather than live under German heels! Has all
pride been destroyed?

XV

I ARRIVED in Madrid after Primo de Rivera had with the
tacit consent of the king become the dictator of Spain.

The next day Don Ramon, who had translated several of my
stories, took me to Perez D'Ayala, the short story writer of
whom I had heard so much. Don Ayala, married to an English
woman, was greatly interested in O'Neill, Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, and Bret Harte. We sat in front of the Negresco
Cafe, drank manzanillas, and talked and talked.

In the evening Ramon took me to see the slums of Madrid.
The poor people were so emaciated they seemed to have only
eyes. Most of them were tubercular. All the younger men
were in the army. Tens of thousands had already died in the
Moroccan adventure. Tens of thousands of the dictator's
critics were in the prisons, which were no different in the
twentieth century from what they had been in the tenth. As a
matter of fact, they were the same prisons.

The following day, Ramon said, "I caught hell for taking you
to the quarters of the poor, amigo?

"Who gave you hell?"

"Who? Don't you know? The police gave me hell. Come
to the Prado to see beautiful pictures."

"But I don't want to see pictures."

"No? Well, then, let us go to Negresco, or to see the
churches."

Poor Ramon was embarrassed.

176

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 177

"When is the next train to Granada?" I asked.

"In two tours from now/* lie answered.

"Ill take it"

"Oh, you North Americans," he groaned. "Hurry up, hurry
up, all the time. I made an appointment for you to meet a very
extraordinary gentleman/'
is it?"
man who was the lover of Mata Hari."

TNot interested, Ramon. I wouldn't even be interested in
Mata Hari herself."

Esther Root, fiancee of F. P. A., doubly famous now as a
columnist and for his radio work on "Information Please/* met
me at the station and took me to the Alhambra Palace Hotel
where she was staying and had reserved a room for me. She
had only just arrived in Granada herself.

Tall, blue-eyed, with reddish blonde hair, Esther was a sensa-
tion in Granada. When we visited the Alhambra, a group of
Spaniards followed us step by step and discussed us.

"They are not brother and sister. They don't look alike.
They are no matrimonio. What are they to each other?"

One of the men offered a solution. We were legal relatives.
Either my brother was married to her sister, or her brother was
married to my sister.

"Es clara, eh?"

"Clara."

AH eyes were on us during dinner in the dining room of the
hotel. After dinner we went out to a cafe. Half a dozen men
followed us and huddled together at the table nearest us.
Suddenly one of them, an army officer, "psste'cT a tourist guide
and called him to their table. The man looked at us, then
came over, humble and embarrassed beyond words, and asked
in English, TPlease, please, these mens want to know you and
the dona what?** and he rubbed the index of the right hand
against the index of the left.

178 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Brother-in-law/* I said. "Her sister my wife."

"Gracia" and hie backed away from our table to deliver the
answer.

Their faces beamed. The mystery was solved.

"Es dam, eh?"

"Clara."

"Why did yon tell him that story?" Esther asked.

"To end their agony. There is no more curious a people than
the Spanish. They got that from the Moors. It's a harem
habit"

A moment later a Gypsy flower girl handed Esther a beauti-
ful bunch of roses and pointed to the officer who had sent it,
Esther acknowledged the roses with a nod. The officer rose to
his feet and clicked his heels.

Granada is a city of roses, music, Gypsies, and dancers.
Whenever I happened to be close to the Spanish military, I
could tell the rank with closed eyes and without turning to look.
A soldier just stank. An officer's stench was perfumed. The
quality of the perfume designated the rank.

The next morning Esther and I visited Emanuel de Falla, the
most famous modern Spanish composer. His house overlooked
the Alhambra.

A dry, slight, dark little man with flashing eyes, he lived with
an older sister who took care of him and approved or disap-
proved his compositions. He asked us to his workroom and
played and sang for us the "Three-Cornered Hat" from the
manuscript. Later on I heard Arthur Rubinstein, the famous
pianist, play the same composition much better, yet it didn't
have the quality, the genuineness of the composer's play-
ing.

Miss de Falla hardly spoke to us and didn't come out in the
carmen, the garden where we were served dulces. Esther was
so entranced by her meeting with de Falla she was blissfully
unaware of the social ostracism to which she was subjected be-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 179

cause she went arm in arm with a man who was not her husband
and not her brother*

A letter from Rebecca West introduced me to Don Fernando
de Los Rios, of the University of Granada, and the socialist
member of the Cortez (parliament) from that same city.
Esther and I rode to Passeo de la Bomba expecting to find a
venerable white-bearded professor, but met a charming, black-
bearded man in his early forties, who smiled even when he was
very serious*

Our social status improved considerably after we were seen
with de Los Rios. True, they were socialists and anticlerical,
but the de Los Rios had a fine reputation in Granada, After
de Falla had Joined us for coffee the next day, we were con-
sidered almost good enough for anyone to associate with.

Esther and I went to Seville together and stopped at the
Regina because Joan M was there.

Dark and very beautiful, Joan went wild when she noticed
how the Spanish men were attracted to Esther. One day I
suggested that the three of us go to Triana, the Gypsy town
across the Guadalquivir River from Seville. I wanted to take
them to an old Gypsy singer whose relatives had given me a
message for her. At the other end of the bridge we stopped at
a bodega for a glass of manzanilla. It was so good Joan and
Esther clamored for a second one. I drew the line at a third
glass and warned Joan. I knew how potent the drinks were,

"I am no sissy. Whafs three manzanillas to me! Nada,
nada, 9 * Joan said, tossing back her magnificent head.

There was a curious look in the eyes of the waiter when I
ordered a third set. Joan's color was already high and her
voice louder.

The drinks were two cents apiece in our money. Many a
Gvpsy* a driver, and a peasant, turned his back to the bar to

180 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

see the North. American dona drink more than was good for her.

We didn't go to see the Gypsy singer. We crossed the bridge
back to Seville with Joan singing at the top of her voice, talking
to every truck driver, and lifting her large black sombrero to
the passers-by.

That afternoon a messenger brought her a note from the
Marquesa Davilla canceling a tea appointment without givina
any reason or excuse. Poor Joan had angled for that invitation
for months. It was the door to Spanish society.

A few days later, while I was being entertained by the
Gypsies of Triana, she gathered her bags and Siamese cats and
went to Madrid to start a new social campaign there.

I returned to Madrid to find a note from Douglas Fairbanks
and Mary Pickford, who were at the Ritz. Doug, who wasn't
well known in Spain, was jumping tables and climbing walls
to the delectation of everyone in the diningroom. He had
hired a local publicity agent, who had arranged to have one of
the matadors dedicate the next bull he killed to Doug and
present him with the animal's ear, a mark of great honor in
Spain.

Doug got the ear of the second bull a decent animal who put
up a square, but tame fight against a rather plodding matador
and held the center of the stage up in his box, as the matador
in resplendent uniform made his little speech from the arena,
looking up at the movie hero, and presented him with the limp
little hairy lobe.

The Associated Press cabled the story to the United States.
The S. P. C. A. raised a terrific row. All the women morality
groups attacked Doug for his countenancing such cruelty to
animals. Informed by cable of the storm the news had created,
Doug cabled to America, "I deny ever having seen the bar-
barous spectacle known as a bull fight. Miss Pickford and I
are horrified at the thought that people home could believe that
we countenance cruelty to animals."

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 181

"How's that for a cable?" Doug asked the next day at break-
fast. "That will put an end to my detractors, eh?"

I went alone on a walking trip to Bilbao, Victoria, and Barce-
lona, industrial towns where the wages were pitifully low, and
the upper classes were living in oriental luxury, dabbling in
politics and philosophy, and forever grandstanding.

A Bilbao factory owner whose workers were on strike said to
me, "I won't open my gates until the men and their wives and
children throw themselves on their knees and beg me to hire
them. Td sooner see them all starved to death than give in to
them. You don't know those creatures. If we give in to them,
all the glory of Spain would be lost. They shouldn't be allowed
to use the sidewalks, those dogs. They must learn anew who
is master in Spain,"

"Seiior" the wife of a grandee of Spain said to me, "I have
read somewhere that in North America you used to condemn
to death those who taught the slaves to read and write. We
ought to have the same laws here. All our trouble comes from
the fact that our workingmen are taught to read by the agita-
tors."

The Gitanos, the Gypsies* were happy. They were free and
predatory, smugglers and entertainers, and cared little for the
people they entertained at fiestas and cabarets. Among them
were the best bull fighters, too, Belmonte, Chicuela, Lalande,
El Gitanilla, and Joselito, who had pegged up their fees to
princely sums.

In Barcelona a cable from Rebecca West asked me to come
to London.

On the way to the railroad station I stopped at a second-hand
bookshop and found an autographed book by Shelley, with a
long inscription to Mary. I bought it for a peseta (ten cents)
and gave it to Esther as a present.

In the train I wrote to Naomi, "The people of Spain are on
the eve of a levoiuticm. It is foreshadowed in the eyes of the

182 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

poor, downtrodden peasants and workers and in the desperate
repressions employed by a government which does the bidding
of the Church and the wealthy reactionaries. Spain is a bleed-
ing country."

XVI

THE FIRST TIME I sat down to dinner at the Savage Club
in London, where I was lodging, Baerlein, the novelist,
traveler, and author of many exotic stories which had delighted
me, said, "And of course, being an American, you want to meet
George Bernard Shaw."

"No, I don't," I replied. "I'd rather hear you tell me more
of your experiences at Mount Athos. Are the Greek monks
really as ignorant as you wrote?"

"Not as, but a little more," Baerlein said. "Don't you want
to meet Shaw?"

The second day, at lunch, another English writer asked, grin-
ning, "And of course you want to meet Mr. Shaw.**

"No, I don t "

"You don't?" and he had another look at me.

The same evening some one again said, "And of course you
want to meet Mr. Shaw.* 9

"No, I don t"

"How then? All American writers always want to meet
Mr. Shaw,"

"But Konrad is not an American/* Frazier Hunt (Spike),
Hearst's representative in England, roared. And that an-
swered the question. Spike, tall, towheaded, was the best-
liked American at the Savage Club.

One day my London publisher told me that Kipling had
expressed himself in a very complimentary way about my latest
book.

184 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"He can tell a story, tliat man of yours, and lie writes with
freshness and vigor," Kipling was supposed to have said.

Some time later, when I was introduced to him, Kipling said
to me, "I hope you won't use what I said to advertise your
book. I only said it; I didn't write it."

At dinner at Rebecca's home with Karel Capek, the Czech
author of H. 17. R., and H. G. Wells, during a discussion of
Wells's Outline of History, I told the author that his chapter
on the Gypsies was erroneous and unfriendly. Capek, who
admired Wells unboundedly, looked daggers at me and kept
on repeating, "If Mr. Wells says it is so, it is so."

Later in the evening Wells told Rebecca that she should have
read his book on the U. S. A. before writing her articles for a
newspaper.

"The cheek!" Rebecca flared up. "How long have you been
in America?"

"Two weeks."

"And I was there nigh on to a year and traveled all over the
country," Rebecca stormed.

"Just the same, you should have read my book before writing
your stuff for the papers," Wells insisted stubbornly in his high-
pitched voice.

"The cheek!" Rebecca repeated, her eyes ablaze.

"I shall write to the papers and contradict you," Wells warned
her.

"You will, will you?" Rebecca flared. "It's probably not
beyond your cheek. No, it isn't."

And it wasn't.

On another day, while somewhere with Rebecca, I pointed
to a handsome dark-skinned man and asked, "Who is he?"

"That's Lord Rirkenhead," she said.

"He is a Gypsy."

"Are you crazy?"

**No. He is a Gypsy. I caught the Gypsy stare in his eyes."

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 18$

Some time later Lady Eleanor Smith, Lord Birkenhead's
daughter, wrote a Gypsy novel and acknowledged that her
father was a full-blooded Gypsy.

Augustus John, the English painter, lie with the lowing
beard, the earrings in his left ear lobe, and the scarlet vest,
asked me at our first meeting, <6 San tu Rom?* (Are you a
Gypsy?)

Several days later he took me to the Derby where we saw
and spoke to many brown brothers, a little different, but essen-
tially the same breed as the ones in Roumania, Hungary, Spain,
or Turkey. The Romany women were not as beautiful as the
Gitanos and had no particular talent for dancing or music, but
they were marvelous story tellers. We sat around a fire out-
side a wardo and drank wine and told tales until the early
morning. When the sun rose, Augustus John took his shoes
off and danced while the rest of us clapped our hands. On the
way back to London, the great painter said, "I always dance in
the morning. My father and my grandfather also danced in
the morning,'*

"San tu Rom?' 3 ' I asked. He made believe he hadn't heard
me and spoke of other things.

I wrote to Joseph Conrad, who had written to me in New
York, asking to be notified whenever I came to England. He
came to see me in my room. When the tea came, he confessed
that his hands were so badly crippled by rheumatism he
couldn't hold up the cup. It was one of the reasons he didn't
go out as much as he would have liked to.

I fed him the tea and the marmalade, and broke up the cake
and put the pieces in his mouth. He talked French better
than English. He had a great mind, but not a lofty one. He
was absolutely devoid of pity, but was overburdened with a
sense o irony. There was no kindly twinkle in his gray eye.
And he was literary, literary from top to bottom. He wasn't
concerned with anything f or itself but only as to whether it

186 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

was or was not fit for literature. When I spoke to him about
Spain, lie said, "You can't do anything with that. It's no good."

Our conversation was interrupted by a charming young lady,
who came to interview me. Conrad lit up and employed all
his Polish charm to captivate her. When she left, I asked,
"Could you do anything with that?"

"Oui, she'll be in the next novel."

"I would rather have her in a more agreeable place."

He looked at me and said something in Polish.

Informed by Rebecca West that I was invited to the next
P. E. N. luncheon, at which Queen Marie of Roumania was also
to be one of the guests, I refused, saying that I wasn't bothered
by the queen's morals, but wouldn't break bread with one
whose arms had been up to the elbow in the blood of thousands
of people.

"But," said Rebecca, "guests will be seated at small tables.
I am the hostess at your table. Marie's presence shouldn't
bother you. You will be at my table. Do you still refuse?"

I didn't.

Back at the hotel I found a cable from my agent, Otto Liv-
eright, that two stories I had sent had both been purchased
by the Ladies 9 Home Journal. He advised me to return to
America as soon as possible. Someone wanted to dramatize
one of my stories.

I felt very elated to know that I was in demand, that people
were thinking of me. It was a precious feeling.

The day of the P. E. N. lunch, Rebecca phoned.

"Can you imagine this?" she said. 'The great Galsworthy,
the president of P. E. N., tells me that Buckingham Palace has
ordered us to genuflect before her majesty, and that once the
queen is seated, the doors must be shut and no late comers
allowed in. Are you coming?"

"Definitely not 111 not genuflect to any queen and still
less to that one.'*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 187

"Let's have lunch together instead, and go there after lunch,
and tell Galsworthy, in plain language, how supine he was to
accept Buckingham's decree/' Rebecca suggested.

We had lunch together at Lyons, and reached the restaurant
where the P. E. N. lunch was held just as the doors were thrown
open and Marie walked out, followed by the obese Chesterton,
who waddled behind her, his back bent to the floor, like a fat
gargoyle. The queen was flanked by her own two secretaries,
and neither Rebecca nor I bowed as the cavalcade passed us by.

I was talking to Bessie Beaty, who had just returned from
Russia where she had been the first American newspaperwoman
to report on the condition of women under the Soviets, when
an attendant handed me a card, requesting me to appear at the
Roumanian consulate without delay. I went, and die man at
the consulate told me not to forget that I still had relatives in
Roumania.

I was reminded of the existence of those relatives again and
again.

"If you have any consideration for them, bow low when the
queen of Roumania passes you. If you don't . . ."*

I almost felt relieved the other day, when news reached me
that our last relative in Roumania, Uncle Rubin, a man of
seventy, had been found on the street, dead with his throat cut
from ear to ear, victim of the latest pogrom engineered by the
harbingers of Kultur to a new world.

Raymond Savage, the London literary agent, asked me, "Are
you a relative of the Palestine Aronsons?"

"Yes. Cousin."

"Did you know Sarah?"

"I wish I had known her. But I know Alex and Sam!"

"Oh, you don't know Aaron? Too bad. I don't know his
equal. I served under Aflenby in Palestine. Good old A1-
lenby. Heard Aaron talk about his cousin, the writer, in
America.**

188 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Someone at the table, Spike or Tomlinson, asked, "What are
you two talking about?"

The Aronsons lived in Palestine and wanted to free Palestine
from the Turks. Aaron crashed in a plane. Sarah, a girl about
eighteen, was caught by the Turks signaling to Allenby's men
by smoke from her father's chimney. They tortured her for
days on end to make her give them the code she used. When
that failed, they bastinadoed her old father in her presence, but
while being beaten, the old man begged his daughter not to
weaken if he should cry out. Then they bastinadoed her
youngest brother, who, though only a child, cried out in Hebrew
to his sister, "Don't tell, Sarah . . . don't . . . don't . . .
in the name of God, don't tell/'

Even when the soles of his little feet had been shredded to
the bone, he still cried out, "Don't tell, Sarah."

In the end her own f atlier managed to get hold of a Turkish
officer's revolver and gave her the weapon to kill herself with.

Allenby's men entered Jerusalem a few days later. They
would not have been able to do so if Sarah had given the Turks
the signal code.

Baerlein, who had just said something derogatory about the'
Jews, shuddered when he heard the story of Sarah.

"You should have told me you were Jewish/ 5 Baerlein com-
plained.

"I'd rather hear your frank opinion about us/* I said. "As a
rule, people attribute to the Jews their own defects, and I want
to know you, Baerlein."

A day or so later, the porter of the hotel told me someone was
waiting for me outside. At the door a slight, short man, blond
and lantern-jawed, moved forward and said, holding his hands
deep in the pockets of his raincoat, "I am Lawrence. T. E.
Lawrence, friend of the Aronsons," he added to introduce him-
self better. "Let's get out from under the rain to a pub. Have
a drink, eh?" He talked, as he walked, in large strides.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 189

"A drink is just what I wanted."

"Good. Beastly weather/ 7

The pub was just around the comer.

Lawrence threw his raincoat on a chair, but kept his dripping
cap on. He was dressed in crumpled rough tweeds which
seemed never to have been touched by a pressing iron. He
looked sallow and unhealthy, and his colorless hair was matted
on his forehead.

When the bartender brought us hot grogs, Lawrence paid
him and carefully counted the change from the half crown be-
fore he separated a few coppers for the tip.

"Heard Aaron mention you once or twice/' he said after the
first sip of the grog. "A man, that's what he was. A man.
How many of the family do you know?'*

"Alex, Sam."

"Didn't know Sarah, did you?'*

"No. How was she?"

"Can't describe her. No one could. 5 * He looked me steadily
in the eyes. "I can't yet. Well, she was ten or twenty people
with one purpose. But all the Aronsons are like that, each one
ten or twenty people. Aaron was a hundred. You ought to
have known him."

Lawrence finished his grog, and I called for another set. He
looked annoyed because I didn't count the change from the
half crown.

"Shouldn't do that, you know. How are you for time?"

"Have all the time in the world."

"Let's go to Lyons; get something warm in us, eh?"

"Let's."

"Remarkable that you learned to write English. Said so the
other day to Shaw. You want to see him, don't you?"

"No, I prefer the British Museum."

He laughed as he put on his coat and put his arm under mine
as we went out in the ram.

"Heard Conrad talk about you. Mind the rain?"

190 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"No."

"Know many people in London?"

"Quite a few/' and I told him a few names.

"All the people in the world/' he commented. "And more
than I know. Fond of Rebecca? Grand person."

At Lyons we found a convenient table, and Lawrence hung
up his cap; I could now see that tie had a good head of hair.

"You are outdoors a great deal/' he commented, looking at
me.

"As much as possible."

"Aaron was happy only outdoors. He could walk any man
off his feet"

"And Sarah?"

"Well, I don't know. I suppose not happy anywhere. You
know the whole story, do you?"

'Whatever has been told."

"Well, not aU. It can't be told. It would serve no good
purpose now. My job was with the Arabs. Beastly job in
the end."

After a while, he leaned forward and just looked at me.

"What is it that makes people speak of you as an anti-
Semite?" I asked.

"Because my job was to make certain promises to the Arabs,
and having made them, I wanted them kept by my government,
regardless of whether conflicting promises had been made by
other agents to the Jews," he answered. "That's the British;
they always lose one set of friends by promising the same thing
to both. But I made my promises to the Arabs and was intent
on seeing them kept You understand. When there is trouble
again, the Arabs won't forget. It's like the debt to America.
It wiE work out the same way. The war isn't over. If s only
an armistice. The Heinies are rearming. But"

He closed the conversation on the subject, saying as lie
looked toward the window, "Beastly weather."

Suddenly he leaned his head on the table and groaned in

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 191

Arabic, "Ana Shebaan min Umri" ( I have had my fill of life. )

When he raised his head again, we talked literature and
history, and he was childishly pleased when our opinions on
German Kultur coincided.

On the way back to my hotel, he said, "You ought to meet
Joseph Conrad while you are in England. If you admire him/'
he added; *1 know he likes your work."

"I have already met him/*

I told him about the Kipling incident, and we both laughed
heartily as we stood in the rain.

When The Seven Pillars of Wisdom appeared with Law-
rence's dedication and poem to "S. A./* few people realized that
the person to whom the book was dedicated was a woman, a
woman who had died so that England should live.

I left London the following day. My meeting with
Lawrence topped my stay there.

XVII

ON THE RETURN VOYAGE to America, I had dinner
with Dudley Field Malone; his wife, Doris Stephens, the
suffragette; and William C. BulKtt.

As long as I talked about the foreign settlements in New
York, Mr. and Mrs. Malone were an interested audience, but
they refused to look below the surface of international affairs.
Dudley Field Malone, at the height of his success as a lawyer
and politician, filled with his own importance, was certain that
the World War had been the last great war, and that that too
could have been avoided if he had been consulted in time.

Mr. Bullitt praised the Russian experiment, but didn't be-
come belligerent when he was contradicted.

I talked to dozens of young German immigrants in the steer-
age and found all of them convinced that Germany had not
lost the war.

"We should have fought on, on our own territory. The
Krupps had pushed us into the war and then forced us to give
up before our territory was invaded and their plants destroyed.
The Kaiser and all our generals were stockholders in the Krupp
plants. Next time it will be different."

"But you are going to America. Why be concerned about
what will happen next time?" I asked.

They turned their heads away from me.

During my absence from New York MireFs drawings and
paintings had been praised in the art columns. Now some

192

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 193

friends slapped me on the shoulder and introduced me as the
father of Mirel, the painter. My older son had been made
editor of Fourth Estate, a newspaper for newspaper men.
Rada, my older daughter, had had several poems published and
was learning to sing. Gorky had done nothing. He was too
superior actually to do things; he was a critic. Naomi was
painting beautiful things and keeping them away from
strangers.

"Later, later on, I will show them."

We sat up many hours together while I told them of my
European experiences. Rion was having his troubles. He
had been given the power to hire and fire whom he wanted, but
the men now under him had worked on the paper some twenty
years and were more than twice his age. He couldn't bring
himself to fire them no matter how incompetent they were, and
they sabotaged his work. As a matter of fact, although Rion
didn't know it, he had been hired by the owner in the hope that
he would "clean out the old men/* a cleaning the owner didn't
have the heart to do because he had known the men too long.

My wife and I went to the Provincetown Theater to see a
revival of Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson. Although not so
finished an actor as Gilpin, Robeson gave something to the play
which it had not had before. A towering figure with a magnif-
icent body and a beautiful voice, he made the African lost in
the jungle appealingly picturesque. The women in the audi-
ence admired the beauty of Robeson's AE American body, even
if it was black.

After the performance, we went up to Jimmy Light, the
director, and met Paul and his wife.

"You are wasting yourself as an actor. You ought to sing/*
my wife said to Robeson after hearing him sing.

<c What > s the matter with my acting?^ Paul questioned, taken
aback, "I know, I am no Gilpin, but *

**Mothmg is the matter with your acting/* she soothed him,

194 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

"but think how limited the opportunities. You can't go on
playing Emperor Jones all your life, but Holland Hayes can
change his repertoire every day."

Essie and Paul looked at each other.

Naomi asked Paul and Essie to dine with us the following
day.

"Really?"

"Do you mean it?" Paul asked.

"Of course/' my wife said.

The following evening, when we sat down to dinner with
Sherwood Anderson; Horace Liveright; Don Fernando de Los
Rios; Zuloaga, the Spanish painter; and Paul Robeson and his
wife, the colored inaid shed her apron, declared that she
wouldn't "serve no ^Niggers'," and left.

When Paul came to see us again, the colored elevator man
refused to take him up.

A day or so later the agent of the house informed us that the
other tenants threatened to cancel their leases unless I ceased
having colored men go up in the same elevator with them.
The sale of the motion picture rights to a story gave me enough
money, in a lump sum, to buy a beautiful brownstone house at
Eighty-first Street and Riverside Drive. It had enough room
for the family to roam and romp in, and a room where Paul
Robeson and Brown, his accompanist, could come to practice
and "clean up" the spirituals Paul intended to sing at his first
concert.

Our New York home was the first one opened to a Negro
artist.

De Mille sent his agent to my agent to tell us that he'd pay
me five thousand dollars for my trouble if I came out to the
coast and jdidn't like his suggestion for a special story, but
would pay me fifteen thousand if I should decide to develop
the story. We accepted, and I was put on the train that very
afternoon.

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 195

At Phoenix, Arizona, I telegraphed Chaplin that I was arriv-
ing. When, the train stopped in Los Angeles, I had the choice
of two limousines, Chaplin's and De MiHe*s.

"You'll have lunch with me, then well spend the week end
on my yacht/' De Mille said when he saw me.

"Mr. De Mille/* I interrupted Mm, "111 have lunch with you,
and you'll tell me what you have on your mind during the
lunch. I'll agree to write the story or not, at a single session,
for I am taking the next train back/ 7

"Why?"

"I have promised to be back home for my baby's birthday.**

We sat down to lunch with De Mile's intimate entourage,
some twenty people. At a prearranged moment, De MiUe put
on a record of the "Song of the Volga Boatmen/' sung by Feodor
Chaliapin, and asked me, "Ever heard it before?'*

"Hundreds of times/*

"Ever see a painting called the Volga Boatman?"

<4 Yes, in Paris, at the Luxembourg/ 5

"Right. I want a story based on this song and the Russian
Revolution, and the clash between the old Russia and new
Russia/*

While drinking coffee, I began to weave aloud a story with
the revolution and the song in it. When I stopped for a sip of
coffee, De Mille urged me on, "Go on, go on. It's just the story
I had in mind. Go on. Put on the record again, the other one
with the orchestra."

That story became The Volga Boatman, a motion picture
made in America about the Russian Revolution. In that story
I attempted to show that the inhumanity of the Russian aristo-
crats and princes produced the eventual inhumanity of their
erstwhile serfs. The picture was a great success, but incurred
for me the enmity of both factions.

"Nothing succeeds like success, 5 * is a trite but true saying.
There were at least a hundred writers in Hollywood who could
have done as well. But I was successful; my name was on the

196 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

covers of magazines every month. It made me tremble when
I thought of the day when perhaps my name wouldn't be seen
so frequently, and when even a better story than the one I had
improvised for De Mille might not be found good enough.

I had dinner with Chaplin and left for New York that night.
I had been in Hollywood exactly twelve hours.

The family was in an uproar. Real estate speculators had
bought out all the houses to the right and to the left of us and
would build around our house, making it an airshaft if we re-
fused to sell to them. I liked the house. It cost no more to
maintain than an apartment, it was convenient, and it gave us
privacy.

That night, after dinner, a real estate agent came to explain
why we should sell the house, and offered twenty thousand
dollars above what the house had cost me.

I asked ten thousand dollars more.

"Done," he said, and pulled out a wad of bills to bind the
agreement,

An hour later I didn't feel at home in my house. It was sold.
We had six months in which to leave, but already I didn't feel
at home. I had made thirty thousand dollars. The whole
transaction was preposterous. I was sony that the house had
had to be sold. But we couldn't have lived in it while the
wreckers tore down the other houses, and certainly not while
the big building to the right and left of us was being raised.
Naomi and the children were desolate. Gorky said that I
should have held out. He loved the house.

"We could have gone away for a year and then have come
back after they were through building/' he said.

"But the expense!" I argued.

'What of it? You could have written another Gypsy story
or two," he said, not without a slight sneer.

I was averaging a short story a week, rewriting it three or

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 197

four times to get it right The magazines published Gypsy
stories and stories of Roumanian peasants as fast as they got
them.

In writing these stories I relived my younger days in the
wooded marshes of the Danube, heard the shepherds* flutes and
the Gypsies" fiddles, and would often get out of bed to fix a
scene on paper and to describe what I had just seen and heard
in my sleep.

Those stories seemed to write themselves. Physically I was
in New York with my family and my friends; spiritually I was
roaming somewhere between the Carpathian Mountains and
the Black Sea.

Both my sons thought of money in terms of stories and what
I was paid for them.

"Buy a new car. It only costs two short stories."

When Gorky lost a valuable watch he had taken to a party,
he said, "Don't be so angry with me. The watch wasn't worth
a quarter of a Gypsy story /*

Glenn Frank, then the editor of the Century Magazine; Carl
Van Doren, his assistant; Joseph Anthony, author of "The
Gang/' and the "Golden Village," but then one of the editors
of the Century Publishing Company, asked me for lunch at
the Algonquin and proposed that I write a book about New
York

I had spoken to Horace Liveright about just such a book, but
he had dismissed lie project as unprofitable. While we were
lunching, Horace stopped at our table to say "Hello" to Frank.

"Sit down for a moment/* I said to Horace. TTheywantme
to do a book on New York/*

~Whose idea was it?" Horace asked.

"Mine/* Joseph Anthony said.

"Go ahead and do it for them. I am sorry I didn't take It
Horace said, leaving us.

198 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

Otto, my agent, was called over and settled the terms over
coffee and cigars. Otto was a great agent. Every one of his
clients was his friend and the friend of his friends. He wor-
ried over them all and warned them when they worked too
hard or when they didn't work enough. I had never grudged
him his commission. A good agent, especially an intelligent
one, is a great asset to a writer. It was Otto's habit not to
offer a story to an editor unless he liked it himself. When he
liked a story, he not only offered it to an editor, but made him
buy it. We spent many an hour, Otto and I, discussing a pas-
sage in one of my stories or the construction of a sentence.

I finished Around the World in New York in less than two
months. When the book appeared, Loring Schuler, then edit-
ing the Country Gentleman., proposed that I do a book about
the whole United States in the same manner as I had done the
book on New York, seeking out the non-Anglo-Saxon popula-
tions of the country and describing them, their customs, their
manner of living, and their relations to each other.

Otto and I went to Philadelphia and closed the deal then and
there. I was eager for just such a tour of the country to get
acquainted with its people and see them at work and at living.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, I trav-
eled from city to city, village to village, and state to state. I
spoke to Finns in Michigan, Menonites in the Dakotas, Poles in
Ohio, Czechs in Montana, Dalmatians in Seattle, Croats in
Arizona, Germans in Wisconsin, Scandinavians in Minnesota,
and Dutchmen in Illinois. I traveled with Gypsies and roamed
with shepherds, slept one night in a hut and the next in a
de luxe hotel. And all the time my notebooks were being filled.
I had neither itinerary nor timetable while traveling.

Six months later Otto telegraphed me at Seattle to look up
Irving Thalberg, the general manager of Universal Pictures,
when I was in Hollywood.

Eventually I called up Universal Pictures Corporation, told

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 199

who I was, and was informed that a studio car would be sent to
my hotel for me. I was to have an appointment with Mr. Thai-
berg at four that afternoon.

At a quarter past three the studio car was outside.

Since the reception room outside Mr. Thalberg's office was
crowded, I told the fat boy at the desk to announce me to Mr.
Thalberg.

"Sit down."

A quarter of an hour later I told him that my appointment
with Mr. Thalberg was for four o'clock.

""What about it?" the boy replied. "That lady there had an
appointment for one o'clock, and she may not see him today
at all. Sit down please.**

"Look here, go in and tell him."

"Sit down, please/*

At half past four the boy went in to take my name to his
boss and said as he came out, "O. K. You can go in/*

At the farthest end of a very long room a young fellow, his
head buried in papers, sat behind an enormous desk, and acted
as if he hadn't noticed that anybody had come in. I walked
up to the desk with leaden feet and fire on my tongue.

"Yes?** he questioned without raising his head, still busying
himself with the papers.

"I want to see Mr. Thalberg/*

"I am Mr. Thalberg/* he said in a bored voice.

"You? Oh! I thought you were another office boy/* I said.
"You are as arrogant as the boy outside/*

Before he had recovered from my tongue lashing, I was at
the door.

The Universal studio was miles from my hotel. Montague
Glass of Potash and Perlmutter fame, coining out of the studio
driveway in his car, picked me up, and I told him what had
happened. He was amused. Dear Monty was always
amused. As far as he was concerned, half the people in the
world were Potashes and Perlmutters. We stopped for a drink

200 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

at the Writers* Club, and Monty told and retold the story to
everyone who would listen to it

I told the story to Chaplin at dinner. Thalberg, who was a
friend of Chaplin's, came over to our table.

"I don't talk to office boys/* Charlie said.

**We got off on the wrong foot, Mr. Bercovici. I am sorry/'
Thalberg apologized.

"If you had been in Hollywood three months, you wouldn't
have felt insulted by his behavior. They have taught us how
to take insults., us who have been here long/' Monty said, and
to take the bitterness out of my mouth, he asked me to a party
in honor of Feodor Chaliapin, the famous Russian singer, given
by a famous dancer residing in Hollywood.

It was the kind of a Hollywood party one reads about: with
vodka, large bowls of caviar, champagne, and girls. At mid-
night Chaliapin, as handsome as an aged Apollo, sat down to a
serious discussion on love. American women were worthless
in bed, but generous. French women were wonderful in bed,
but terrible outside of it. The German women treated sexual
relations as duties to the male and read books on how best to
perform them. Drawing from his fund of innumerable experi-
ences, he had something to say about every race and nation.

Every Russian at his table became mournful, and each one,
in turn, told a tale of personal frustration that had given him
wealth but not happiness. Each one had wanted to be some-
thing other than, what he was. They were all terribly un-
happy, rich and famous, gorged with champagne and caviar,
with beautiful women in their beds and ten carat diamond
rings on their fingers, but terribly unhappy.

How Daumier would have liked to etch them in steel! a
bunch of fat, sprawling, sexless, weepy Russians. Nobody can
be so blissfully unhappy as a Russian. What is generally
called Russian depth in literature or music is seldom anything
more than torpor which doesn't permit a Russian to have any-
thing end happily. Happiness makes Russians profoundly mis-

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 201

erable. A happy ending to a story produces upon the Russians
the same effect as an unhappy ending upon our readers. Rus-
sians always scratch their right ears with their left hands and
then groan about discomfort. And yet, they are a very prac-
tical people and know how to take advantage of the unrest
they create about them. They never go straight to the point,,
but they never let the aim out of sight. They are past masters
of confusion, a confusion in which they only seem to be en-
meshed.

I returned to New York, finished the book, On New Shores,
and then proposed to the family an extended European tour
with a base in Paris. Writing about Gypsies and peasants
had awakened a nostalgia for Gypsies and peasants. I simply
had to go back, back to where I had come from, had to listen
to and play Gypsy music with Gypsies, and eat peasant food
again, and talk peasant language with peasants in their own
homes.

Bada, our oldest daughter, was studying singing and could
do that better in France than she was doing here. Mirel
would have an opportunity to study under others besides her
mother. Naomi, too, could do with a few years* work under
different conditions. Oh, we had dozens of reasons, now that
we had the money, to sail for France. So, since we had to
vacate the house we had sold, we stored our things and began
to make the necessary arrangements for the trip.

XVIII

WE HAD a whole suite on the A deck of the Paris. The
sea was smooth, the food was excellent, but I was ill, ex-
hausted. We had enough money to live on and travel for five
years. I had worked twenty years for that. Even during
my previous trip abroad, I had been writing every day. In
eight years I had had fifteen volumes published and had written
over two hundred stories. I examined my achievement with
pride, now that I felt a little tired of the effort. Was it worth
while? Yes. Now, I felt, I could say "we Americans" and
"us Americans'* when I spoke of the people of the United
States. I was sailing to Europe to go back to my native land,
but I was going there as an American. I had not only bred and
raised a family in the United States, but I had contributed with
all my powers to make it a more agreeable place to live in.
Should I die suddenly, America would know that I had lived
within its borders. I had done my best to instill in my chil-
dren the idea that one has to give to one's country more than
one takes from it.

After we had settled down in Paris in a beautiful apartment
on the Boulevard Haussman, we began to meet the American
expatriates, the prohibition expatriates, the variegated lot at
the Cafe du Dome or the Select, sulking in front of their beer
or whiskeys or acting very French at the bar. Paris was Just
one big bordello as far as they were concerned.

202

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 203

It was pitiful to see Isadora, the great Isadora Duncan, in
her shabby room back of the Dome, her magnificent nude legs
spread far apart, her eyes watery, her lips drooling, totally un-
aware whether anyone was there or not when she was drank.

Twenty-five years before, I had seen her first public perform-
ance in Paris, at the Chatelet. No spectacle I had seen before
or since has quite equaled it.

I and a few hundred others had come because it had been
advertised that the young American dancer would dance bare-
legged.

Twenty-five years ago this was uncommon even in Paris. At
the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergeres, girls danced the
cancan and other risque dances, but they wore tights or long
flesh-colored stockings. The few hundred people of Isadora's
audience, however, forgot why they had come after Isadora
had danced a few minutes. We had brought lewd minds to
her performance, but were purified by the cleanliness of her
art. Had she stripped nude before us, we couldn't have ex-
perienced other than a high esthetic joy in looking at her.

When she came to New York years after that first perform-
ance, I saw her dance again, but always with the recollection
of how I had first seen her. In that little room back of the
Dome, I realized for the first time that I was twenty-five years
older and that Isadora was flabby and fat, a human ruin and
not a magnificent one.

<r So, you remember first performance? Didn't know you
were that old. Gimme that bottle. Remember what CattiUe
Mendes wrote in Le Journal, eh? Great Catulle. He had a
funny beard. Have a drink with me. FiH up, fill up. So,
thaf s so! Jean Lorrain, you knew Lorrain? A great writer.
Greater than Maupassant. They said things about him* Him
and Oscar Wilde. Ah. I have no money, not at all. Russia.
Yes, Russia. No money. Nothing. Don't dance no more.
Great Isadora Duncan, finest dancer this side of heaven.
Gatulle Mendes said so. No money. Look where I live.

204 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Gimme that bottle. So you knew Lorrain! Remember when
they said he and Liane de Pougy would marry! Never be-
lieved it. Remember when he wanted to shoot Mendes?
Poor Lorrain. He was in love with Mendes' wife, Judith
Gauthier."

Naomi went to see her, found her sober, and talked her into
dancing again. We argued the point, but Naomi, with tears
in her eyes, affirmed that a few months of rest and freedom
from worry would restore Isadora completely.

"Isadora will yet give to the world a second great conception
of dancing, a mature one. Watch and see."

Naomi's admiration for Isadora was undying. Shortly after-
ward Isadora danced again, and was getting ready to dance
some more but was strangled to death by her flowing scarf
which caught in the turning wheels of a car. When we heard
the news, Naomi and I sat up the whole night holding hands
and weeping. It was too sad an end for such a great artist.
The two of us wore black clothes for a month.

Isadora Duncan's influence on the women of the world is
perhaps the most lasting and most powerful one they have ex-
perienced. She literally took the shackles, the corsets and long
skirts, off their bodies. The women of the world could be di-
vided into those before Isadora Duncan and those after.

At a Peruvian poet's apartment in Passy, I met James Joyce;
Sherwood Anderson; Julian Green, the American-French
writer; Ludwig Lewisohn; Elmer Rice, the playwright; Jean
Richard Bloch, the novelist; and Bazalgette, the translator of
Thoreau and Walt Whitman.

Joyce's voice had the vibrations of a well-played 'cello. He
seemed well-poised but wasn't A good looking man, deep-
eyed, red-bearded, and with a strong, coarse mane of hair,
Joyce was idolized by women.

Elmer Rice and I sat down by ourselves to talk about the
French company which was then rehearsing Rice*s Adding Ma-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 205

chine. Leon Bazalgette, looking like an Armenian rug dealer,
joined us, glass in hand, to talc to Pace in Ms very precise Eng-
lish. Sherwood Anderson sat down on the floor. Then Joyce
came over to ask me something about Gypsy music, and the
whole crowd followed him.

The host kept our glasses filed and led the discussion to-
ward the injustices caused by the Versailles treaty. His
American wife reflected aloud that France was a wonderful
country* but it was too bad that the Germans didn't live in it.
I flared up. Here they were, guests of France, eating French
food, drinking French wines, the men sleeping with French
women, and some of the women doing the same, and yet they
wished that the Germans, the enemies of France, possessed the
country.

Joyce looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. Julian Green
turned his back and left the room. Naomi, Rada, and I fol-
lowed him.

Paris was crowded with Germans. They were everywhere,
in cafes, theaters, restaurants, and in the big hotels. They
spent money freely, but never failed to complain about the in-
justices of the Versailles treaty and how it had impoverished
them. Somehow they managed to be at every party where
there were Americans.

One day a German writer said to me, TLook at what the
French have done with their victory! Can you imagine what
we would have done if we had been victorious?**

**Ach " and his eyes looked up. **Ach, ach "
We moved into an apartment of our own, in a newly built
co-operative house on the left bank of the Seine. I broke the
walls of the two maids* rooms in the garret and made a work-
room for myself with windows overlooking a million housetops
and part of the roof of the Louvre. On clear days I could see
the frame of the Eiffel Tower, which I had once painted f or
ten francs a day.

206 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

The gods being good to us, we discovered Louise, the best
cook in the world, who loved to cook and knew exactly which
wine to serve with each course. Louise judged our guests by
the way they appreciated her food. Emma Goldman was tops
among the ladies. "Oh, la, la, cette dame-la, how well she
eats!"

Dosh Fleurot, the newspaper correspondent, was "a gentle-
man who eats like an angel."

A Russian-born violinist and his wealthy American wife lived
on the same floor. She adored him in a cold, pure way. The
best decorators had painted and furnished their apartment.

When we were shown their bedroom, Rada asked, "Yes, but
where do you actually sleep?"

That room didn't look as if it had ever been slept in.
Though they had six rooms, the husband practiced six hours
a day in the bathroom. "Because he smokes," the wife ex-
plained, "and drops ashes."

Before going to Vichy, for a cure, our neighbors sublet their
apartment to Lee Simonson, the Guild's theatrical designer,
who was so outraged by the purity of the apartment that he
painted all kinds of Rabelaisian pictures on the walls of the
bathroom.

Lee took Mirel, who was knee high to a grasshopper, wher-
ever he went, endlessly fed her ice creams, and visited all the
museums with her while she acted as his interpreter. I
watched over Rada's musical education and did some work
myself. Naomi was busy with clay and paint. Rion, who had
left his job as editor of the Fourth Estate, came to Paris for a
vacation, but was too unhappy over a girl in New York to have
much fun. Gorky had found a crowd of appreciators of art
in all its phases and was spending most of his time appreci-
ating art and the girls.

At Bernadine Szold's house I met Ernest Hemingway, whose
stories had already been published in the ^advanced" left bank
magazines. He looked familiar. Suddenly I remembered

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 207

that I had seen Mm in Spain at Pamplona in the Basque coun-
try. It was the morning of a bull fight, and lie was running
ahead of the bulls.

Before dawn the side streets crossing the Avenida that leads
from the bull pen to the arena were roped off and the whole
populace of Pamplona and the villages within fifty miles ran
like mad, with the bulls at their heels, to the arena. At every
encero at least a half dozen people are gored by the wild beasts,
but in Spain costurribres (customs) are not abandoned for such
trifles.

Sitting there in Bemadine's room, in a heavy black suit,
Hemingway didn't look much like the fellow with his back to
a black bull in Pamplona.

He smiled when I told him where I had first seen him and
remarked that he preferred Spain to France because it wasn't
effeminate.

"He has just sent a manuscript to Horace Liveright/' Berna-
dine, who had just divorced Otto Liveright, my agent, informed
me.

"What do you call the book?** I asked Hemingway.

"In Our Time"

"I hope Horace takes it/ 7 1 said.

"It's a wonderful book/' Bemadine assured me.

Embarrassed by her praise, Hemingway said something espe-
cially complimentary about my stories. I hadn't heard my
work praised in a long time. I was starved for a little flattery.
We had a drink and then another one. By the fourth drink
I was absolutely certain that his book would be accepted and
be a great success. By the sixth drink I was willing to stake
my life on it.

Weeks later I saw Bernadine again.

"Horace took the book/' she told me.

~Whosebook? Oh, yes. Well, I knew it, didn't I? Where
is Ernest?"

"In Spain. Cashed the advance check and left for Spain.

208 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Some people say he's the greatest writer America has yet pro-
duced. What do you think? Do you think he is better than
Glenway Westcott?"

At that time Bernadine measured all writers by Glenway
Westcott.

My coirntryman, Panait Istrati, was already a legend in Paris
when he came to see us; that is, when he burst in upon us.
His first book, Kira Kiralina, introduced to the world by Romain
Holland, had made him famous.

Panait knocked at the door, embraced me, my wife, and the
children, put down a suitcase, and said, "I know you'll find a
place for me in your apartment, but I have picked up a stray
waif, a stowaway, on the train, so please find a place for him,
too, somewhere, anywhere, in the kitchen, in the garret, if you
have a garret"

"We have a garret."

"All right then. He's outside. Ill call him in."

A moment later a ragged, pimply, disagreeable boy of about
fifteen came in.

"I know youll feed me," Panait said, "but he, too, is hungry.
I couldn't eat knowing that he is hungry."

Slight, nervous, long-faced, dark, with deep-set, coal-black
eyes and blue-black hair, Panait ate ravenously, drank wine
and cognac, smoked, and at the same time talked incessantly
about his mistress in Nice, his former wife in Roumania, and
his uncle in the Dobrogea.

We compared notes. We were raised in the same town on
the same street. His father had been a Greek smuggler, his
mother a Gypsy washerwoman. Panait and I were the same
age. When I mentioned the daughter of the Greek priest in
our town, Panait cried out, "Nerantzula! Did you, too, know

He had been her first lover. Suddenly he began spinning
a tale about her, describing the Danube River, the sailboats,

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 209

the other boys, and the other girls of our town. The tale grew
and swelled as his voice rose and became more passionate.
He only stopped to fill his wine glass and to light one cigarette
from another.

At midnight we tied our platters from the ice box. At day-
light Panait finished telling the tale, went to his room, and be-
gan to write it, drinking interminable cups of black coffee and
small glasses of cognac.

Two weeks later the manuscript of the novel he called
Nerantzula, exactly word for word as he had told it to us, a
masterpiece of story telling., was finished. *

We had our troubles with Panait He played cards with
our American friends and emptied their pockets. He had the
contempt of the smuggler and the Gypsy for all the amenities
of civilized life. One day he was a communist; the next day
he was something else. He went to Switzerland to lecture and
returned with a new mistress, a beautiful and very intelligent
young girl, the daughter of a university professor.

He met, casually, very casually, a Greek banker, noted for
his avarice, talked to him a half hour, and extracted ten thou-
sand francs from him. He would have gotten more if the
banker had had more at the time in his pocket.

A great writer, but what a beggar! What a crook!

I ran away to Nice. A week later he was there with his new
Swiss girl friend, registered at the same pension. He charged
everything up to me. When I refused to foot the bill, he
played poker with the manager and robbed him of more than
the bill he owed.

**Why do you think I came to ParisF* he shouted at me one
day. "For your beautiful eyes? I should say not. I came
because I had heard that you were rich. That you had dollars.
And then what do I find out? That you don't play cards.
Writing is my art, but I make my living playing cards.**

That same night he told me a story, which he later wrote as

210 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

The Thistles of the "Baragan, one of the most beautiful prose
poems in any language.

Eventually Panait Istrati went to Russia at the invitation and
expense of the Soviets and came back with two books against
them. Pleased with his antibolshevism, the Roumanian gov-
ernment invited him to return to Roumania. He returned, and
there he, the great idealist, engaged in the dirtiest and most
scoundrelly of politics. As a writer he was like a mountain;
as a man he was the size of a peanut.

Born in Roumania of Bulgarian parents, Doctor Christian
Rakowsky, son of wealthy land owners, was for a long time
head of the socialist party in Roumania. At the end of the last
war, following an agrarian revolution, he made himself master
of the country, but was dislodged by the military authorities,
imprisoned, and sentenced to death as a traitor. The night
before he was to be executed, he escaped from prison, crossed
the border into Lenin's Russia, and was made the president
of the Ukraine, one of the first Soviet States.

In 1924 he came to Paris, where his personal charm and his
wide acquaintance among journalists and politicians of the left
helped him to gain France's recognition of the Soviet Union
despite the opposition of the Church, the French investors in
Czarist Russian bonds, and the antagonism of the military
clique.

As soon as Rakowsky and his family had moved into the old
Russian embassy, we were invited to dinner. Rakowsky, very
handsome, embraced me like a brother when he saw me, and
we soon sat down to dinner and a discussion of the situation in
Russia.

The Russian government, having confiscated all the large
properties of the nobility and the landed gentry, was now prom-
ising the land to the peasants.

"From having been against us/* Rakowsky explained, "the
peasants will now be for us. They may not understand com-

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 211

munism, but they'll be for us because we give them land. We
won't have any more trouble with them! 9

"That's how peasants are/' Madame Rakowsky, tall and
ample-bosomed, said to Naomi, "the Roumanian peasants as
well as the Russian.*" Turning to me, she asked, "Do you
know a peasantry that has any other ambitions? 9 *

"No/' I said, "I don't. And I don't know any peasantry that
will ever feel otherwise. But will they own the land they til
in Russia? 77

"Make yourself clear/* Rakowsky urged.

"I suspect that after the support of the peasantry has served
its purpose, and the bolsheviks have entrenched themselves
solidly in power, they will take the land away from the peas-
ants again. Isn't that so? You can't have a collective indus-
try and a property-owning peasantry at one and the same
time/ 7

"But well educate the peasants to believe that they'll be
better off in collective farm groups than owning the land indi-
vidually/' Mrs. Rakowsky said.

"Will you ever convince them of that? Will you wait until
you have educated them? Will you be able to make the peas-
ants give up the land voluntarily mark you, voluntarily to
the collective of the state?" I questioned.

"Of course/* Rakowsky said. "Why not?"

I laughed aloud.

"That you, Christian Rakowsky, should say that! You, the
son and grandson of peasants. Russia wffl bathe in blood be-
fore you take the land back from the peasants. You will have
to torture them, imprison them, starve them, lay siege to their
villages, to get the land you have given them when you needed
their support. They'll detest you, sabotage, kill you, destroy
you! And I, and millions like me, shall be entirely on their
side.**

"You?** Madame Rakowsky asked. "You will be against us?
I don't believe a word you say."

212 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Let him talk/* Rakowsky urged. "What would you do if
you were in Russia now?"

"I'd go to the peasants and tell them that they were being
fooled and that the bolshevists don't mean that they shall keep
the land"

"And if I were in Russia with you," Rakowsky said, looking
at me with tears in his eyes, "if I were in Russia with you,
brother, dear brother, I would shoot you myself for telling this
to the peasants."

The food stuck in my throat. Rakowsky looked down into
his plate and tried to eat, but couldn't.

"We must achieve communism at all cost. I, a peasant, who
knows what ownership of land means to the Russian muzhik,
say that. We must win the peasants to our side now. I was
myself against giving the peasants something we will ultimately
have to take back, but once it has been decided to do so, I'd
shoot my wife and child if they opposed the decision of the
party."

"But I don't oppose it," Madame Rakowsky cried out.

Koka, their daughter, a charming young girl of eighteen,
trembled, paled, and left the room without excusing herself.
Rada followed her out of the room. The dinner which had
started out like a reunion of old friends was a complete fiz-
zle.

"You shouldn't have said that about shooting your own
child," Madame Rakowsky said to her husband. "Look at the
effect it had on Koka!"

After a while, Rakowsky said, "This hasn't been a very pleas-
ant dinner. Now that we know where each of us stands, we
won't talk politics when we meet again."

I didn't expect to see Rakowsky again. Much to my sur-
prise, however, several days later we received an invitation
from him, asking our presence at the Grande Soiree given by
die Russian embassy to celebrate the official recognition of the

ITS THE GYPSY 1A T ME 213

Soviet Union by France. At die bottom of the card were the
words *De rigueurl*

The Soviets, the country of the worldngmen, soldiers^ and
peasants, gave a soiree and the two little words De rigueur ex-
cluded workers and peasants from the soiree! For what work-
ingman or peasant in France possessed an evening suit? The
inconsistency was amusing.

All Paris was at the Russian embassy that night, artists, cabi-
net ministers, journalists, writers, bankers.

Wine and champagne flowed freely. The buffet was laden
with the finest sturgeons, a score of crystal bowls filled with
fresh caviar, and platters of lobsters as big as lambs. The
whole of the renowned largesse of Russian hospitality was ex-
hibited on that buffet.

On the landing of the main, staircase of the ballroom sat
Anatole Lunacharsky, the Soviet minister of culture and edu-
cation, flanked on either side by gorgeous young women, to
whom he was telling risque stories.

"Are you enjoying yourself T Lunacharsky asked me. "Ex-
cellent caviar. Fine champagne. Beautiful women. Is there
anything else you would like? Sit down with us. This young
lady is a very serious young lady. I talk to her about the
secret springs of life, and she asks me to tell her whether it is
true that the Ukrainian peasants are dying of starvation. Isn't
that funny?**

"What's there so funny about starvation, Anatole Lunachar-
sky?** I asked. "Is it true they are starving to death?"

**WelI/* Lunacharsky said, standing up and combing his
pointed beard with his fingers, "of course it's true, but it is
greatly exaggerated. The truth, you know, can be greatly ex-
aggerated, greatly, indeed. Russians have starved for hun-
dreds of years under the reign of the Czars. They are accus-
tomed to starvation/*

Rakowsiy, in high spirits, joined us on the staircase.

214 ITS TP1E GYPSY IN ME

"I am very glad you came, Konrad," lie said, hugging me
fraternally and pointing to a little group in the center of the
crowded ballroom, added, "Look at your beautiful daughter
and mine. They get along well. And look how many men
are about them! And there is your wife and mine. It is won-
derful to see them together."

"Christian., he doesn't approve of us. He won't even drink
our champagne or eat our caviar. He's troubled by starving
Ukrainians; so is this young lady. Can't you do something
about it? I don't like troubled people. They are not very
amusing," Lunacharsky complained.

"Let him feel as he wants to/' Rakowsky said. "As long
as he is here, I am satisfied."

"And why shouldn't I be troubled?" the young lady asked
between clenched fists. "With what you have fed this satiated
crowd, you could have bought enough bread to feed a starving
village a month."

"I don't understand what's happened to the youth," Luna-
charsky said, half drunkenly; "all so serious." And he joined
another group of guests.

"If the young lady had said in Russia what she said just now,
would Lunacharsky have ordered her shot?" I asked Rakow-
sky.

"If only she had said it, yes. But if a hundred thousand girls
had said the same thing, no. Come, let's have a drink together
and not talk of shooting. This soiree here, tonight, is also an
expedient. I was against it. But we have to impress the
French. We need loans. Machinery. You can't obtain loans
of tens of millions of dollars by pleading poverty. You must
show yourself rich, and put up a prosperous front; otherwise
they'd say, *Why should we lend our gold to paupers?* I was
against this grandiose soiree, but once the committee decided
we should have a soiree, I carried out the decision to the best
of my ability. You were never one to work with committees.

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 215

You don't know what It is, or knowing, you refuse to submit. 5

Despite Rakowsky's willingness to obey orders, Moscow later
recalled him from Paris and banished him to Siberia in the first
great purge.

Naomi saw him eight years later, shortly after his return from
Siberia. Although hardly more than fifty, he was gray and
bent, could hardly see, and remembered his old friends only
dimly. Eight years of Siberia had wrecked his spirits and his
health. After his return to Moscow, he lived on, a government
employee without an occupation, discarded like a cog in an
overhauled machine.

During a subsequent purge, Rakowsky was brought before
a revolutionary tribunal presided over by Stalin's eunuchs and
was accused of having plotted against the Party, of having
given lavish entertainments to the French bourgeoisie in the
Parisian embassy, and of having associated with capitalists and
other enemies of the Soviets.

Rakowsky denied nothing.

He admitted participation in conspiracies, espionage, brib-
ery, the dissipation of public funds, and intrigues with foreign
powers.

Broken, dispirited, disillusioned, hardly understanding what
was said to him, the former president of the Ukraine and am-
bassador to France, standing in rags between armed Ogpu
men, repeated mechanically the confession of his crimes. He
eame to life only once, when the sentence of death was not
pronounced against him. It was a cruel disappointment. He
was carried out of the courtroom protesting, not his innocence,
but screaming, **You promised me death; you promised it to
me."

"And Koka and Madame Rakowsky?" I asked a friend who
had just come from Russia.

Probably alive and in Russia."

216 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

'What makes you think so?"

"Would Christian Rakowsky have confessed to crimes tie
had not committed if Koka and Ms wife were not in the hands
of Stalin's Ogpu?"

What I could not understand was why they hadn't pro-
nounced the death sentence on him!

A few months later, at another purge trial for the edification
of the Russian people, Christian Rakowsky was dragged out
of his cell to give state's evidence against several of his old
comrades.

XIX

ROSENTHAL, my Roumanian publisher, came to Paris.
Boon companions in the grand style., we became the joy
of La Perouse, Foyot, Pranier, and a dozen other restaurants
and cafes in Paris. He knew where the tripe was best, where
the escargot was the juiciest and the wines were the finest.

A brilliant mind, he had curious little inadequacies. He
couldn't lace his shoes or tie his necktie. He couldn't say **No"
directly. He had done business in millions, but had no idea
about the value of small sums of money. He knew every
newspaperman, every diplomat, and every cabinet minister in
or out of office of every major or minor power in Europe, and
knew all the dessous of politics and diplomacy in the world,
but didn't know the name of his secretary.

The year before we met, RosenthaTs paper in Bucharest had
launched a series of articles which unveiled the machinations,
the speculations, and the intrigues of the royal court of Rou-
mania, of which Queen Marie was the head.

Queen Marie had sent word to the publisher to desist and
to retract what he had published. Rosenthal paid no atten-
tion to her orders and went on merrily publishing more and
more of the rascalities of the "upper clique which had despoiled
the country and destroyed its moral fiber.

One day Rosenthal was commanded to appear immediately
at the palace before her majesty. The office of the paper was
within walking distance. Five minutes later the publisher

217

218 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

stood before Queen Marie, who, walking up and down the
room, cigarette between her fingers, told Mm what was what.

When she had had her say, Rosenthal said, "Your Majesty,
before I left the office, I told my secretary where to find my
last will and made orally the last dispositions. So you see, I
am not totally unprepared! Now as far as the paper is con-
cerned, I want you to know that I am its editor-in-chief and
not you. Roumania still has a constitutional government and
a free press. I can be sued for libel, but cannot be dictated
to. I shall continue to publish what I think proper and dis-
regard your objections."

The queen looked at him hard, and said, "You have made
your choice. Goodbye."

At the gates of the palace Rosenthal was shot down by the
queen's hoodlums and left for dead on the sidewalk. No one,
not a passer-by, dared to stop to look at the crumpled figure
in a pool of blood.

As luck would have it, Rosenthal's brother, a surgeon, passed
by in his car, stopped to look, recognized his brother, carried
him to his car, and discovering life in the body, he nursed it
back to health, comparative health.

When Rosenthal was well enough, he was smuggled out of
the country. The queen and her banker friends took advan-
tage of the publisher's illness and disability to deprive him of
his properties and to rob him of almost everything.

After this noble deed, she departed for America to appeal
for poor downtrodden Roumania and to sell her endorsement
for creams and lotions.

Long before Hitler had even been heard of outside of Ger-
many, Rosenthal, a former prisoner of war of the Germans, said
to me, They'll make one great bid, the Germans. Either
they'll achieve world power, or they'll perish. A brutish sort
of mysticism has convinced them that they are superior to the
whole world. However, should they conquer, the European
nations will never be allowed to shake off the yoke."

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 219

I had a wonderful time with the Gypsies who were living in
shanties at the Porte Montrouge outside Paris. Passing Gyp-
sies, Romanishels, Gitanos, Tziganes,, and Roms have been liv-
ing in those shanties for the last hundred years. No one owned
those sheds. Gypsies just camped in them for a few days and
left. No one bothered them.

When 1 spoke to the editor of Vue > an illustrated magazine*
about the Gypsies at the Porte Montrouge, he was amazed.
No one in his office knew anything about them, or that there
were some twenty thousand native traveling Gypsies in France.

Princess Martha Bibesco wasn't shocked when I told her
what a French aviator had told me about the state of military
aviation.

<fl The Frenchman is very patriotic, pour la gloire, and all
that, but when his taxes are increased, he goes berserk. The
French bourgeois and industrialist would sooner risk the loss
of his country than pay another cent tax on the franc/* Martha
said. The politicians out of power say such terrible things
about the ones in power, the public has no confidence in either
group. France is doomed/*

Henri Barbusse, the author of Under Fire, one of the great-
est books that came out of the last war, was Moscow's mouth-
piece in Paris.

"I don't care whether France falls or not! What do I care
if Germany beats France or not? A beaten France will be
more amenable to communism than a victorious one. The
minute France declares war shell find out something about her
army. The French army is antiwar. We haven't been sleep-

99

ing.

^Neither have the Germans? I retorted.

"Good for the Germans," he answered.

"There won't be much of France left, ground as she is be-
tween the upper class who prefer a German victory to com-

220 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

monism, and the communists who believe that a German vic-
tory would lead France to communism.

"And what of it? ?> Barbusse asked.

"Merde. Merde" I shouted, beside myself, and left him.

When I saw Prince Carol of Roumania in Paris, he was in his
early thirties, and looked like a well-dressed dry goods sales-
man and bon vivant. There was nothing majestic in his
slouchy walk.

Magda Lupescu, statuesque, with golden red hair and
plenty of rouge on her face and lips, had her big brown eyes
on the entrance of the night club as if she expected someone.
Carol was cocking an ear to the Gypsy music and absent-
mindedly drinking glass after glass of champagne without
paying the slightest attention to Magda or his table com-
panions. At the twentieth drink, Madame Lupescu put her
hand on top of his glass to stop him from refilling it. Carol
pushed her hand away angrily, filled his glass, gulped down
the wine, filled the glass again, and gulped it down, then rose
and walked drunkenly across the floor to ask an unmistakable
file de joie to dance with him.

Furious, Madame Lupescu gathered her furs, drew on her
elbow-length gloves, and left the place in a huff, despite the
entreaties of the other table companions. It was just one of
those nice, princely, public family squabbles.

At the end of the first dance, Carol sat down at the young
lady's table and played with the cheap ten-cent-store bracelets
on her wrists.

"So, you are a subject of mine, eh?" he blubbered, when I
was introduced to him at his request that night.

"You like Paris, don't you? Paris is paradise in exile. Good,
isn't it? Paris is paradise in exile! Pretty good line for a
prince in exile, eh? So you are a writer, eh? My mother is
a writer, too. How good is she?" lie asked. "I have never

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 221

read her stuff. My great-aunt was a writer, too, Carmen

Sylva. Never read her stuff either. Not amusing. She didn't
like Paris, my great-aunt. She liked Berlin. Stuffy Berlin, I
like Paris. Don't you? Everybody does. Not such a bad
place to be exiled to, eh? Mile., pardon me, Mile., I don t
know your name. What's the difference? Ill call you Made-
moiselle Nitouche. Agreed? Charming girl, isn't she, my
honorable subject? But make love to her, and in two days
she'll want to stop you from drinking a glass of wine. What's
the matter with drinking a glass of wine? I am a prince. I

can be king whenever I want to. Can't I, Dimitra? Speak

up :

"Of course, of course, your highness. Any time you want
to/* Mr. Dimitra Stefanescu, his factotum, assured him.

"Tomorrow?" Carol asked slyly.

'Tomorrow, if you wish, your highness," Stefanescu as-
sured.

"Tomorrow? No, not tomorrow. Some other day. I like
Paris. Paradise in exile. Ill be king later on. No hurry.
Next week. Next month. Next year. Roumania will wait.
Won't it? Speak up, Dimitm!"

"Yes, your highness. Of course, of course, Roumania will
wait."

"See," Carol turned to me. "Anytime I choose to be king
of Roumania, he will make me king. Isn't it great to have such
a friend? Excellent man, Dimitra. Ill make him ambassador
to Paris. And what about you in America? They know me
there, don't they? I have had a big press in America, but a
bad one. Why don't you say something? You are one of my
subjects. Ill make you an ambassador, too. Tonight is am-
bassador-making night Have a glass of champagne. Don't
say "No.* I order it. You are my subject. Itll untie your
tongue. In Roumania I could do that without champagne.
He doesn't approve of me, Dimitra. But you do, don't you,
Dimltrar

222 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Yes, your highness, I do. Of course, I do. We all do.
Your highness will be the greatest king Roumania has ever
had."

"Nitouche, do you approve of me?" Carol turned to the
girl

"Oh, oui, monsieur" Nitouche said.

"Prince, aliesse, not monsieur. I am not a monsieur" Carol
bellowed, foaming at the mouth.

"Pardonez moi, mon prince'' Nitouche apologized.

I was embarrassed, but Carol didn't seem to notice even the
existence of the people at the twenty other tables.

"Pardonez moi, mon prince"

"That's better, Nitouche," Carol exclaimed. "Nice girl, eh?"

Suddenly Carol rose, swayed on his feet, stuffed a few
banknotes in Mile. Nitouche's handbag, and stalked out with-
out saying "Goodnight" or "Goodbye" to anyone.

"Where would he be going at this time of the night?" I asked
Stef anescu, the would-be ambassador to France.

"He can't be without Magda longer than an hour, but he will
make the best king Roumania has ever had."

"Will he ever be king?" I asked.

Dimitru smiled.

"Not if it depended on France or England. But, there are
others, you know. Roumania is a very rich country. You
know that, don't you? And we are not exactly sleeping.
Everything is ready. Everyone has his price."

Nitouche touched my sleeve and asked, "Who was that
man?"

"Prince Carol of Roumania."

"O&, mon dieul What a chance I missed! But, diable, how
is a girl to know! Princes don't look different from champagne
salesmen, and they are awful, simply awful. They fill you
with champagne, take up your time, and then they slip away.
What do you say, monsieur? Ce soir je suis toute pleine
rfamour. Vous en verrez des dioses. You wouldn't be able

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 223

to even look at another woman after you have had me tonight.
So, he is a prince. Ou, la y la. Ou y la y la! 9

I was lunching with. Panait Istrati in Montmartre, when
Pascin, the great painter, who resembled Panait and had the
same manner of speech, came over to join us.

While he ate an excellent omelette covered with caviar,
Pascin sketched on the tablecloth a profusion of lascivious
nudes and gave them the faces of the waiter, the waitresses,
and the guests.

After lunch I called the proprietor over and offered to buy
the tablecloth from him.

"Oh, non, monsieur. I have a collection of them/' the
Frenchman grinned.

"You are not the only appreciator of my art.'* Pascin
laughed and asked me to accompany him to his studio on the
Boulevard Clichy.

"Let's go by the Place Pigalle, by the fountain, and pick up a
few models."

Pascin looked at the girls leaning against the rim of the
fountain of the Pigalle, and signaled to three of them to follow
us. He called them by their names, Yvonne, Suzette, and
Marcelle. They addressed him as "patron" As we walked
away from the fountain, he seemed unconscious of their exist-
ence and didn't bother to look at them when we stopped at a
bistro for another petit verre.

This premier painter of Paris yes, of our epoch was un-
shaven and in rags, but wore an expensive silk shirt and fresh
cream-colored kid gloves.

His studio on the top floor of an old house on Boulevard
Clichy, at the foot of Montmartre, was furnished with three
couches that tad seen much usage, four easels, a table, a fold-
ing screen, and a species of dangling temporary kitchen ar-
rangement, a gas rubber pipe hanging from one of the gas
Jets on the wall.

224 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Without being told to do so, the models shed their dresses
behind a screen whence they emerged nude to make them-
selves comfortable on a couch. After a while one of the girls,
who had kept on her black stockings and shoes, began to busy
herself with the coifeepot over the gas flame, while Pascin
talked to a frowsy parrot chained by one leg to a chair. A
moment later the painter was at his easel and talking about his
youth in Roumania. He only blinked at the models who were
talking and laughing, and never once asked them to hold a
pose.

The girl who made the coffee, Suzette, was from the south
of France, probably of Italian origin, and had the body and
the legs of a dancer. She poured cups of coffee for the patron
and me ? then for her friends. Then she sat down to smoke
and talk to her companions without the slightest embarrass-
ment and acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world
for her to be nude. After coffee, Marcelle straightened out the
room and washed the coffeepot and the cups while Suzette
bent over to talk to the parrot. Front and back, from head to
toe, Suzette was a magnificent specimen. What made her even
more magnificent was the absence of even a hint of inhibition.

"She is still a virgin," Pascin informed me, a propos of noth-
ing. "She is saving money and everything else for a great mar-
riage with a sergeant in the army. N'est-ce pas, Suzette?"

An hour later a rather fleshy woman in her middle thirties
came in without knocking, greeted the girls by slapping their
buttocks, said, "Bon/owr, patron'" went up to the easel to have
a look, filled the coffeepot, placed it over the gas, and sat down
on the couch to smoke a cigarette.

Pascin made a gesture with his hand, a questioning gesture
that asked whether she wanted to undress.

"Pas aujourtfhui, patron" she said and then beckoned the
three nudes to the semidarkness of the far corner of the room
to talk to them. Grouped like that, they looked like a living
tableau by Fragonard.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 225

Pascin reached for a block of paper, turned the easel to an
angle, and began to draw them as they stood. Suddenly they
knew that they were posing and remained in the same position
until he had clapped his hands.

"Tu est en belle peau aujourd'hui, Suzette," Pascin remarked.

The leshy blonde looked professionaly at the young model,
came bending over to look at the skin of the girl, and agreed
with Pascin. "EUe est ^raiment en belle peau aujounfhui"

Then we had a general conversation. Yvonne was a com-
munist Marcelle was a right-wing socialist. Suzette had no
political opinion. The ieshy blonde was a royalist. I
watched them discuss politics and gesticulate wildly to drive
home a point.

"Don't wonder/* Pascin said. "All of Paris is deeply im-
mersed in politics. They shed their dresses, but not their opin-
ions when they come to pose. The Germans are at the gates."

A while later he paid them off and dismissed them.

"Bonfour, patron. Bonjour, monsieur! 3

Pascin told me that he sold well in America, but the Ameri-
cans bought his paintings, drawings, and water colors, not as
art but as pornography. His nudes were hanging on the walls
of rich bachelors in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.

*! suppose 111 have to paint some still Iff es to become immor-
tal/* he joked. "There is nothing immoral about a carrot or
an apple.**

He begged me to join him for dinner at Ms pennon.

The food is marvelous. The wines are first class."

The pension was really a brothel. We sat at a long table
with the madame, a former pierreuse, at one end of the table,
and the monsieur at the other end. The pemionnaires, a dozen
girls of every shade, size, and girth, sat on both sides of the
table. During the two hours of dinner I didn't hear one word
or notice one gesture of which Mrs. Grundy might have disap-
proved. Emily Post herself couldn't have advocated better
table manners. After the coffee the ladies left, following

226 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

madame, and we, the three men, drank cognac, lit our ciga-
rettes, and talked politics.

"Et les affaires?" Pascin asked the patron.

"On ne pent pas se plaindre," the husband of the madame
said. "It could be worse. On ne pent pas se plaindreT

"I am glad to hear it/' Pascin said.

"Et vos affaires?" the man asked.

"On ne peut pas se plaindre. It could be worse/' Pascin re-
plied.

"I am glad to hear it. And in America, monsieur, how is
business there?' 5 the man turned to ask me. "I used to do some
business with Rio de Janiero, years ago, but there is nothing
doing now. The exchange is too high. I used to send twenty
or thirty girls, de la belle merchandise, to South America every
year. This year not one. They get them from Austria. It is
cheaper to get them from Austria. The whole luxury business
of France is losing out to Austria. We have lost South America
completely/'

Outside I asked Pascin. "Do you always dine in this place?"

"Almost always. It's the only place where nobody flirts, and
one is immune from dirty stories. These women don't carry
their profession into their private lives."

When I next went to see Pascin, he had hung himself in his
room.

The husband of the madame was desolate.

"Ah, monsieur., quel malheurl Why did he do it? We loved
him, madame and all the pensionnaires. We are desolate.
He was like one of the family. Well never again have a pen-
sionnaire like him. Ah, monsieur, quel homme d'esprit et de
talentl Some day I must show you our bedroom which he has
decorated. You should come to see us often, monsieur. Pas
pour du business, mais en ami. Oui, venez en ami de la

The man wasn't at all conscious of the degrading nature of
his business. He dealt in sex with the same aplomb as bankers

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 227

deal in money or cheese dealers in cheese. He spoke of Ms
brothel as **le commerce" and of the girls as merchandise.
"Nous tenons de receijoir deux pieces de Cologne, epatantes en
peau et en manieres. Faut coif ga, monsieur. How Mon-
sieur Pascin would have liked to see them! He was a real
connoisseur. Et de la delicatesse, monsieur! De la deli-
catesser

The Bullitts lived in an old house five minutes* walk from
us. Beautiful, sparkling Louise Bryant Mrs. Bullitt and my
wife were intimate friends. We often dined with the Bullitts
or had coffee with them in their house or in our apartment

They had adopted a young Turkish boy whose father had
been decapitated by the sultan's men. He acted as the Bullitt
doorman on great occasions, when he put on the gorgeously
tasseled costume of an Amaut. He was devoted to Louise.
His eyes shot fire when anyone looked at her too long. I
stopped kissing her "Goodbye" because of the eyes of that
young Amaut.

The Bullitts gave musicales, especially of George AntheiTs
new works with the composer at the piano, and all Paris was
always there. AntheiTs music made me angry. Louise was
amused to see me rage. At one of these musicales she sat be-
tween Walter Damrosch and me, highly amused at the discom-
fiture of both of us.

Bullitt and I took long walks and talked. Russia hadn't
fooled him. He had been in Turkey and had seen that land in
the throes of modernization. He had been in Germany and
come away distrusting German republicanism. He had a weak
spot for Vienna (as have most Americans) and Budapest (as
have most romanticists), but he loved France and above afl
Paris.

On the surface, Cocteau, Gide, and a host of others were
just being ultra modern. It was ultra chic to chant the vices
of Germany and depreciate the virtues of France. It was **/w

228 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

de si&cle" to praise Wagner, Strauss, Schonberg, and Toch and
run down the modem French composers. It was very, very
civilized to admire the work of abstract German painters and
to accept the decrepit monstrosities they shaped in glass and in
clay as modern sculpture.

Naomi and our two daughters worked hard. Rion went
back to the States and his girl friend. Gorky roamed the
cafes where he vociferated about art and literature. I worked
hard to get back to music.

Music had one advantage over literature. One could say
what one pleased without fear of being censored. One could
express in music one's wildest erotic emotions without restric-
tions. No composer has ever been hauled before a magistrate
for pornography, as has often been the lot of painters, sculp-
tors, and writers. There is much more voluptuous emotion in
a piece by Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven than there is in a story
by Boccaccio, de Koch, Maupassant, or the most unexpurgated
stories of the Arabian nights. Music is the only uncensored
art in existence. But, mon dieu, musicians are, as a rule, the
most stupid of men. The more intelligent musicians are com-
paratively sterile. Thought, the ability to think, is not con-
ducive to musical composition. I had been thinking too much.

When I went to the Roumanian consulate in Paris to get the
necessary visas for my homeland trip, the consul introduced
me to a Mile. Rose, a tall, dark young Roumanian beauty, and
asked us to join him for tea at the Ritz. Eventually the consul
left us, saying that he had to return to his office, and Mile. Rose
asked me to accompany her for a walk.

At dinner time Mile, said she knew a charming little place
to dine and talk. Across the table she assured me that she had
more talent than any other actress, but had gotten nowhere
because she was too tall. Queen Marie had promised her a
pension, but hadn't kept her word, and, here she was. . . .

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 229

She ordered caviar, lobster, fish, filet mignon, topped the
dinner off with, crapes Suzettes and Roquefort, changed wines
expertly with every dish, but complained bitterly of poverty.

Halfway home she confessed that she was part Gypsy, and
asked me why I had wasted our time since I had arrived in
Paris.

'Tell me/* I asked when we had entered her rez de chamee
apartment on the Place Victor Hugo. "Why did you expect
a pension from Queen Marie? What have you done for the
royal house of Roumania?'*

She didn't answer. She pressed a button on the wall. A
maid came in*

"Are the children up yet, Irene?"

"Oui, Mller

"Bring them in for a moment"

A few minutes later a boy of six and a little girl of four rushed
into the room crying, *Mama, Mama/'

I took one look at the two blonde heads with the slightly
receding chins and knew why Carol's mother had promised
Mile. Rose a pension. When the children had been taken back
to their room, Mile, said:

"After that, she married me off to a young officer, who left
me the night of our wedding, and then she palmed me off on

Prince G , a stingy old man. In olden days it may have

been worth something to have been the mistress of a prince
heir; today it means nothing/* and becoming hysterical, she
cried out, "I have to prostitute myself to feed Roumanian royal
children/*

"Be careful/' Rosenthal advised me the following day* **You
shouldn't have gone to her apartment Marie has tried to
palm her off on everyone. It* s a very mixed-up affair. No
one can make head or tail out of it* Don't get mixed up ia
the mess."

A week or so later Bincess Bibesco said, "I didn't think

230 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

you'd get mixed up with that woman, or I should have warned
you."

Mile. Rose had spread the story of our friendship to the four
corners of the earth. Unbeknownst to me we were photo-
graphed together, and the picture was published in all the
papers. I had to do quite a little explaining to Naomi and
Rada when Mile, called up persistently every day, demanding
to talk to me.

In one week my French publishers gave me a handsome ad-
vance on two books, I received money from Italy and Germany,
and my English publishers sent me a hundred pounds. I
looked upon this money as a windfall and spent all of it buying
wines for my cellar. When the racks were filled with several
thousand bottles of wine and champagne, we gave a party to
our American and French friends, writers, musicians, and
painters, and sampled our beverages. After the first party we
had to give a second and a third so as not to offend those we
had not been able to accommodate at the first one.

Following those parties we entered upon a series of parties
which left me little time to work and played the devil with my
health.

The real reason for those parties, the half -subconscious one,
was that I craved to show myself off to myself because of the
poverty I had once endured in Paris. I took pleasure in invit-
ing my Parisian relatives who had treated mother so shabbily
when the family first arrived in Paris twenty years before.
True, they had become richer in the meantime, but I had be-
come famous, and the famous of the world came to our house
and not to theirs.

I am ashamed to tell that one night, when the rooms were
crowded with people from everywhere, I said to my cousin at
the top of my voice, "Remember when we came to Paris twenty
years ago?"

didn't call me 'Cousin Konrad* all over the place then.

ITS THE GYPSY JA 7 ME 231

You and yours treated me and mine ratter shabbily. And you
still would today, if tilings were not as they are. You must be
of the bastard branch of the Bercovicis.**

I am sorry I told him that. I was sorry a moment after I had
done it, but, great God, at best I am but a man with all a man's
failings and shortcomings, and it does feel good to have them.

The French franc had been hammered down by a Dutch
bank to fifty for a dollar,, and Paris was now crowded with
British, Spanish, Italian,, Scandinavian, and German tourists
who changed their money into the depreciated currency of
France and bought linen, furniture, antiques, and paintings.

When the Paris shops raised their prices, the tourists fell
upon Orleans, Lyons, Lille, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Nancy,
and bought and bought to their hearts* content.

Thousands of cases of champagne and old cognacs and
thousands of cases of antiques, linens, books, statues, paintings,
furniture, and porcelains left France every day. The Amster-
dam bank daily offered tens of millions of francs at lower and
lower rates. The other banks followed. New York unloaded.
The cost of living finally rose so high for the French that there
were daily fights between tourists and natives. Unless you
looked like a Frenchman, you were considered a criminal if you
bought anything in a store. There was no doubt that France
was being systematically looted, and it wasn*t long before the
discovery was made that the looting was done under orders
from Berlin. It really took the Germans twenty years to soften
France up for the coup de grace. The German bankers,
Schacht and the others, performed the same service for Hitler,
the ultimate, as do banderilleros in die bull rings, bleeding the
bull to soften him up for the matador.

At an international literary gathering I noticed a young Ger-
man who flitted from group to group and made himself agree-
able to aH.

When somebody in my group made a cutting remark about

232 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

the Germans, a young Frenchwoman brought the man up short
by saying, "My husband is a German."

Before leaving to join another group, she remarked, "It's too
bad about the franc. I am as sorry as you are. A banker told
us that it will go down to a hundred to the dollar. Le pauvre
franc est fishu"

A little later Charles Young, the playwright, Kathleen
Millay's husband, said to me: "Heard the news? The franc
will go down to a hundred."

"Who told you so?"

"Otto."

"Otto who?"

"That fellow there. Nice sort of German. Married to a
French girl. Loves the French."

When I asked Ignacio Zuloaga whether he knew that man,
the famous Spanish painter said, "Oh, he! Charmant type.
Comes up to see me sometimes. Charming wife, poor as
church mice. Crazy about Paris. Tout a fait charmant.
Very intelligent, very, very. II y a longtemps? he has warned
me that the franc will fall. I have saved lots of money thanks
to his advice."

A Hungarian German princess was a frequent guest at
literary-artistic parties, and pestered everybody to tell her,
"what Americans really feel, but really feel, about my people/*

Knowing her origin, I said, "The Hungarian Jews in America,
Madame, are quite well thought of in America."

The princess left me in a huff and complained about me to
the Comtesse de Noailles, our hostess.

"You are no diplomat," the countess said to me.

"No. No diplomat and no spy/*

"You are terrible."

Franz von Pappen shuttled in and out of Paris and was often
at the "Deux Magots" for his breakfast He stayed at the Hotel
Cayre, on die Boulevard Raspail and was frequently, incognito,
at the "Rotonde" or "Montparnasse," the caf^s frequented

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 233

chiefly by Americans, where Otto Abetz and Ms wife came for
their nightly glass of beer and to give people advice about the
franc.

And the franc fell. When I gave our concierge the usual
monthly pourboire y she held the banknotes in her hands and
asked ironically, "En dollars, monsieur, combien que cela est?
How much is that in dollars?"

"The franc still is French currency/* I replied.

"Malheureusement" she remarked and turned away.

The Abetzes were working. Their innuendos were seeping
below the surface, below all the surfaces. French patriotism
is tied down to the pocketbook. For hundreds of years now
every French generation was either bom during a defeat and
died after a victory, or was bom after a victory and died after
a defeat.

When I dropped an American dime in the hands of a beggar
woman on the steps of Notre-Dame cathedral, she said "Merci*
with unusual fervor. It got so little shopkeepers hesitated to
part with their merchandise at any price.

Otto Abetz, in a loose tweed suit and hatless, greeted me
familiarly at the Select one day, and, as a favor, informed me
that the franc was down lower than ever.

"How many Otto Abetz*s are there in Paris?** I asked.

"Only one/" he said, and then added heatedly, "What do you
mean?**

"What are you doing here? Helping the franc along on its
downward path?** I asked. "Who pays you for this land of
workr

Otto squared off for a fist fight, but the proprietor of the
Select came over and separated us:

"AHoras, allons, monsieur, the war is over. Everyone is a
customer.**

Several American friends also interposed themselves between
us and told me that Otto was all right He was a pacifist, an
internationalist, a socialist. And married to a charming French

234 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

girl. And poor. And lie had advised them so well about the
franc.

Naomi took one look at Abetz some hours after the affray and
said, "That man there is a spy."

Naomi is uncanny about such matters. A hundred times she
has pointed at men and women as spies and never been wrong
once.

XX

I PILED the family into our car and we drove to Saint-Jean-
de-Luz, near the Spanish border, where Louis Bromfield and
his wife, Edna Ferber and her mother, and a host of other
friends had already gone. We rented a Basque cottage close
to the ocean, paid a season's rent, but had to leave a few weeks
later because the water system of the city could not supply all
the new cottages that had been built that year. Saint- Jean-de-
Luz was ideal in climate and geographical position, but we had
no water in the house. It made us all very irritable.

During that season the same cottage was rented four times,
always to Americans, who eventually left because of the water
situation. We crossed the border into Spain, for a short stay
with the painter, Zuloaga, at his island home in Zumaia. A
great painter, and clever as a fox, Zuloaga had bought off all
the good El Greco paintings in Spain before he informed the
world of his discovery of the great master. When the noise
about El Greco was at its highest pitch, he "reluctantly** parted
with some of the paintings at fantastically high prices, and kept
the best of them for his private collection in Zumaia, At one
time the Morgan interests offered him nine million dollars for
the collection. Zuloaga said, **Why should I sell? I already
have all the money I want.**

At the fiesta of Pamplona I saw Hemingway again, running
ahead of the bulk.

A hundred thousand people slept on the sidewalks of Pam-

255

236 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

plona. Outside the hotel, I stepped over legs and more
legs. It was like walking on ties between railroad tracks.
The cafes were open day and night. People danced in the
streets. There were Gypsies everywhere.

Tens of thousands of people were dancing in the street, yet
there was a terrific sullenness about it all, as if all these thou-
sands of people were playing Pagliacci at one and the same
time.

The guardia civiles, in comic opera hats but with carabines
across their shoulders, broke up the crowds of peasants group-
ing and regrouping themselves here and there.

I found myself a fine Gypsy tribe of dancers and copper-
smiths, with whom we spent a highly exciting week roaming in
the hills. I bought all the bread, meat, and the wine for the
whole tribe, to keep them with us, and we hardly slept that
week. We danced and sang and talked night after night under
the stars, and there wasn't an hour in twenty-four when a guitar
wasn't played or a tale wasn't told. Those Gitanos had heard
about my writings and insisted that I tell them the stories I had
written. I did, and talking to people who understood, I told
them much better and in greater detail than I had written them.
Eventually our party was broken up by the rurales, gendarmes,
who asked too many questions and wanted to know why the
senor from North America and ,his family were roaming with
Gitanos when he had enough money to stay in hotels!

At Hendaye, on the French side of the border, I visited Una-
muno, the Spanish philosopher, and told him that his recent
book, The Agony of Christianity, was a thick spread of anti-
Semitic merde. I had to show him the merde in his book.

"But anti-Semitism is totally alien to me," he clamored, shak-
ing his goatlike head.

"And what do you call this?"

"Senor, a mistake."

The whole Basque country was seething; the ground under
one's feet was throbbing like a sore pulse.

IT'S THE GYPSY IX ME 237

In Victoria, an industrial town, the son of a wealthy manu-
facturer asked us ironically, "Have you also come for local
color? Watch and see! There may soon be rivers of blood
running in the gutters,"* and quoting Jehan Rictus, he added,
"Ca ce met en drame, en loers, en prose, et ga fait faire des
tableaux. It can be couched in a drama., in verses, and prose,
and it does make selling pictures/*

We motored back to our home in Paris. I went up to my
garret and worked for a few weeks at a symphony which didn't
come and refused to be cajoled, then threw it aside and worked
fifteen and more hours a day every day on my book about
Alexander the Great,

I had lost the faculty of dunking in musical terms. There
was no music left in me. There was no music in the air. I
could write but not compose. When the manuscript of the
book had been sent to the publishers, I began to make serious
plans for the trip to Roumania, which I had continually post-
poned, but couldn't postpone any more,

A few days before we left Paris I unexpectedly met a certain
young lady at the American Express Company.

"Well, well/* she said, kissing me, "where have you been?**

"Who else is with you?" I asked.

"You/* she said. "Take me to a cafe and let's sit down. I
like Paris*

"Where is Penny? 9 * I questioned when we had reached Cafe
de la Pak. "Is he here?"

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't married to him/* she replied.

"Where are you staying?**

"YouTI see with your own eyes,** she said winking.

She was very beautiful, more so than I had realized. I
couldn't look at her without thinking of how Penny had once
raved about her charms and passions.

"I am going to Roumania,'* I said.

THave you Just decided to gof* she asked.

It was decided long ago. Passports visaed. Packed.**

238 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Well, then change your plans. You won't regret it."

"Why did you come to Paris?"

"Why did you run away from New York?" she questioned.
Just then Penny came into view.

"Darling/' he cried out, embracing her. "Darling! Why
didn't you wait for me at Havre, as was agreed?"

"I got tired waiting/' she said, disengaging herself. "Yon
haven't said a word to Konrad yet."

"Hello, you. He doesn't count when you are around," Penny
said, punching me in the chest. "But what luck! At the hotel
they told me you had gone to the American Express, and here
you are! Darling. Did you change any dollars? How much
did you get? The robbers! Cheated you two francs on the
dollar. There was a young German outside the American Ex-
press, charming fellow, who told me to hold on to my dollars."

I rose and offered both my hands, one to her and one to
Penny. "Goodbye. See you when I get back."

"Where are you going?" Penny asked.

"She'll tell you all about it. Must run just now."

It had become that casual. One met American friends at
the Cafe de la Paix as casually as if one came upon them in the
lobby of the Algonquin.

I went to the American Express. Otto Abetz and his wife
were outside talking to a group of Americans, and telling them
that the franc was on its way out. I punched him in the face.
It was the only thing I could do. There were a hundred
Abetzes all over Paris telling people that the French franc was
on its way out.

"Why, Konrad, what the hell is this?" Carl Harriman, the
editor of the Redbook, who was listening to Abetz, asked,
separating us.

THello, Carl. How would you like to see your own country
destroyed by termites?"

**What do you mean?" Carl asked.

doing it out of friendship to our American friends/*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 239

Madame Abetz cried, "and he comes and punches my poor
husband in the face. I shall have you arrested."

"Why don't you? There goes a Hick/ " I urged her, pointing
to a policeman.

But Madame was on her way.

"What the heck is all this?" Carl Hamman asked, while the
group melted away.

When I had explained the matter to Carl, at a little table on
the terrace of the Cafe de la Paix, that unique terrace, Carl
said, "It's unbelievable. How about a piece about this for the
Redbook?"

When I had written him the piece, Carl said to me, *1 know
it's so, but it still is unbelievable. I just can't believe that such
a diabolical scheme is being enacted now in full daylight, so to
say. And if I can't believe it, my readers certainly won't/*

Carl's words froze my blood. I knew then that the Germans
would be able to do as they chose, for no one would want to
believe they could be so diabolical, so far-sighted in their
Machiavellianism.

A later conversation with Barbusse convinced me that the
Germans were even then using the French communists as
pawns in their game, and that the French communists under
the orders of the Internationale in Moscow were helping the
Germans,

"The poor downtrodden German worker is closer to me than
the French bourgeois/" Barbusse said to me in the office of Le
Monde, the communist weeHy lie was editing and publishing.

**And what about the downtrodden French worker?** I asked*

**He, he gets what lie deserves. He has had La Victoire/*
Barbusse replied with a sneer.

At that moment, Leon Vert, Barbusse's assistant, rose from
behind his desk and yelled at Barbusse, "Merde. I have had
enough of this. I wont play the German game/ 9 and he picked
up his hat and banged tie door after Mm.

That was Paris in the summer of

240 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

We left Paris early one morning in our open car, a Renault of
seasoned vintage but reliable and solid, with our pockets bulg-
ing with passports, American Express checks, letters of credit,
and dollars, and crossed into Switzerland. After some trouble
at the Italian border with the customs men, we entered Vienna
the first day of a revolution. We had reserved rooms at the
Bristol, but the Bristol, in the center of the town and of the
revolution, was now threatened by the leaping flames engulfing
the burning Palace of Justice, so we put the car in a garage,
loaded ourselves with bags and suitcases, and followed a little
woman who offered to put us up in her apartment not far away,
on Marie-Hilferstrasse.

The stores and shops were shuttered. The wide street was
empty one moment and swarming with a running crowd the
next; quiet one moment and crackling with machine gun bullets
a second later. Those hit lay on the pavement until they
were dragged in behind hallway doors.

Suddenly I heard a shot corning from behind us, looked up,
and saw a boy who had been looking out of a fifth story window
slump over the window sill like a deflated doll in a puppet show.

"That's the house I am living in," our would-be hostess said,
turning to face me, and walking a little faster though backward
for a few steps.

Just as I entered the lobby of the house behind my little
family, I heard several shots, several screams, the gallop of
horses, and the ratatat of machine-gun bullets upon the walls.

"Up, up," I shouted to my family while I shut the heavy
oaken door against the crowd at our heels.

But the little one, Mirel, wouldn't leave my side.

<6 Tas ton rigolo? Have you your gun?" she asked in Parisian
slang, touching my hip pocket. <e Oui y tu Tas?* And then it
occurred to me that I didn't know which floor our hostess lived
on. The crowd was battering at the door I had shut.

Mirel and I hurried up to the second floor. I knocked at a
door. No one answered. No one answered my knocking at

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 241

the doors of the third floor. Below, the mob was battering at
the heavy door of the hallway. 1 released the safety catch of
the gun and looked at Mirel. She didn't bat an eye.

"Are you sure It's loaded?" she asked.

On the fourth landing my wife threw open the door of an
apartment, despite the insistence of our hostess, and pulled us
in. Soon afterward mounted police dispersed the mob on the
street.

Our hostess, the wife of a consumptive physician, had braved
the bullets and gone to the railroad station to offer her home
as shelter to those who couldn't reach a hotel. There was a
magnificent kitchen, but not a morsel of food in it.

"Could we get some food?" I asked.

"]a, we could. I think so."

I gave her a ten dollar bill and said, "Go get food. Don't
forget milk;*

Madame, being the wife of a physician, had a maid, a maid
who had starved with the rest of the family. Frau Doktor was
liungry > but Frau Doktor wouldn't think of carrying a market
basket. So she called to the maid to follow her with the basket.

A half hour later madame came back, followed by die maid
with a basket of food. They had crawled over the roof of the
house and climbed down a fire escape to the window of a
woman who had hoarded food against the pending revolution.

Frau Doktor*s three youngest children had tears in their eyes
at the sight of food, but their manners were perfect. The
Herrschaften ate in the diningroom; the maid the starved, un-
paid maid ate in the kitchen. Madame had bought white
bread for the Herrschaften and black bread for the maidL

Several hours later, Frau Doktor's two older sons came home
from the center of the town and reported that everything was
under control

'"Revolutions don't happen every day. We may never get a
chance to see another one/* Naomi said. **How about having a
look at this one?'*

242 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Frau Doktor's son said all danger was "ausgeschlossen?*

Marie-Hilferstrasse, lit only by the light of the moon that
night and by the sudden burst of flames in the distance, was
empty between sidewalk and sidewalk. A procession of peo-
ple walked hurriedly, but in single file, close to the buildings
like two lines of human ants. From afar I saw a large
group of people in the center of the street. When we got
there behind hundreds of others, someone was haranguing the
crowd.

Suddenly the crowd began to mill, much like a herd of horses
before it is stampeded by a strange sound or smell. Someone
shouted, "Die Polizei!"

A hundred mounted police, riding in upon us from the side
streets, slashing the air with their naked swords, broke us up.
The crowd crumbled and ran in all directions with the horses
at their heels. I lost all sense of individuality and felt like part
of a mass that had fallen apart, but ran on holding fast to my
wife's hand.

The clattering hoof-irons on the stone pavement and the
brakelike clatter when a horse was reined in too suddenly pur-
sued me. I ran and ran.

Halfway home the clatter behind us receded, the running
crowd that had spread all over the street slowed up, and
straightened itself out soon again in two endless antlike lines
crawling along the walls away from the town. In the center
of the street a redheaded woman, with the moon shining in her
great face, disheveled and with outstretched arms, tried to stop
the crowd from passing her and shouted, "Why do you run
away? This is no time to run away from anything. How
many of us have we left behind us sprawling in their blood?
Stand up and fight the murderers. Stand up. Don't ran
away. Here they come again. Die Polizei"

The clatter of the hoofs upon stone became sharper and
sharper, but the human mass was now like a wall although the
horses plunged upon it. The mass held. The disheveled
woman's voice rose.

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 243

"Stand your ground the murderers. They have

enough. Stand your ground/"

Suddenly the mass of humanity opened up and closed Bice a
monstrous maw upon horses and riders. A dozen rapid shots
were f ollowed by the awful shrieks of falling horses, a spasm of
clattering hoofs, and the ripping noise of steel upon stone,

Naomi and I were on the outside fringe. When the crowd
had parted, 1 saw a dark heap of quivering men and horses on
the pavement, and a curving dark line that was thickening as it
spread over the stones. And then 1 too began to run, holding
on to a warm hand.

Behind us a police car was spattering the walls with machine-
gun bullets. We ran, ducked into doorways and hallways, and
ran again until we were at our own door, and up the four
flights of stairs leading to Fran Doktor's apartment

The whole night we listened to the spattering machine-gun
bullets, rifle shots, and the rumbling of army trucks clattering
into Vienna from the outlying districts. In the morning at
breakfast, Frau Doktor's oldest son, who was fifteen, told us
what had caused the Krawatt. A delegation of workingmen
had been shot upon by the police when they had demanded an
interview with the Minister of Justice. Then the crowd set fire
to the Palace of Justice with the policemen in it and prevented
the firemen from extinguishing it.

"Now the crowd is out of hand. And so are the police. The
unions have called a general strike. The rest you know.'"

**Such a thing could not have happened while our Kaiser
Franz Josef sat on his throne/* Frau Doktor said.

"But, mutter" the son pleaded, ^the fascist police started it
all by shooting into a crowd of workers. 7 *

"Had our beloved Kaiser been on the throne, there wouldn't
have been a crowd of workers on parade," she snapped back

Frau Doktor was an old royalist. Her sons were socialists.
Frau Doktor had loved to waltz with young officers in resplend-
ent uniforms to the tune of Johann Strauss's melodies, and

244 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

though starving, still thought of those days with fervor and
regret.

At the Bristol, the following day, behind the shuttered win-
dows of the bar, Sinclair Lewis, George Seldes, and a few others
toasted the revolution. Anita Loos and her husband, John
Emerson, who had made Vienna their residence, came in, a
little frightened and a little anxious to explain away what had
happened to their beloved Vienna.

Red Lewis raised his glass again and again and shouted in
his fluent but very bad German, "Hoch die Revolution. Hoch.
Hoch die Revolution"

Grim, gray-clad young soldiers from the provinces, with
rifles slung on their shoulders were patrolling the streets, break-
ing up the crowds, and running down the underworld, which
had muscled in on the quarrel between the workers and the
police.

Doctor Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst, whom I
visited, said that it was only a "Kaffee und Milch Revolution"
a coffee and milk revolution, and psychoanalysed the soul oi
Vienna, a frivolous soul even during a revolution.

"They had expected music and waltzes during the last
war. They thought they would be enacting a Lustige Witwe,
a Merry Widow play on a grand scale, and were disap-
pointed. People actually were killed and not in heroic poses
at alT

While he was talking, a machine gun from a running military
truck sprayed the outside wall of his building. The good old
doctor, annoyed by the interruption, said, "I hate noise, don't
you?" and continued his dissertation, "They are just using up a
little ammunition and getting in a little practice for the next
play."

He may have been right, but he was too Olympian for me.
As a matter of fact, I thought then and think so now, too de-
liberately Olympian. To see someone soar to Olympian

ITS THE GYPSY LV ME 245

heights is a divine spectacle, but the spectacle of one plodding
up is a sore sight.

The days were comparatively quiet, but every night the
mounted police rode in from the side streets into the crowds
and slashed at them with their naked swords. The police
looked upon every civilian as an enemy. The civilians recipro-
cated the hatred, and always there were at least a few deflated
bodies sprawling on the pavement when Die Polizei rode away.
I had never realized until then how small a body became im-
mediately after the last gasp!

On the fourth day, in front of the house we Mved in, a woman
street peddler, selling a self-threading needle, called out, "Buy
now, while the shilling can still buy something.'*

I thought of Otto Abetz and his wife in Paris, telling their
friends that the franc was falling still lower.

The banks were closed. Our cash dollars had dwindled.

When it looked as though Vienna would soon return to a
more or less normal state, the communists started fresh trouble.
A soldier was killed, a policeman torn limb from limb, and the
murderous feud between policemen and civilians was on again
with the added animosity of the soldiers out to avenge the
death of one of their own.

Before this new outbreak a man in civilian clothes was at
least sure that another one so garbed was not his enemy.
When the communists got into the fray, guns popped indiscrim-
inately. The agents of the communists shot at policemen to
enrage them against the civilians and at civilians to enrage
them against the police and the soldiery.

On the sixth day the bakers* syndicate allowed the baking
and selling of bread, the banks were opened, and, although the
shilling was freely offered at twelve for a dollar on the street,
the banks refused to give more than seven for a dollar. There
were hours of absolute quiet followed by sudden flashes of
shooting activity. The communists wouldn't let the fire die
out.

246 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

At the end of the revolution, the Vienna anti-Semites put in
their oar.

"The revolution is a Jewish plot to divert the Vienna tourist
trade to Budapest."

Swarms of street peddlers selling self-threading needles,
mostly women with intellectual faces, appeared on every street.
"Buy now, while the shilling can still buy something. Don't
keep your shillings. We want Anschluss with Germany. We
can't exist alone. Do you want Austria to become an English
province? Buy self-threading needles made in Germany while
the shilling is yet worth something."

I want it noted that this was going on five years before Hitler
came into power. The Anschluss was prepared by the German
Republic. Hitler inherited the result of its labors after killing
the Republic that had nursed and endowed him. We, here,
and now, sit and look on while fools and scoundrels, under the
protection of our laws, are attempting to soften us up for a more
gigantic Anschluss so gigantic we refuse to believe it could be
accomplished.

As against such a possibility we have the "assurance' of
Lindbergh that Hitler would not disturb himself to bother us.
Who has given that assurance? And to whom? And how
much more is it worth than the assurances given to every coun-
try before it was invaded? Austria, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia,
Denmark, Norway, Holland, Russia . . .

XXI

AFTER A FEW more nights of screams and shooting, we
got into our car and took the road to the Hungarian bor-
der. People turned to stare at the car, saw the French license
plate* and called something after us, but let us pass. Here and
there some local constable outside Vienna raised his hand to
command us to stop, but we drove on at top speed, making
sudden turns on two wheels with screaming brakes and soon
reached the border of Austria. The Austrian customs inspector
took a dollar bill and let us drive on to Hegeshalom, the Hun-
garian border. The Hungarian customs inspector took another
dollar and let us get into Hungary.

Two hours later we stopped to eat at a peasant inn in Hun-
gary. The owner, delighted to hear us speak English, called
his four children, and pointing to the older two, he said, **They
are Americanos. Detroit. Jesus Christ, what a fool I was!
What a fool! I came back for visit after war, and America she
made a law and I no can go back. So I stay here. But them
sonofabitches are Americans. Yes, sir! They looMt, no?
Talk American to the peoples/* he urged his offspring. "Talk
American, you sonofabitclies.**

We stayed overnight in Budapest at the biggest hotel on the
Danube shore. In the morning one of our suitcases disap-
peared while a porter carried our belongings to the car*

When I became vociferous, the manager, in striped trousers
and tails, called all the porters of die hotel outside and asked

247

248 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

me, "Mister, which one do you accuse of stealing your suitcase?
Youll have to prove it in court. Go ahead now. Wliich one
of us do you accuse of stealing?"

I said something unprintable and started the car.

After some more trouble with grafting, corsetted, rouged,
and powdered Roumanian officers at the border we crossed into
the land of my birth and entered the valley of the Oltu. An
hour later, as we passed under the bower of trees on a road
strewn with toylike houses, Rada, my older daughter, said, "I
have to apologize to you, father. I was sure you had roman-
ticized the beauty of your homeland. I am apologizing/*

Mirel didn't utter a word. She didn't believe she was alive.
Naomfs eyes were filled with tears.

We stopped, for the night, at a hotel three hours' ride from
Bucharest. I was talking and laughing. I ate and ate and
drank and drank. I sent wine and more wine to the Gypsy
musicians and sang with them. When a newspaperman came
to talk to me, I asked him to join us, called for more wine, more
food, and talked and talked. When another newspaperman
came to our table, I called for still more wine and more food.

People stood in back of our table, identified me, and said, "So
that's him. Away so many years and he still speaks our lan-
guage. What do you think of that?'*

"I have a cousin in New York; maybe you know him?" a
woman inquired,

"I am sure I don't, but sit down. All of you. Waiter. Push
the tables together. So. Sit down, friends. Bring some fresh
wine, waiter. Send a .dozen bottles to the Gypsies. Hey,
Praia. Play. Play on your heartstrings. I have been away.
I have come back. Play. Sing. Don't you know me? I am
Conu Jancu's son. Mama Tinka was my nurse. She was
Murdo's daughter/*

The women looked at my wife and daughters. Rada had
burst into song and was singing with the Gypsies songs I had
taught her in New York and in Paris.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 249

"I have come back/' she sang. *1 have come back to the
green of my homeland/"

Mirel fell asleep in her chair with her head on the table in a
mass of plates and glasses,

'Tell us about America/ 7 someone asked.

"TeH us about Paris/* another one urged.

"Tell us about London."

"1 read in a Bucharest paper that he gets a million lei for a
story. Is it true?" a woman asked Naomi,

"One million? He gets two million for a story/' she said
with pride.

"I could marry off my four daughters with half that amount.
Even a doctor doesn't get as much dowry as he gets for a -story/*

"Why did you ever leave such a country?'* Rada asked.

"Play. Sing > Praia. Come closer to my table and play.
Waiter, more wine/* I called out, trying not to remember that I
had once been driven out of the country that was now making
grandiose arrangements for my reception. The newspapers
had kept reporters and photographers at the border for two
weeks.

In the early morning on the road to Bucharest I saw peasants,
chained to their oxcarts laden with bags of wheat, being taken
to the market pla'ce by gendarmes. At the market place, after
the wheat had been sold for half the current price to speculators
in the pay of the queen, the money was taken by the tax collec-
tors, and the peasants' chains were removed. This was how
the noble Hohenzollern royal family had enriched itself.

A few hours later, upon entering the office of the prefect of
police of a small town, I found the great man sipping coffee and
smoking a cigarette while four policemen were whipping two
Gypsies curled up on the floor,

"What have they done?** I asked.

"Nothing."

"Then why have you ordered them whipped?**

250 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Because I am bored," the prefect answered. "Great God!"
he cried out, walking up and down the room, "Great God, what
kind of a government have we? They take a man like me, a
university graduate, who has studied in Berlin and Vienna, a
poet, and they stick him in this hole. And now, you, you who
are on a pleasure tour, ask me why I beat up a few Gypsies!
Am I not to be allowed any diversions at all? C'est a creuer le
plafond. If I didn't know the respect I owe you for what you
have done for our country, I would say your question is im-
pudent, monsieur. Do you realize that I haven t seen a play
in six months and haven't heard a concert in a year! Do you
realize what that means, monsieur?" And he broke down and
wept.

As we entered Bucharest, we came upon a long convoy of
bedraggled peasants flanked by policemen who were beating
them with horsewhips.

"Why don't you stop them? Why don't you?*' Mirel cried
out. She who had been so calm during the Viennese revolu-
tion was now almost in tears. Rada covered her eyes with her
two small hands. Naomi and I could hardly hold the two girls
down. They wanted to throw themselves out of the car.

Those peasants were a delegation who had come on foot to
Bucharest to protest against some special taxes imposed upon
their village. Penniless, they had slept on the streets and had
begged food from the farmers who came to the market place of
the big city, but were determined to see the voda, the king,
and to tell him what they had come to say to him.

"Was it like this when you left your country?" Rada asked
when she calmed down.

"No. Not quite like this."

"You shouldn't have come back," Rada cried.

Naomi didn't say a word. She looked as if a world had died
within her.

The following morning the Bucharest newspapers were
bordered with black. The king had officially died during die

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 251

night On the front page, under a large photograph of the
dead king was a proclamation,, signed by John Bratiano, the
prime minister, stating that, before dying, his majesty, Ferdi-
nand of Hohenzollem, had ordered that his oldest son and heir,
Prince Carol, then in exile, should not be permitted to come to
the funeral.

"Do you believe that?" the porter of the hotel asked me.

"What do you think?**

*7 think that this is the work of the old bitch, Marie. Shame!
To forbid a son to come to his father's funeral!** the porter said.

"Was King Ferdinand his son's f ather? y? another porter asked,
winking at me.

"He was, legally, anyhow!"* the first porter insisted.

"How will it look to the world, that's what I want to know?
Domnule Bercovici, you know the world. How will it look to
the world, eh?" the second porter asked.

Outside the entrance of die hotel, the Atheneu Palace, were
two machine guns manned by four soldiers with black arm-
bands on their sleeves. At the next street comer were four
machine guns. Outside the Royal Palace were twenty machine
guns, and there was a cannon in front of the post office and
one before the telephone and telegraph building. On the
terrace of Capsha, the Cafe de la Paix of Bucharest, obese con-
gressmen and senators dunked croissants in their coffee cups
and complained bitterly that Bucharest was short of silk
hats.

*Don*t you think it was a mistake to forbid Him (it was for-
bidden to mention Carol's name) to come to the funeral of his
f Ether?** I asked a senator who looked like a peeled pig.

"What I think doesn't matter," he replied. "She wanted ft
so"

"Why do you think she did it?" I asked.

*THave you seen the machine guns on the street?**

**Why do you think they are there?"
afraid of a revolution.**

252 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Now I can see that you are smart/* lie laughed. "Did you
become that smart in America?"

Three days later George Seldes and several other newspaper-
men representing a dozen news agencies, stood at my window
and watched the funeral procession. First behind the hearse
and the royal carriages marched several hundred peasants in
their bare feet. Among them were the peasants who had been
arrested and whipped the day before, but had been released
from the prison to march behind the funeral cortege of their
beloved king. Then came the army officers, in resplendent
uniforms, marching in parade steps, behind the peasantry, and
looking up at the ladies on the balconies as the cortege passed
by.

The funeral over, everybody rushed to the wine houses.

"What about those peasants?" I asked an official of the Palace.

"They? Well, I don t know. They have probably been
taken back to jail. Bucharest is one of the great capitals of
the world. We can't allow peasants to sleep in the streets.
You wouldn't allow such a thing in New York, would you?"

"No."

"There. Of course not. Anyhow we have to cut this dele-
gation business short. Tell me, mon cher ami, are the Ameri-
can girls really so beautiful? And have you been in Holly-
wood? Yes? What made you come back? I never would,
you know!"

We left Bucharest and went to Sinaia, in the Carpathian
Mountains, where Yehudi Menuhin and his family had pre-
ceded us so that the boy could be near his teacher, the com-
poser and violinist, Georges Enesco.

In Sinaia a medical student, the son of an old friend, took
Rada for a walk in the park. The following day, when he came
to see us again, his right cheek was swollen and his lower lip
split. He had been set upon and beaten by Iron Guard stu-
dents because he had refused to introduce them to my daughter.

ITS THE GYPSY L\ 7 ME 253

"Whaf s happening here, Daia?** I asked a Gypsy woman who
was telling fortunes to the guests in the hotel

"Praia, the rats are gnawing at the root of the tree. Tell us
something of the Praia in America. Are they beaten there?
Are they being spit upon? Are their daughters being raped in
the cellars of the police before the eyes of their parents? Is
their lesh being used to feed dogs? Tell us how is the Praia
doing across the big ocean?"

Princess Bibesco, who summered in a castle at Possada, five
miles from the royal summer palace at Sinaia, knew nothing of
what was going on, or didn't want to know. She talked litera-
ture, poetry, art, philosophy, and folklore, and was happy that
her roses were in bloom again.

During the World War the Germans had looted her garden
and sent her rose bushes to Germany, but not before Vasili, the
old gardener, had secretly taken enough cuttings to grow an-
other garden of roses. She called Vasili to introduce him to
me.

"This is our Vasili"

The white-bearded old peasant bowed and knelt before the
"alteza" and listened with bowed head to her praises.

"What wonderful people our peasants are!" Princess Bibesco
exclaimed. "And so devoted!**

I told her about the peasant delegation which was released
from jail to follow the funeral cortege of the king, but was re-
arrested immediately after the funeral.

She said that something ought to be done about it. Hie
dead king had been a friend of hers, and he certainly wouldn't
have countenanced such a thing.

"But/* I argued, "those peasants have been in Bucharest
months trying to see him.**

"The poor dear had so much on his mind. And he wasn't
well. And what could he have done if he had seen than?
You know how it is/*

Even the Gypsies, who had retained their individuality and

254 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

dignity during hundreds of years of slavery, hadn't been able
to withstand the stench of the Moeurs speciales that had risen
in the last thirty years or so. Their music had become vulgar,
and their women I won't speak about them.

The queen, the princess, the princesses, the generals, the
politicians, the police, and the financiers were either in the
service of Germany or in the pay of England. Some of them
served and betrayed both masters.

"Why did you come back? You'll never again be able to
write beautiful stories about your homeland," Rada said.

"I had to come back. Don't you see? You can't go on
dreaming about your homeland. I had to come and touch it.
Don't you see?"

"Well, now that you are here, look at it. Look at it. The
peasants chained to their oxcarts, the peasants jailed and taken
out to lend color to the king's funeral, then herded back to jail.
The beaten Gypsies. The beaten Jews. The machine guns
on die street. The Iron Guards. Look at them all," she cried.

Invited to the Palace, I refused the invitation and all the
other honors. When the chief of police ordered that my
daughters should come and explain why they hadn't registered
with the police when they had arrived, I refused to let them
go.

"You have been talking too much. Get into your car and
leave," a friendly newspaperman said to me.

"Why?"

"Must I tell you everything! Well, then. Our government
is trying to arrange a loan of a hundred million dollars in
America. Some people now say that what you'll write about
us when you return to America won't help us get the loan.
This isn't the Roumania you have known. People are killed
for much less than in those days. Now, will you get into your
car and leave the country?"

That night I noticed Sigurantza (gestapo) men outside the
door. I called them inland said, "I warn you! We can all
shoot well."

ITS THE GYPSY IX ME 255

"We won't make any trouble/' one of the men spoke up ? "if
you leave today I*

"We'll be ready in half an hour/* I said, "if youll help us
pack. ?>

They did. We left an hour later, and drove back to Paris,
via Italy, Venice, and Switzerland, but I didn't talk until we
were back in our apartment in Paris, and then only after I had
wept hysterically on Naomi's shoulders. I had buried a long-
cherished dream. For a month or more, we couldn't laugh or
be gay. Rada and Mirel felt our mourning and respected it by
their silence.

In Paris Otto Abetz was now on friendly terms with many
Americans, artists, and writers, and was acting as their financial
adviser. He and his wife were actively helping to organize the
French youth and peace societies. There were more German
"tourists" than ever in the capital of France. At night they
occupied all the terrace tables of the Rotonde and the Select at
Montparnasse and paraded their homosexualism on the Boule-
vards.

XXII

ON MY NEXT TRIP to New York I talked to magazine
editors about some articles I had sent them.

"What has gotten into you?" the editors asked. "The war is
over. Haven't you heard about the armistice and the peace of
Versailles? Go ahead and write about lovely Gypsy girls and
peasant women. Let the French and the English worry about
Europe.'*

At Hull House in Chicago, Jane Addams took me aside after
dinner and said, "I don't know what makes you talk like that!
Talk like this is not conducive to peace, to disarmament."

Jane Addams didn't like to hear that there was neither com-
munism nor democracy in Russia, any more than in Italy or
Germany. She had been glad to see me; she was even more
glad to see me go.

The Chicago bunch, Ben Hecht, Anderson, and a few others,
weren't interested in the politics or the literature of France and
Germany. Young, vigorous, and American born, they were
interested in their own emotions and reactions.

"France. Marvelous food. Germany, good beer."

I lectured on the Gypsies to the women's clubs and state
universities. When I spoke about the coming world war, a
professor in Minneapolis shouted at me, "The Germans are
only trying to regain their rightful position in this world. It
is too bad that they lost the war."

256

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 257

In Madison, Wisconsin, Glenn Frank, now president of the
university, said, "Don't be more Catholic than the Pope. We
went to war once for France and England and to save democ-
racy. Never again/*

In Hollywood a famous producer showed me a life-sized in-
scribed photograph of II Duce on the wall behind his desk.

"He gave it to me himself. A great man, Mussolini.'*

"What is great about him? That he made the trains run on
time?"

"Well, yes. That is symbolic," and rising and swelling his
chest, he added, "That's what I am trying to do, make the trains
run on time. Discipline. Respect for authority. Obedience.
The use of a firm hand. We need many Mussolini's here.
Supermen/*

Chaplin, who had finally become accustomed to being
wealthy, owned a yacht, no longer looked at the right side of
the bill of fare, had lost some of his shyness, was no longer a
hypochondriac, and loved laughter and fun. We went out
together evenings and roamed about Los Angeles.

Because, probably, of atmospheric conditions (the climate
of Southern California is exactly like the climate of Palestine),
there are more religions born every day in California than
babies. Self-ordained priests stand on soap boxes in the parks
and shout to the world that they, and only they, have received
the blessed word from the great beyond. Those self-ordained
priests are to religion what the pushcart peddlers are to the
department stores. Occasionally, however, such priests get
there, too, and, with the assistance of some wealthy widow,
build temples and tabernacles, and join the ranks of big busi-
ness. Aimee Semple McPherson isn't the only one.

On a Saturday afternoon we picked up two young working
girls who agreed with Chaplin's interpretation of socialism.
We asked them to join us for ice cream. Chaplin introduced
himself as a school teacher and me as a fiddler*

Toward evening, Chaplin suggested that we have dinner to-

258 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

gether. Helen and Ruth agreed to this on condition that we go
Dutch.

During coffee, Kuno, Chaplin's Japanese driver, bodyguard,
and valet, burst in on us and said, "I have been looking for you
all over town, Mr, Chaplin."

The girls turned pale with anger and smothered their ciga-
rettes. Charlie grinned, laughed a hollow laugh, and left me
to deal with the two infuriated women.

"So you have had some fun with us, have you? Fooled two
working girls, have you?"

They were furious.

I talked fast, explaining that Mr. Chaplin had little oppor-
tunity to live a normal life, talk to people, and be treated like
a human being and not a celebrity.

They couldn't have been more furious if an impostor had
masqueraded as Chaplin and had turned out to be only a school
teacher.

Rion, my oldest son, got married. His marriage made me
feel old for a few days, but I was rejuvenated when I became
aware that several young and beautiful women sought my com-
pany. When I introduced Rion to them as my son, they re-
fused to believe me and said that he was my younger brother-
there was a family resemblance but son, never.

In one week I sold five short stories which I had brought with
me. During our travels in Europe I had not let a day go by
without working at least four hours at some sort of literary
project. When I had to skip a day, I doubled the hours the
following day.

Back in New York, at a party at Theodore Dreiser's, one of
those gorgeous parties he gave weekly in those days, Grant
Overton, then the fiction editor of Collier's, took me aside.

"You are the gayest fellow here tonight. I was watching yon
the whole evening. Things are well with you, aren't they?**

'Tine, Grant. Let's have a drink with Teddy-'*

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 259

Dreiser's parties were very fashionable* Literature, art, the
theater, music, the dance, and finance were well represented at
them. Otto Kahn was one of the frequent guests, to watch
some protegee make her debut and to give, as a great favor,
financial advice to friends only.

Poor sheep. They took his advice in 1928. A famous
banker art patron was making Broadway rich. When the crash
came, the banker had their wool, and the poor sheep stood
naked and shivering in the cold.

When I was about to leave the party after an impossible
exhibition of African dances by a troupe of genuine African
dancers from Harlem, Grant Overton pulled my sleeve, "Let's
have some coffee and talk outside."

At the table he looked at me out of his mellow eyes and said,
"I can't make you out, Konrad, You were so gay tonight, yet
your recent stories have an undertone of great sadness. What
is the matter?'*

We talked until morning.

"You are always in your stories. You were the gay, the
strong, and the lucky one in every one of your stories. Of late
you are the sad and the unhappy one. And suddenly I see
you jumping over tables and cutting capers. You are tearing
yourself to pieces, boy."

Naomi and Mirel followed me back to New York. They had
developed a nose for danger and tad come home to avoid it.
Naomi put the matter tersely when she said, "There are too
many Otto Abetzes in Paris and everywhere else in Europe.
They f aU over each other. Let's forget about Europe. I want
to forget."

While I was sunning myself in Miami to recuperate from an
attack of the grippe, Naomi fell in love with a beautiful house
and a magnificent piece of land on the border line of Connec-
ticut. The day after I returned to New York, we drove out
to see it. The grounds were still covered with snow. The
naked branches of the manle trees on the lawn wf*m

260 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

in sheets of translucent ice. The house was beautiful and enor-
mous.

There were a dozen cows in the main barn, two big black
Percheron horses in the stable, pigs in pigsties, chickens in
chicken coops, and a tool shed filled with well-oiled modern
farm machinery.

"Well?" Naomi asked.

"Buy it/* I said. "Our children should have something to
fall back upon, have ground of their own under their feet and
be part and parcel of the soil of this country."

We bought the place at the asking price, popped some cham-
pagne bottles to celebrate the buying, and moved in immedi-
ately.

Arthur Vance and Grant Overton complimented me on my
next stories. Papa Bigelow of Good Housekeeping voluntarily
increased the price of the next story, and Loring Schuller of
the Ladies 9 Home Journal enclosed a beautiful letter with the
check for a story I had sent him.

After we had taken possession of the farm, I worked with my
men mornings behind the plow, on the tractor, in the machine
shed, or at cutting down trees in the piece of forest, then sat
on a stone fence and wrote stories while listening to the chop,
chop of the tractor, the fall of the ax, and the neighing of the
horses.

Our friends and the friends of our sons and daughters filled
the house every week end. There were seldom less than a
dozen at the dining table and often more than twenty. We
had brought our cook, Louise, from Paris, and our meals were
banquets. There were six large fireplaces in the house and a
fire in every one of them every evening.

Everyone we knew was making a 'little extra'* on the stock
exchange.

"Don't sell America short/' a literary friend cried when I
wouldn't take his advice on a stock about which he had an
absolutely certain tip.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 261

And then, suddenly, the crash. How will I ever forget the
haunted looks in the eyes of my friends when the brokers
hounded them for more margin and sold them out when they
didn't get it?

The gentlemen on the estates in our neighborhood dismissed
their laborers, gardeners, and caretakers, closed their houses,
and sold their prize cattle for butcher meat. Twenty lovely
red-haired Irish setters owned by one of our neighbors roamed
the fields and fed themselves on our and other people's fowls.

"Nothing has happened. There was a little too much specu-
lation. When the small fry is squeezed out, everything will
be as it was. Don't worry. President Hoover says we have hit
the bottom already. We can only go up from now on/" people
said.

On an early December morning* I heard shooting in my
forest and came upon two Italian gardeners who had just
killed a magnificent deer.

""What the hell do you mean by that?*' I shouted before I
realized that they were armed, and I wasn't.

I did a Charlie Chaplin and grinned as I looked at the dead
animal. "Fine. YouTl have plenty of meat for Christmas.* 3

The two poachers, with their fingers on the triggers of their
guns, looked at each other.

"When you finish this meat, come and get some more. Take
it out the back way. Or better still, put it away in the ice
house by the pond, and come and take it at night," I advised.

They still looked at each other.

"How about selling me a hind quarter?"

"O. K, boss," one of them said, putting out his hand. "I
think you O. K. And I hope you are O. K. I trust you, I
gots family and children. 9 *

"Sure. So have I."

"Boss, twenty years I work. The bank she buy the gas com-
pany stock with my money, and every time the bank she says,
Tony, you make hundred dollars, two hundred dollars.* Then
the bank she says, "Gimme a thousand dollars; if not, you lose

262 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

everything.' Jesus Maria, where I get thousand dollars? And
now my boss she says, 1 can no pay wages/ Jesus, boss, what
happened? Who stole our money?"

I tried to explain to them what had happened while I helped
them drag the carcass to the ice house and hang it up from
the rafter.

While in New Orleans I met Huey Long at the house of a
friend. That bouncing, bumptious, leaping, shouting politi-
cian spoke of Louisiana as if it were his private backyard.
After the third "special" cocktail, he was barely willing to agree
that Louisiana had existed before he was born. After the
fourth, he didn't concede that much. After the fifth, outsiders
had no God damn business interfering in his affairs. "Come
to ma Louisiana to tell me in ma Louisiana what all I's to
do!"

After the sixth special, his excellency talked from the bath-
room that opened upon the livingroom and came out holding a
cocktail glass in one hand and buttoning his fly with* the other,
too contemptuous and too superior to impose upon himself the
most ordinary restraint. When he heard that I had been in
Italy, he came up to me.

"Italy! The greatest man in the world governs Italy now!
Don't tell me you have actually seen him! You have? Quiet
there! This man has something to tell me. Quiet there.
Shut up. So you have seen him! What do you know about
that! He makes them jump through the hoop. Nobody asks
him what he does with the money, and why he wants this guy
up and this guy down, eh? Top man. Makes things go.
Run. That's what we need here. A top man. Me. That's
what the sonofabitches need. Me. A top man. There won't
be no depression with me as the top man/'

The bouncing, frog-eyed, leaping piece of arrogance jutted
his small chin out and wanted to know how Mussolini had
done it How had he engineered the march on Rome? Who

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 263

had given the cash to organize the movement? And what did
I know about the castor oil treatment?

"Made them fill up their pants, eh?" Huey Long guffawed.

"Yes/* I said. "Mussolini rose to power on a heap o excre-
ment/'

"What difference does it make as long as he rose to power?"
Huey scoffed. "On a wave of blood or a heap of shit, it's all
the same/'

He had heard something about the Nazis in Germany and
that man Hitler. Had I seen him? Had I heard him? Who
was in back of him, and why? And did I think he, Hitler,
would ever get to the top? Hell, no. Hitler didn't interest
him half as much as Mussolini, but if he got to the top, it would
be another story.

"To hell with aristocracy. It is now the day of the men of
the people. Stalin in Russia. Mussolini in Italy. Hitler in
Germany. Three men of the people. To hell with democ-
racy. As long as you get there. Votes, bullets, castor oil, it's
all the same, isn't it?"

As I walked out, our hostess followed me.

"You have been talking to the future dictator of America."

"Did he tell you to tell me that?"

"It doesn't pay to be too smart in Louisiana/* she replied.

Some months later I saw Huey Long again at "21."

"Hey, you, come and tell me mo' about ma friend from Italy.
Ah love to hear you," he called to me across the room. Turn-
ing to his table companions, he asked, "Ever heard him. tell
about Mussolini? No? Never heard him tell about the castor
oil and how he made them take it? Never heard that Musso-
lini rose to power on a heap of shit?"

Huey Long spent half of his time in a lavatory and never
stopped talking. And it was in a New York lavatory that he
was beaten up by someone he tad offended.

XXIII

IN JUNE I sailed to Europe to collect some more material
for a book I intended to write about Roumania.

On board the Paris, I met Dr. Willys, a professor of politi-
cal economy at Columbia, who was on his way to Roumania to
make a study of Roumanian finances for a group of American
bankers.

Carol, heir to the throne of Roumania, lived in Paris with
Magda Lupescu on the income of his Roumanian estates, but
his formidable mother and her friend, Prince Shtirbey, the
power behind the throne, regulated that income according to
his behavior. Marie was painting such a picture of her son to
her people and the world that he would never have the face to
claim the throne. Half the scandals about Prince Carol origi-
nated from the Royal Palace in Bucharest. Queen Marie, the
Bratianos, and Prince Shtirbey looted the country to their
heart's content and left what they couldn't take to the minor
thieves. These minor thieves then worked up a conspiracy
with the representatives of an American utility company, to
whom they promised a fat contract if they would finance
Carol's return to the throne.

All of Carol's sympathizers in Roumania then set to work.
John Bratiano, Carol's enemy, died during an operation by the
physician general, Doctor Argentoiano, who dropped a knife
down the ministerial throat.

Vintilla Bratiano, a brother of John, died suddenly and con-

26 4

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 265

venientiy. Carol's men traveled through tlie country, spoke
to gatherings everywhere, and told them that it was better
to have a virile long on the throne than a baby or a woman.

Other men addressed business meetings and said that Amer-
ica would lend Roumania two hundred million dollars if Carol
were on the throne, but would not lend a dollar as long as Marie
was manipulating the regency.

The hoodlums of the Iron Guard said that Germany would
like to see Carol back on the throne. Carol's father had been
a German. Marie was an Englishwoman. It was much better
to have someone on the tbrone whom the Germans liked than
one they didn't.

When the ground was well manured with propaganda, Prime
Minister Maniu, a heavy, stupid stooge, gave the green light.
At the last moment, however, Carol, on the advice of Magda
Lupescu, hired an actor to impersonate him on the Journey to
Bucharest. The poor thespian, disguised as the would-be king,
flew to Roumania, landed at Cotroceni, motored to Bucharest
to the acclaim of the populace, and bowed to it again and again
from the balcony of the Royal Palace. What a stage for an
actor! Hours later, on receipt of a telegram from Prince
Nicholas that all was well, Carol himself flew to Bucharest,
entered his palace by a back door, and came out on the balcony
to substitute for the actor and to acknowledge the well-man-
aged acclaim of the populace.

By that time the queen and Prince Shtirbey, Marie's friend,
had gathered their large coffers filled with gold and jewelry and
crossed the border.

Carol crowned himself king the day I arrived in Paris.

I asked Doctor Willys, who was to report about Roumania
to the American bankers, whether he knew what had happened
there. He told me he didn't and thought that what I had told
him were stories.

"Queen Marie is a noble lady. The young long is a fine
man."

266 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

I hadn't been at the Hotel Regina in Paris an hour when a
Roumanian acquaintance called to tell me that he was coming
up to my room with a young lady, precisely the young lady
who had engineered the deal with the American company.

A charming, dark-eyed, vivacious young woman who spoke
several languages fluently, she made no bones about her busi-
ness in Paris.

When we were alone, she said, "You have done a lot for our
beloved country. It won't be forgotten. You have made the
riches of our country known to America. We love you. Now
that you are here, you'll have to help me."

"How?"

"Come to dine with me tonight at my apartment/' She re-
fused to tell me more.

"I love you and want to be with you every minute while you
are in Paris. I might even accompany you to Roumania and
see that you receive all the honors due you."

She told me all this an hour after we met, and what she said
was accompanied with appropriate gestures and sighs.

Mile. Elena Borshu's apartment on the Champs filysees was
decorated by Roumanian artists. The walls were hung with
homespun silk tapestries. The carved wall panels were
painted in peasant colors. The rugs of the floor were price-
less pieces that would have honored a museum. Tables,
chairs, divans, and corner pieces were carved by the greatest
artists and artisans of Roumania. The servants were dressed
in Roumanian costumes.

Mile. Borshu was dressed in a seductive, peasant-style, hand-
woven silk gown that allowed her shoulders and her beautiful
arms to be seen in their full glory.

"Do you like me like this?" she asked and sat on my knees for
an aperitif.

A band of Gypsies, of the best musicians, played in the ad-
joining room. An international lawyer and his wife, a former

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 267

Roumanian minister and Ms wife, and, in their wake, two
American gentlemen already mildly plastered, came in shortly
afterward.

When Lucullus feasted LucuEus, he didn't have anything
half as good as was served for dinner that night. The caviar
was from Roumania. The Danubian sturgeon^ brought on a
platter four feet long, had arrived that day on the Orient Ex-
press from Roumania. The pheasants and partridges were
from the Carpathian Mountains. The wine was from the best
Roumanian cellars.

"The tobacco in the cigarettes comes from your own Dobro-
gea, Mr. Bercovici," Elena Rorshu said.

"Is there much tobacco grown in Dobrogea?" one of the
Americans asked.

"Mountains, mountains of tobacco/ 9 my hostess exclaimed.

The older of the two Americans, a bulgy sort of fellow, had
lost his heart to Mile. Borshu, and his eyes were almost con-
tinually on her bare, honey-colored arms and shoulders.

Around eleven o'clock the diplomat and his wife departed,
leaving the two Americans, the international lawyer, the hos-
tess, and me to ourselves.

An hour after midnight, we crowded into a Rolls and drove
to the Scheherazade, a small, expensive, and exclusive night
club, where the American utility magnate and Mademoiselle
sat close to each other and kept up a continuous whispering in
each other's ears. At five in the morning, I left while they
were still whispering nothings.

Two hours later Mile. Borshu called me on the phone.

"I am going to Venice for a few days. See you in Bucha-

. yy

rest.

One of Mile. Borshu's ^dearest" friends was a French aviator
married to a Roumanian woman. She had telephoned him to
look me up and keep an eye on me. During our first conversa-
tion he said quite frankly, "Trance is through. The Germans

268 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

will have us. They'll take us when they are ready, and nobody
will stop them."

"And the Maginot line?"

"The Maginot line is a strong door, but it has two open win-
dows on each side, Luxembourg and Belgium. And there is
treachery above and pacifism below. France is through."

Such opinions were not rare in the French army, and Mile.
Borshu helped to foster them. She was one of Otto Abetz's
friends. So were the French aviator and his Roumanian wife.
They couldn't see why I hated Abetz so. He had been giving
them the best financial advice. He was charming. His wife
was amusing. As a matter of fact, they hoped Abetz would
some day come into his own as a diplomat and financier.

I entered Roumania by the back door through Yugoslavia.

One day the scion of a princely Roumanian family told ine
that King Carol was anxious to abdicate his throne.

"He can't live without Magda, and he has been warned that
she would be killed if she set foot on Roumanian soil."

In this dilemma, Carol had asked several of his liberal friends
to conspire, compel him to abdicate the throne, and then de-
clare a Roumanian republic. The conspirators were, of course,
obligated not to confiscate Carol's properties after he had abdi-
cated.

I was taken to a castle ten minutes from the royal castle in
the Carpathians where I was introduced to the future minis-
terial cabinet of the Roumanian republic.

Five minutes before the conspirators were to march to the
palace, the would-be president of the Roumanian republic went
to the bathroom, got cold feet, and disappeared by a back door.
When the other conspirators discovered that the would-be first
president of the Roumanian republic had left them in a lurch,
they got into their cars and drove away as fast as they could
without telephoning to the king that there would be no abdi-
pation that night; that the would-be president had reflected

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 269

while on the reflecting seat and renounced the honor and the
pleasure. Realizing that the "conspirators" would blame me
for the intended court revolution, I left Roumania in a peasant's
one-horse buggy, crossed into Hungary, and took the first train
out.

When I arrived at Venice, Mile. Borshu was at the landing
of the Danieli.

"I know all that has happened/' she said, embracing me. "I
am ruined/*

"You?"

"Yes, I was in on it. I suggested that they take you in on it
to give you a chance for a journalistic scoop. And I made such
beautiful arrangements for the president and the new govern-
ment!"

"What happened to the American utility magnate?"

"He? Oh, he? That was yesterday, long ago. Why such
questions? He meant nothing to me. Mon cher ami, as far as
I was concerned, it was all strictly business. Oh, I am so tired,
so tired. Magda will be furious. She expected Carol in
Vienna. She really loves that fool. Don't leave me alone
here. Mon Dieu, I am so tired, so lonely!"

"What do you think will happen now in Roumania?"

"Haven't you read the papers? They already say that you
tried to engineer a revolution, and that you were backed by
American gold."

"How did you know I was coming through Venice?" I asked
her after a while.

"You really are deliciously naive, mon cher. Did you really
think that you traveled alone, that I wouldn't protect you?"
And she laughed and laughed.

Magda was back in Paris at the Ritz, and exhibited herself
to the newspapermen and photographers to prove that she was
there and not in Bucharest. She had put on some flesh, but
was very pale.

For two weeks she appeared every afternoon for tea at the

270 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Ritz to let the newspapermen see her. During those two
weeks, there were daily rumors in Roumania that she had been
seen at the window of the palace.

I was home before the last ears of sweetcorn had been
picked, and sat down to write the book. When the first chap-
ters were done, my wife said, "This book may cost me your
life. Do you have to write it?"

Rada, Mirel, and my two sons asked, "Must you write that
goddam book?"

"I must. I just have to tell what I know about those gang-
sters and murderers who are about to take the Americans for a
ride."

I shut myself away from everything and everybody and
worked day and night.

Roumanian officials in New York heard what I was doing
and sent emissaries to advise me not to publish the book and
to tell me that I would be amply compensated if I followed
their advice. When I showed them the door, they threatened
to avenge themselves on my relatives still living in Roumania.

I was torn between what I believed to be my duty and my
emotions and could ask no one's advice.

In the end I did not pull my punches. All reason for mod-
eration had been eliminated by those who had threatened the
lives of my own flesh and blood.

When the book was done, an old schoolmate came to see
me and wept and wrung his hands, saying that I was endanger-
ing his people's lives. He had just received a letter from his
sister in Roumania in which she wrote that something would
happen to her if and when my book appeared.

The appearance of the book, That Royal Lover., created a
sensation. All the reviews appeared in one day. The book
was hot. My phone bell jangled. Magazines wanted pieces
on the same subject. Friends called to advise me not to come
to town unarmed or without a bodyguard.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 271

Roumanian papers in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland
called upon Roumanian patriots everywhere to do their sacred
duty by me. Only a traitor, they wrote, could have written
such a book before Roumania was about to obtain a loan in
America.

The Roumanian embassy sent its legal representatives to the
publishers and threatened to sue for libel unless the book was
withdrawn.

When that failed, one of the American utility companies I
had mentioned by name in the book threatened to obtain an
injunction, but in the end was satisfied by having its name
eliminated from the subsequent editions.

A week after the book's publication, while I was in New
York, I was attacked in Central Park one evening. Gangsters
in the pay of Roumania hit me over the head with a lead pipe
and jumped on my stomach when they had me down.

I have since spent many months in bed flat on my back, in
consequence of that attack on me, and I still bear the marks
made by those assassins, but I have no regrets. What has hap-
pened to Roumania since was predicted in that book, even
Carol's flight and the occupation of the country by the Nazis.
It was fitting that a country ruled by gangsters should fall un-
der the sway of supergangsters, I only hope that at the hour
of reckoning, the sob sisters of America will not plead for
leniency and "understanding" and forgiveness.

We must never forget that after a little prompting, the gentle
citizens of Roumania herded hundreds of men, women, and
children into the slaughterhouses and cut their throats there
"to conform to rules of sanitation, rules that do not permit the
slaughter of animals on the streets. 5 *

At any rate, I won't forget what they did to my uncles,
cousins, and nephews and the uncles, cousins, and nephews of
others.

XXIV

ARTHUR VANCE had died, and the new editor o Pic-
torial Review, Van Zieckurch, a Philadelphia newspaper-
man, asked me one day, "How soon can you sail to Europe?'*

"As soon as I want to. My passport is in order/'

"Good. I want you to interview the most important people
in Europe, not only statesmen, but important writers, editors,
and educators on the subject of peace/*

I took the assignment. That was on a Wednesday; on Satur-
day I was on the boat. I had no illusions about the prospects
of peace. I knew the Germans were arming themselves, knew
that the French politicians and financiers had sold out to them,
and that all the reactionaries were eager to overthrow the Re-
publican regime in France.

The third day out, the bulletin on board ship informed me
that a bloodless revolution had been carried out in Spain; that
the king had abdicated and left the country; and that Don
Fernando de Los Rios, my Granada friend, had been released
from jail to become the minister of justice.

I cried out "Hurray" and shook the hands of the person next
to me, a tall, middle-aged woman, who was accompanied by a
tall, young, and very good-looking woman.

"What are you yipping about?" she asked.

"The Spaniards have kicked their king out."

"I wouldn't yip about that/' she said.

"And why not?'*

272

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 273

"Because my daughter, Marquesa D'Alorso, is married to a
Spanish nobleman/'

"I am sorry about that, I mean about your being personally
concerned in this affair."

"I am Mrs. Crouchley/' the lady said. "I know who you are.
This is my daughter. She was saying to me ( Let's go out on
deck. Do you mind talking to us?) She was saying to me
(Our chairs are there. You'll sit with us ? won't you?) She
was saying to me You tell him, Joanna, what you said.
Do."

"I was saying to mother/* the younger woman said as she
tucked herself under the blanket, " Wouldn't it be fun to get
Mr. Bercovici to talk to us?* I read your book on Roumania,
That Royal Lover. Queen Marie was certainly no lady. I
was saying to mother, when I saw your name on the passenger
list, ^Wonder what he looks like?* I had a picture of you in
mind, see. And you look like the picture in my mind/'

While she was talking to me, the older lady closed her eyes
in sleep.

Marquesa D'Alorso didn't like Spain or the Spaniards. She
was an oil heiress from one of our southern states.

"Mother talked me into marrying this goddam marquis be-
cause he has a tide. And that's all he has ever had. He has
gambled away gobs of my money, and his family treated me like
dirt. And I don't even have a child by him to pass on the tide.
And it sure isn't my fault You can tell that by looking at
me, can't you? I hope to God they kill Trim/*

"Who, they?"

*The ones who made die revolution, of course! He won't
divorce me, you know* Mother is crazy about tides, but she
hasn't been to bed with one of them."

We left her modier asleep on tibe deck chair and had several
jdtrinks at the bar. She was a full-lipped, wide-eyed, long-
limbed Texan girl with golden hair and steel gray eyes.

"Mother says to go back and get me a child, she don't care

274 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

how. Til pick me up some good-looking fellow. Let's have
another drink/'

It was a new Spain. It was easy as soon as one crossed the
border, to see that the face of things, if nothing else, had
changed in Spain. The voices and the eyes of the people, the
behavior of the custom house inspectors, and the manner of
the gendarmes had changed. I stopped in Victoria in the
Basque country with some people I knew, to find out how the
revolution had been engineered.

Primo de Rivera, the dictator, after many years, came under
the illusion that the people of Spain actually liked him and his
regime and called for a free election, a municipal election over
the whole of Spain, to replace the people he had appointed to
office.

Some time before the election, Primo de Rivera had arrested
seventeen thousand Asturian miners who had protested against
Prime's regime. The socialist, the republican, and the liberal
candidates for municipal offices, however, taking advantage of
Primo's stupidity, promised on large posters and by word of
mouth to free the Asturians, to give the vote to the women,
and to end the war in Morocco, which was draining the blood
of Spain. The dictator, the king, and the grandees soon saw
the danger they were running in that election, but it was too
late to withdraw the order they had given.

When the votes were counted, it was discovered that ninety
per cent of the cities and towns had voted the republican, so-
cialist, and liberal candidates into office. The king, dictator,
and grandees wanted to suppress the whole thing by force of
arms, but the guardia civiles, the dreaded gendarmes, had liter-
ally turned their coats and wore their capes with the red lining
on the outside to signify that they had changed sides and were
with the new order.

After Primo de Rivera had packed his boodle and crossed
the border into France, Don Fernando de Los Rios, now minis-

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 275

ter of justice, obtained an abdication from the king and saw
him, the royal family, and their personal belongings., including
the crown jewels, safe across the border, before the released
Asturians moved to avenge themselves.

When I visited Don Fernando at the Palace of Justice in
Madrid, I was elated to see a photograph of my youngest,
Mirel, on his desk. Her photograph had been in his suitcase
when he was jailed on his return from America, and because
he had gone to the palace from his cell, he had taken the photo-
graph with him for luck. And there it was on his desk.

The new government had already patched up a peace in
Morocco, was repatriating the soldiers, and sending them back
to their homes.

Church and state were separated, but priests who wanted to
continue to live in Spain as free citizens were given three years'
salary by the new government.

Spain, which had the largest percentage of illiteracy in
Europe, was now busy building schools and turning every
vacant building into a school.

No, the millennium had not come with the new government*
There still were thousands of starving people roaming the
streets.

Because there were no textbooks, schoolteachers used black-
boards and gave oral instruction to the children. Under the
old regime, tens of thousands of these children would never
have seen the inside of a classroom.

Week ends, college students, intellectuals, and members of
the government went out to villages, hung blackboards on trees
in the public squares, gathered crowds, and taught them their
ABC's.

After a while, the grandees who had fled the country, seeing
that the new government did nothing to avenge past misdeeds
and hadn't even suppressed the reactionary press, returned to
Spain. The reactionary papers were polite and subdued at
first, but realizing that the new government actually meant to

276 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

keep its promise about a free press, they abused that freedom
and began to attack the government on every inch of paper.

The salaries of the ministerial cabinet members were so small
that Don Fernando lived in a five-room apartment in the work-
ingmen's quarter and came home from the palace in a street
car. The de Los Rios's one servant girl, who had come with
them from Granada, was the only member of the household
who put on airs. When I rang the bell of the apartment and
asked whether Don Fernando was in, she corrected me, "You
mean, sua excelenza."

In the meantime, Rex Smith, then the resident correspondent
of the U. P. (now the managing editor ot Newsweek), looked
me up. Although he wasn't enthusiastic about the new gov-
ernment, he had an open mind. Most of the other American
newspapermen in Spain were colder than that toward the new
government, and often sent out unfavorable and highly colored
reports to their papers. They had friends in "high society" and
had come to the conclusion that the republican government
was a weak government: (1) because it allowed freedom to its
enemies, (2) because it had not yet distributed the land to the
peasants, (3) because it had not suppressed the reactionary
press, and (4) because it had not thrown its political enemies
in jail.

Marie D'Aragon, a magnificent specimen, a former actress
and dancer, took me to the homes of some workingmen in
Madrid. The Spanish women, still under the influence of the
priests, were bitterly opposed to the coeducational school sys-
tem proposed by the new government.

When I spoke up in favor of the system and pointed out
that no harm had come from it in the United States, one of the
women said, "If you want to bring up millions of bad women,
that's your business." *

"My dear Konrad/' Don Fernando said, when I told him that
it would be dangerous for the republic to give the vote to the
women, "we promised the women the vote in our pre-election

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 277

campaign. We shall keep our promise. The people of Spain
must learn that we, the republicans, keep our promises/*

When I pointed out that the reactionary newspapers were
undermining all confidence in the government, he replied, "You
have a free press in the United States. We must have one
here, too."

"Yes, but how free will they let your press be, if they suc-
ceed you?"

Don Fernando shrugged his shoulders. "One shouldn't be
democratic only in promises/'

At the Military Club, and at the Negresco Cafe, the German
businessmen and tourists joined forces with the English in their
denunciation of this and that member of the cabinet, and in
spreading rumors that the new government surreptitiously was
replacing the famous paintings in the churches and museums
with fakes and selling the originals to America.

When I went in Don Fernando's company to see the famous
synagogue of Toledo, the newspapers in Toledo and Madrid
reported the next day that I had come to Spain to buy the syna-
gogue and transport the building to New York.

Marie D'Aragon assured them that I was a writer and not a
millionaire, but they knew "on good authority" and had abso-
lute proof yes, absolute proof that I had come to buy the
old synagogue.

In Malaga, one of Marie's friends wouldn't let her little
daughter out of her sight for a moment because of the Yudeos
who had come to live there. She told us what her neighbor, a
German woman, had said to her.

I talked to the German woman, the wife of an engineer, ex-
plaining to her how wrong and barbarous it was to calumniate
innocent people.

"Unschuldigr she screamed. "So sagen Sie! But what
about the butter that has risen in price? It's almost as expen-
sive as in Germany. We came here because living was
cheaper."

278 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"It's the merchants who have raised the price and not the
Jews/* I tried to explain.

"Ja ? Ja, I know that. But the Jews, they pay; they always
pay what is asked of them/*

In Cordoba an old Gypsy woman said, "I know what is the
matter with the Spaniards. There has been no blood letting.
They love to see blood, something red and sticky that oozes
and spreads. Watch them at a bull fight. They gloat, looking
at the splotches of blood in the sand of the arena. They must
have murder. Believe me, pariente, this government isn't go-
ing to last. Los Utopias of the Republicans are fine, but they
should have brought them to the people at the end of a sharp
spada. Spain cannot be ruled 'con lanta e gilly," with love and
kisses."

In Barcelona, at the syndicate, a heavy-set, wide-eyed long-
shoreman, one of the leading communists, said, "This is a
namby-pamby government, a government of reform. We
want a revolution, a real revolution/'

"What do you call a revolution?"

"When blood is shed in the streets. Have they killed their
enemies? No. Have they killed the royal family? No.
They let them leave with their gold. Look at what the Rus-
sians did. They spilled plenty of blood. There was blood in
every street, ankle deep. That was a revolution!"

The poor edifice of the Spanish republic was being sapped
and gnawed from above and below. On the one hand, the
republican government was accused of instigating the burning
of monasteries, the murder of priests, and the raping of nuns,
and on the other hand, it was accused of protecting the monas-
teries, the priests, and the nuns.

At a meeting of workingmen in Bilbao, a tall fellow, simply
dressed, denounced the government for not carrying out
promises made to ameliorate the conditions of the workers.

Several weeks later, I heard the same man, faultlessly
dressed^ at the Military Club in Madrid, tell his audience that

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 279

the economic policy of the government was ruining Spanfs
industry and finances.

"Heraclio," I said to the friend who had brought me to the
club; "I have heard this same man speak at a meeting of work-
ingmen in Bilbao, where he denounced the government for
being too kind to the capitalists/*

Heraclio called the Prince of Bourbon to our table and re-
peated what I had told him.

The hollow-eyed, heavy-fowled, squat prince buttonholed
the man and brought him to our table.

"Sefior Weidler," the Prince introduced the man.

"Have you been in Bilbao recently?" I asked.

"Bilbao? Bilbao, you ask? No, of course not."

"Then it must have been your twin brother I saw at the work-
ingmen's meeting in Bilbao. Yet I would swear it was you."

"I don't know what you are talking about/' Herr Weidler
said, walking away from our table.

When Heraclio and the prince tried to find out who had
introduced Herr Weidler to the club, no one there could tell.

A few months after the new government had come into
power, many of its adherents, workers, peasants, and even lib-
eral intellectuals, were saying that the change was not all for the
better, that the government was too weak and was composed
of visionaries, of people afraid to shed a little blood.

Blood. Blood. One heard the word everywhere. The
Spaniards were disappointed by the "dry" revolution.

At a night club in Madrid, where I went with Rex Smith, a
Gypsy matador sighed:

"Pariente, pariente. This is a bloodless Spain. A Spain of
schools and meetings. More schools and more meetings.
And now they want to forbid bull fighting," he added, spitting
on the floor with disgust.

In Granada at the Hotel AUxambra, a French newspaper-
woman told me, "Monsieur, I am warning you, je vous avertis,

280 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

that some people think you de trop. After what happened to
you because of your book on Roumania, you should be more
circumspect. For instance/' she said, "I wouldn't drink open
wine," and speaking, she spilled the wine out of the pitcher,
"but order bottled wine and inspect the seal to see that it has
not been broken. I didn't intend to flirt with you last night
when I followed you out to the cafe. The Germans in Spain
don't like you. Pas du tout., du tout."

Marie D'Aragon wept on my shoulders at the railroad sta-
tion. "Ah, araigo/' she cried. "It could have been so beauti-
ful. At the next election they'll vote our friends out and then
throw them in jail. This is the beginning of the end of Spain.
Ah, amigo, I shall never see you again. My heart tells me so."

In my train compartment were two engineers and a chemist
on their way back to Germany after two years in Spain.

"Was denken Sie uber Spanien?" I asked.

"This new government won't last. Those Utopians don't
know how to govern. They are idealists."

Before we had crossed the border into France, I caught a
glimpse of Otto Abetz and his French wife in the corridor of
the train. She wore beautiful clothes, and he had filled out
considerably. After we had crossed the border, I looked into
their compartment and wasn't at all astonished to find Herr
Weidler and the Abetzes together.

"Monsieur, this is our compartment and you have no right
to come in here uninvited. Please leave, or I shall call the
conductor," Madame Abetz cried out, when I appeared.

At the next station, Herr Weidler and the Abetzes left the
train. At the station after that, a detective came up, asked to
see my passport and identification papers, interrogated me on
my visit to Spain, asked me where I usually stayed in Paris,
and how long I intended to be there this time.

"Why this interrogation?" I demanded.

"Telegraphic orders from Paris," he said, "as a result of a
denunciation. Well, I can't hold up the train much longer.

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 281

I suppose it's one of those quarrels among foreigners. He de-
nounces you; you denounce Mm. It's all very disturbing.
Bonjour, monsieur" and tie left.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink was in Paris. The great singer
was also a great human being. One of her sons had fought on
the German side and been killed. Another son of hers had en-
listed with the American army and had likewise been killed.
Ernestine Schumann-Heink was a good American, one of the
best, but would have liked to see again the Germany she had
once loved, where she was born, and before whose people she
had first sung the German Lieder that had made her famous.

"But efen if I go dere now, vat vill I see?" she deplored.
"Peoples who haf lost their souls?"

The dear old lady with the ample bosom and beautiful eyes
loved sweets and took me to Rumplemeyers, under the arcades
opposite the Tuileries, for coffee.

As we came in the door, she cried out, "Is dat not Ysaye
dere, he und Chaliapin?"

But they had already seen her and compelled us to sit with
them. They couldn't keep their hands off Schumann-Heink,
pawed and kissed her and ate the kuchen out of her plate when
she did not feed them into their mouths herself.

When there were no more kuchen on her plate or mine,
Chaliapin, Russian to the core, called the waiter and ordered
a huge platter of sweets, trigones bathed in honey, chamsons
aux pommes with mounds of whipped cream, tartes aux f raises,
and a dozen other sticky things.

"Mein Gott" Madame Schumann-Heink cried out, licking
her fingers, "I will get so fat as a house."

Chaliapin and Ysaye dispensed with knife and fork and ate
out of their hands while they laughed and talked and stuffed
Madame HeinFs mouth with pieces of this and that.

Suddenly Madame Heink's face darkened.

"But, Fedia, I remember now, you must not eat such things.

282 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

Not babas an rhum. Fedia, only saccharine you must have/*

"Me, too/* Ysaye said stuffing a whole baba in his mouth.

"You, too?'* the great Russian laughed. "Shake hands. We
are just a couple of diabetics, eh?"

That night, after dining at a famous Roumanian restaurant
near the Comedie Frangaise on fresh caviar, sturgeon, broiled
partridges, baklava in honey of roses, and bottles and bottles
of Roumanian wine, Chaliapin opened his shirt collar and be-
gan to sing, Madame joined him.

The place was jammed. People sat open-mouthed and lis-
tened to a concert such as they had never heard and never will
hear again.

And then, abruptly, Chaliapin stopped, hid his head in his
arms on the table, and sobbed.

"Vat is it, Fedia?" Madame Schumann-Heink asked, kissing
the back of his neck.

"Nothing. Rien, de rien" Ysaye consoled. "He is a Rus-
sian, isn't he? They alway^ cry when they are very happy.
Udme Russe, don't you know. Mot, ga menmerde de voir ga"

"Are you not feeling well?'* Madame Heink asked the Rus-
sian.

"I feel pain here,'* Chaliapin pointed to his heart.

"Do you still have one?" Ysaye laughed. "A ton age!"

"I feel pain for Russia."

"It's the same with me for Germany,'* Madame Heink said
with tears in her eyes.

"Both the same,'* Ysaye grinned, "weepers in their wine.
Russians and Germans. Some day they'll combine and bathe
the whole world in blood."

"Poor Fedia," Madame said, watching him leave.

At the door of her hotel, Madame Heink suddenly asked,
"Did you hear what Ysaye said about what would happen to
the world if Russia and Germany united?'*

"Well, he just said that to say something."

"Oh, no. Not Ysaye. He has more intuition than any liv-

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 283

ing man. I am frightened already. Grosser Gott. "Nicht
doss. Nicht doss. 9 '

"Mon Dieu y it's as plain as the nose on your face/* Ysaye
said to me the next day in his hotel room. "C'est simple
comme bonjour. But don't talk about it It will give them
ideas. And then poor Belgium. How do I know? Well, how
do I know that a certain passage in a Beethoven concerto
should be played this way and not another way? Beethoven
hasn't told me. Intuition! You play a thing ten years, fifteen,
and suddenly you see it as plain as the nose on your f ace, and
you woAder that you have been so stupid the day before.
Crying in their wine is not the only thing the Russians and the
Germans have in common. But, to hell with them. I am no
politician. I am a musician. I said something. So I said
something."

He sat up on the edge of his bed and doubled his huge feet
to find the slippers, feeling for th^ni.

After taking another pull from the bottle, he pointed a finger
at me and said, "Go and see PaderewsM. He knows every-
thing . . * and he knows the Russians and the Germans. He
is at the Hotel D'Orsay. He is a politician. Poles are like
that. Writers, artists, musicians., thieves, wrestlers, and prosti-
tutes are all politicians. Go and see him. He is a diplomat.
Hasn't he been premier of Poland! Ever slept with a Polish
woman? They do it to save Poland like that one who slept
with Napoleon. Dieu du loon Dieu, quel peupleF*

PaderewsM was hale and vigorous and moved about with the
ease of a young man when I went to see him. We had met
before, years ago, and now talked freely after the first few
minutes.

'What I never could understand was your anti-Semitism,"
I said after we had talked about the new trends in music and
literature.

*1 wouldn't call it that," PaderewsM corrected me. "It was

284 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

merely intense Polish patriotism. Once Poland had become an
independent country, I wanted it to be entirely Polish, abso-
lutely Polish/*

"Well, the only way you could have obtained such a purity
would have been to kill off all the minorities in Poland," I sug-
gested.

He shook his head. "No, don't say that, I hate brutality,
but those minorities exasperated me by refusing to be assimi-
lated, by not allowing themselves to be made into Poles."

"This is precisely what exasperated the Germans and the
Russians against the Poles, the fact that they wouldn't allow
themselves to lose their national identity. You yourself in-
sisted on being a Pole while your country was part of Russia."

''Of course, I did. I was a Pole. I am a Pole. I shall
always be a Pole. Tell me," he asked, "have you no dislike
for any nation as a whole?"

"I am sorry to say that I don't like the Poles," I answered.

"The Poles!" Paderewski cried out. "How could anyone not
like the Poles?"

"How could one like the Poles after what they have done to
the Jews?" I answered his question with a question.

After a long pause, during which Paderewski chewed his
graying blond mustache, he turned to me with moist eyes.

"I hate the Germans. I hate their women, their wines, their
beer, their food, their music, their language, their odor, and
their literature; there isn't a thing German that I don't hate.
I disliked the Jews in Poland because they spoke a German
dialect, Yiddish. If they had spoken Hebrew, I would have
felt differently toward them, I am sure."

When I told him of my conversation with Ysaye, Paderew-
ski cried out, "Did he say that? Ysaye is the most intuitive
man in the world today. Tell me, how did he come to speak
about it?"

When I had recounted the events of the dinner with Schu-
Hiann-Heink and Chaliapin, Paderewski said, "That's it. It's
as plain as the nose on your face."

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 285

"You are repeating his very words/' I remarked.

"His very words, eh? It has happened before. Thirty
years ago I repeated his very words. Ah! If our statesmen
only had the intuition of artists! So Ysaye said that the Rus-
sians and the Germans will unite against the rest of Europe!
Mon Dieu!"

"Do you believe it is possible?"

"Possible! It's inevitable! Western civilization is doomed
if the two Asiatic powers in Europe combine."

After I had sent off the interview with Paderewski, I took
the train to the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, who was then on
his last lap toward the conquest of Germany.

The very racial theory which Hitler and his entourage of
pseudo-anthropologists expounds stamps the Schukelgrubbers
or the Schulders, his family, as mongrels.

The section of Austria in which Adolf Schukelgrubber was
born was trampled upon by all the Asiatic invaders of Europe
a thousand years ago. Goths, Comenes, Tartars, Avars, and
Huns followed each other over that comer of the world for sev-
eral centuries. There are not two people in the village of
Hitler's birth with the slightest resemblance to each other
either in bone structure or in coloring. The great Adolf him-
self has the cheekbones of a Slav, the neck of a Tartar, the gait
of a Polish peasant, the voice of a Breton, and the heavy-lidded,
bulgy eyes of a Turk. Indeed, this infamous Aryan looks more
like the offshoot of the seed of an Asiatic planted in a Medi-
terranean womb than the get of any other known mongrel com-
bination.

Usually, when visiting a town where a famous man was born,
one finds scores and scores of people who claim to have known
him, playmates, schoolmates, people who claim to have first
noticed how remarkable he was, and people who tell you of his
pranks and eccentricities.

In that man's birthplace, no one wanted to admit having
known him or remembering him, not the priest and not even the
schoolteacher. True, Adolf Schukelgrubber had left the little

286 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

border town of Bavaria when he was only thirteen, but there
were now grown men and women his own age who must have
known him in school or met him at church. Each and all de-
nied having known him as if he were a criminal whose ac-
quaintance sheds no honor upon the town he was raised in or
on the individuals who had known him.

When an old custom house employee finally admitted having
noticed the boy years ago with his father, he begged me not to
tell anyone.

"He may one day wipe out the town and the people who
have known him, so he can tell that he came down directly
from heaven," the old man said. "Hasn't he already changed
his name? Who was that Hitler after whom he calls himself ?"

Adolf Schukelgrubber's sister in Vienna wasn't any more
communicative. She shut the door of her apartment in my
face when I asked her a question about her brother.

I had met similar treatment as a reporter on the New York
World when I came to interview the immediate relatives of a
murderer who was about to be executed, but the doors of near
and distant relatives of people who had suddenly become
famous were always wide open to inquirers.

"Your brother may one day rule the whole of Europe/' I
pleaded with the little woman who had opened the door just a
crack.

"Nein, nein. Ich weiss nichts. Es geht mich nicht an.
Mir ist dies schnuppe" she replied in her impossible dialect
"Ich Jcenne ihm ilberhaupt nicht. I hardly know him. I
haven't seen him in years. Leave me be," and she banged the
door.

On the street to do her marketing, she hurried along the
walk, basket on her arm, shawl over her shoulders, like one
ashamed, and not like the proud sister of a man who was al-
ready being "HeiFed by millions of people.

In Vienna, at the Bristol Cafe, I found one man, a vendor of
pornographic pictures, who was proud to have known him.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 287

"Der Kerl wouldn't have had to leave Vienna if he had lis-
tened to me and painted the land of postal cards I advised
him/' he said.

"Why don't you go to Munich?" I asked. "Now that he is
a somebody, he might give you a good job."

"Er! He! No! Lieber treibe ich mein Handel! Td rather
continue my own business."

Back in Berlin, Stephan Grossman, the poet, said to me over
a glass of wine, "The attitude of Hitler's sister is the true meas-
ure of what we are to expect from him if he succeeds. She
wants to deny any kinship with him so as not to share his in-
famy. Watch out."

XXV

ONCE asked Doctor Menas Gregory, the eminent psy-
chiatrist of Bellevue Hospital, what was the best clue to a
man's sanity.

"The voice/ 5 he answered. "Pay no attention to the
sequence of his words or to their sanity. Remember this: an
insane man can play a sane man much more successfully than
a sane man can impersonate an insane one. I listen to the
voice when I am called upon to pass judgment on the degree
of sanity of a crimiriaL I make a chart of it like a cardiograph
of a beating heart, and know by the wavering of the voice line
the condition of his sanity. Voices of insane people limp and
squint and mirror all the infirmities of their minds. I have
heard crazy people say very sane things, but because they said
them in an insane way, I wasn't fooled. I say, listen to a man's
voice and not to what he says. If the strings of a musical in-
strument are not timed, the finest melody, played on a million
dollar fiddle, will still be crazy and out of tune/*

In Berlin I went to hear the "Schone Adolf 9 speak in the
Sports Palast. Ernst; Roehm; the brothers Strasser, Otto and
Gregors; and the ubiquitous Streicher were on the platform.
The hall was decorated in the grandiose style that Doctor
Goebbels, stage director for the Nazis, had devised for such
occasions. The Nazis were not yet in power, but they had
been given money by the Krupps and other armament manu-

288

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 289

f acturers to get going. It was Thyssen, the great industrialist,
who had originally advised Schukelgrubber to change his name
to Hitler.

"You'll get nowhere with a name like Schukelgrubber/' he
is supposed to have said to the leader of the gang of street-
brawlers and expropriators. "Change your name., or no
money/*

Meetings, pamphlets, expropriations, collections, and the sale
of Storm Troopers* brown uniforms were already yielding
profits. Amter, the Nazi business manager, had managed very
well. From a worldngman's organization, it had transformed
itself into a Herren party with some of the old Kaiser's sons
and grandsons among its members. Nazism had been in bad
odor as long as it was preached in beer cellars only, but it be-
came stylish when it moved into the Sports Palast, although
what it preached was still below the level of the lowest stage
of civilization.

Julius Streicher, as the first speaker, got up and delivered
a long and obscene speech in which he praised Adolf's courage
and gave filthy descriptions of the anatomy of those who op-
posed the party the Jews, the democrats, and the bolsheviks.

Hitler, his dark-brown hair plastered down and his face
ornamented by that funny little black Chaplinesque mustache,
looked like something out of an old wax museum.

Ernst spoke after Streicher.

Roehm, who spoke next, looked as though he had been put
together from the rear of a rhinoceros and the belly of a sow.
He reeked obscenity, the obscenity of a stinking, festering,
slimy animal.

When Roehm had sat down, Adolf rose, and the audience
stood lip and cheered. Hess, looking like a cross between an
Arab and a square-headed Egyptian (he was born in Cairo),
cheered the loudest.

When the applause subsided, Hitler began to speak. He
spoke a language I knew, yet it sounded as if he spoke no

290 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

human language at all, as if some robot had been wound up
to speak. Each, word seemed to be broken off a piece of crock-
ery.

After my ears had somewhat attuned themselves and I began
to catch words, then sentences, and finally phrases, I under-
stood that he was telling why only he could save Germany
from the Jews who had written the Versailles treaty and put
him in jail. In the midst of an interminable peroration, he
began to splutter and stutter, wipe sweat from his face, curse,
and rant about the dear comrades and the criminality of
France and England, two bolshevik countries, two negroid,
dirty bolshevik democracies. He spoke a hundred words on
an even keel, then suddenly screamed and repeated on a still
higher key what he had just said. He spoke nine words one
minute and a hundred the next, looking all the time elsewhere
and not at his audience.

His body neither moved nor swayed. Only his hands moved
up and down, and his fingers crooked themselves into claws,
clasping and unclasping an imaginary foe.

Then I remembered Doctor Menas Gregory's dissertation on
speech and voice. Even if the words made some sense, the
voice did not. What that crazy man said was under some
control, emotion, or intelligence, memory or conviction, but
the voice was under no control at all; it was an unregulated
clock ticking without timing.

After an hour, when almost any other speaker would have
been exhausted, Hitler's voice rose to a still higher pitch as he
shook his head and pounded his chest like an unco-ordinated
mechanical robot with an old broken phonograph record inside.

Never did German sound so harsh. In another hour, he
lowered his voice to an intimate whisper and began to tell what
he would do to the communists, the democrats, and the Jews.
He would take them down to a certain place he and his friends
knew and count off his grievances with steel rods upon their
bare backs until they gasped out their last cries, the cowards.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 291

He would compel their women and cMldren to live like rats in
dark holes in dank gutters and make them lick with their
tongues the streets they had polluted. He'd show them what
German fury was.

As for the hypocritical Christians, whose churches had
sucked the German people dry, their end also was at hand.

By that time he was standing in a pool of his own sweat.
The audience no longer heard what he said, his voice having
disordered their nerves.

Suddenly Hitler stopped, stopped on a loud scream, wiped
his sallow face, shook hands absent-mindedly with the friends
on the platform, and sat back beside Hess, who cooed over him
as over a baby.

I shuddered at the thought that that man might some day
rule Europe and perhaps the world.

A newspaperman I knew dragged me to the platform to meet
Hitler. But I couldn't bear the thought of shaking that sweaty
hand, a sweaty hand that would cause the disappearance of
nations and cause fire and death to rain from the skies and pour
from the mouth of cannon. I was just filled with horror and
was repelled by the slime that oozed out of his mouth and
pores. But, had I known, had I known! I would have gladly
died to . . *

(I heard him speak again after Warsaw, and again after
Chamberlain's speech saying "No!" to Hitler's offer of a Hitler-
ian peace.

(One of the radio companies here made a diagram, like the
one Doctor Menas Gregory had spoken about, of the voices of
Hitler, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Daladier, and the king of Eng-
land. On that comparative diagram, Hitler's voice varied from
thirty to sixty-eight; the average of all the others was from
thirty to thirty-four.)

I remembered an old story I had once read or heard of how
a man once found himself trapped in a granary with a thousand
fat but hungry rats. I thought of my sons and daughters, my

292 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

wife and friends, my brothers' and sisters' children in France
and elsewhere, and the millions of people, all being trapped in
a granary with fat and hungry rats. Those Nazis looked like
human beings, but they weren't. They used a human lan-
guage, but what they said wasn't human. The faces of Hitler,
Himmler, Goehring, Goebbels, and the others were faces of
rats upon two-legged bodies. I couldn't make myself believe
that the skin of their bodies under the clothes wasn't covered
with the horrible fur of gutter rats.

Before leaving with his army for Poland, Hitler designated
Field Marshal Goehring as his immediate successor if anything
should happen to him on the battlefield. Physically the two
men are the very opposite of one another. Hitler is thin and
narrow-chested; Goehring is stout and barrel-chested. Hitler
is on the dark side; Goehring is blond. Hitler's face is oval-
Goehring's is round.

Hitler has had no amours with women; Goehring has had
many amours. Hitler is sallow; Goehring is ruddy. Hitler
walks as though he were following a funeral; Goehring prances
like Falstaff. Hitler seldom smiles; Goehring laughs even at
the funerals of his best friends.

A scion of an old family, Goehring, although offering lip
service to Hitler, is neither his sycophant nor his slavish admirer.

Goehring, the jovial Falstaff, cares little for what history will
say about him. He doesn't shrink from committing cruelties
and abhors the sniveling sanctimoniousness of Hitler. His sad-
ism is open and frank. He speaks of power and not of truth.
He knows the difference between truth and untruth; Hitler
doesn't.

A capable flier during the last war, Goehring was wounded
severely, was in a hospital long after the peace of Versailles,
and came out a confirmed drug addict. Eventually he was
brought before a criminal court under the Weimar republic
and accused of debauching a young boy.

ZT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 293

Shunned by his own caste, not because of Ms immorality, but
because of the public Ignominy, Goehring eventually fell in
with the Roehm-Emst-Hider combination, before it was fash-
ionable to do so.

Goehring's frequent changes of glittering and flamboyant
uniforms have long been the butt of ridicule and jokes inside
and outside of Germany. That well-advertised vanity, how-
ever, is only a cloak for a physical infirmity, a worn-out stomach.
Field Marshal Goehring has no control over its evacuation, lias
to change uniforms frequently, and must use strong scents.

Goehring has given his new wife mounds of historical jewelry
rifled from the museums of the world. He has confiscated
stores, factories, mines, automobiles, bank accounts, clothes,
boats, and houses, and paid for them with receipts much as
Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit, paid for what he took with
paper money bearing his signature.

I have seen Goehring, in Berlin and elsewhere, when he was
so heavily doped he didn't know where he was. I have seen
him drunk at the Kaiserhof . I have watched him at table, like
a costumed pig, tear the meat with his hands and bite chunks
of bread out of the whole loaf, while he grunted and belched.
And he stank like a cesspool between changes of uniform, while
he sat in his own excrement and ate and ate.

At the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1930, this "tourist" stood
before one of Giotto's paintings, looked at it, and turning to
one of his companion tourists, said, "Das nehme icJi wann WIT
Paris nehmen* ( Til take this when we take Paris ) . The Giotto
picture now adorns his Berlin bedroom. Goehring's traculence
is not yet fully known. He may in a mood of boyish expansion
set fire to half the world or to the whole of it The Reichstag
fire was his invention. The word "fire" appears several times
in every one of his discourses. Any student of pyromania
knows what that signifies. And may the Lord help Europe
when a pyromaniac also has a worn-out stomach!

My interview with Goehring was very brief. He looked at

294 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

the questions I had submitted in writing and said with appro-
priate gestures, "Soil mich die Welt in Arsch lecken. Die
Amertkaner iiberhaupt"

In 1932 1 met Herr Doktor Goebbels at a night club in Berlin
a few months before Hitler was made the Reichskanzler by
President von Hindenburg. The Herr Doktor, in a new uni-
form with Sam Brown belt and sideanns, was celebrating all by
himself with a bottle of French champagne. Two uniformed
Storm Troopers stood behind him, but came forward every five
minutes on the dot, clicked their heels, extended their right
hands in salute, and stood at attention until the Herr Doktor
dismissed them.

I couldn't help laughing.

"Stop laughing," Fraulein Schurtz, my companion, admon-
ished.

"I don't have to be afraid of him."

"You don't. You'll leave Berlin in a week or two, but I must
live here," she remonstrated.

A few moments later, Putzi Hanf staengel, six foot four, ap-
peared. There was no love lost between Goebbels and Putzi,
any more than between Goebbels and any other of Hitler's close
associates. They weren't even on speaking terms with one
another.

On his way out, Hanfstaengel, an old New York acquaint-
ance, nodded to me.

I was just about to leave when one of Goebbels' troopers
came up, clicked his heels, extended his right arm, and informed
me that Herr Doktor Goebbels requested the honor of my com-
pany at his table.

"Tell the Herr Doktor that the gentleman will presently come
to his table," Fraulein Schurtz told the Storm Trooper.

"Go for my sake," she pleaded. "Otherwise hell think that
I told you not to go."

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 295

The diminutive Goebbels rose on his clubfoot, clicked his
heels, and invited me to sit opposite him.

"Ach, so you know the Herr Dolctor Hanfstaengel?"

"I knew Putzi in New York years ago."

"How long have you been in Berlin?"

"A few weeks."

"Ach, so, a few weeks already! From New York?"

"No. From Hollywood."

"Ach, so. Hollywood. Then you are in the moving picture
business. Ach, so. Hollywood! Some day I shall be there.
I have ideas. Great ideas. Great ideas for the films. They
are worth millions. Have you heard me speak already?"

"Yes, I have, at the Sports Palast, last week. But I am not
in the moving picture business; that is ..."

"Ach, so! Last week. You must admit it was colossal!
They are very much interested in me in America, are they not?
Ja. My picture is in all the papers there, is it not? Ja. Amer-
ican directors have no idea of the colossal. The real colossal,
that is my invention. Em noch nicht dagewesenes. How
long have you known Fraulein Schurtz?" he asked, suddenly
changing the conversation.

"I have always known her."

Just then a female singer, having finished her song, sauntered
down from the platform and came over to our table.

**Sie war en unherhort. KolossaL Wunderbar" and remem-
bering me, he added, "Fraulein Gerber, permit me. A famous
impresario from America."

"Ach, so. Impresario!" Fraulein Gerber smiled, sitting
down.

"The gentleman has come from America, especially to invite
me on a lecture tour."

"America!"

"Look here," I said. "I am afraid there has been a misunder-
standing."

296 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"But, my dear gentleman from America, I am sorry. I can't
accept your offer/' Goebbels said. "The party needs me.
Germany needs me. We are laying the foundation for a new
civilization that will last a thousand years. I can't think now
of personal glory, of personal advantage. I will come to Amer-
ica, certainly, later. . . ."

"Let's get this clear, Doctor Goebbels/' I tried to explain.

"Can't you understand the situation, my American friend?''

"But Herr Doktor, you are laboring under a delusion . . ."

"Liebchen, you tell the American gentleman that Germany
cannot spare Doctor Goebbels just now." Goebbels turned to
the young lady.

"This is no time to think of one's personal fortune."

Suddenly he cried out, "Don't say any more, Fraulein Gerber.
For all I know it may be a trick of our enemies to get me out of
Germany."

I looked at the mad runt.

"Pardon me/' he apologized. "I take that back. I take it
back. Our enemies are too stupid to have thought of that.
Ha, ha. ]a y too stupid. Accept my apologies. It is the duty
of men of historical importance and I have historical impor-
tance, have I not, Fraulein Gerber? to be on their guard al-
ways."

"Look here, Herr Doktor, let's get this straight; let me talk
for a minute."

"I understand. Don't say a word," Goebbels said. "You
there, in America, think that dollars can buy everybody. You
have already robbed us of our greatest artists, musicians, great
actors, and actresses. But, my dear friend from America, my
answer is, *No. ? I remain here."

I rose.

The four Storm Troopers approached and saluted.

"Escort the gentleman to his hotel," Goebbels ordered, and,
turning to me, he said, "Gute nacht?

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 297

And thus it happened that I returned to the Esplanade Hotel
escorted by four Storm Troopers.

"Du lieber Gott in Himmel" the porter cried out. "Are you
one of them? Are there such in America, too?"

ec GoU bewahre"

The following morning, Irma Schurfz, a well-known German
actress, blew into my room like a whirlwind.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

" "What's the matter/ he asks? Why didn't you tell me any-
thing about it?"

"Tell you about what?"

"That you had come to offer Goebbels half a million dollars
to go to America on a lecture tour. Why didn't you let me in
on your plans?"

I told her what had happened and how Goebbels had made it
all up of the whole cloth.

An hour later. Doctor Goebbels' private secretary 'phoned to
inform me that Herr Goebbels had talked it over with several
friends, but all had advised against his leaving Germany just
then. . . .

At Agnetendorf, Gerhart Hauptmann, the famous dramatist,
received me at the gates of his villa in a pearl gray Prince Albert
coat.

Frau Hauptmann Joined us in the library.

"How are things in Berlin?" she asked.

"Crowded with Storm Troopers."

"Ach, so!" she sighed.

"But Liebchen" Hauptmann reassured her, "this is nothing.
Our Germans are happy when they can see thousands of uni-
forms on the street/*

"And sidearms," I added, "and drill grounds outside Berlin,
and cellars in which they beat people up."

"Well, a few people have to be beaten up," Hauptmann sug-

298 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

gested philosophically. "You can't have an omelette without
breaking the eggs/'

"What omelette? 5 ' Frau Hauptmann questioned.

"The happiness of the Germans, Liebchen"

I looked at the white-haired head of the great writer.

Was this the man who had written The Weavers, Hanshel
Fuhrman, and Hanele?

"Von Papen is not going to let that paperhanger rule Ger-
many. He'll have dinner with us tonight, and you'll hear it
from his own mouth/' Hauptmann pacified his wife.

Von Papen had dinner with us, but didn't say whether Hitler
would or would not rule Germany, He sat there like a gray fox,
his eyes wandering from one guest to another, and came to life
only once, when I mentioned casually the Black Tom explosion
which he had engineered in America during the World War.

Frau Hauptmann enjoyed my bluntness, but Herr Haupt-
mann changed the conversation and asked whether I knew his
friends in Milford, Connecticut.

When von Papen asked for my impressions of Germany, I
asked, "What role is Otto Abetz playing in France?"

"Who?" von Papen inquired.

"Abetz, Otto Abetz, a young German I met in Paris and in
Spain."

"Do you know him?" Frau Hauptmann asked von Papen.

"Never heard the name."

When we walked into the next room for coffee, Frau Haupt-
mann brushed her lips against my shoulder and whispered,
"You are a very rude boy, but I like you."

After Herr Hauptmann had retired to his library for a snooze,
I asked his wife, "What about your son who had accompanied
you to America some years ago?"

"Not my son. His son. I am not old enough to have a son
as old as that."

"Pardon me. But what about him?"

"He is probably enjoying his new uniform," she sighed.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 299

"Oh, he Is one of them, too?"

"Let's not talk about him.**

Later, when Shapiro, the dramatist's amanuensis, took me to
my room, he said, "Young Hauptmann is one of Hitler's great
friends. The old man doesn't like the Nazis, but he rather
likes the idea of having somebody at court in case anything
happens."

On my return to Berlin I met Ben Huebsch, the American
publisher (Viking), at Compinsky's restaurant. Ben thought
I was too pessimistic and almost refused to believe what he saw
with his own eyes.

Even Rohlwog, the German publisher, who later turned Nazi,
couldn't convince him that anything serious was afoot.

After Huebsch had gone, four Storm Troopers came into the
restaurant, dragged two men out from behind a table into the
center of the floor and beat them mercilessly with rubber
truncheons.

Rohlwog held me down in my chair.

"Stay where you are/*

*Why doesn't someone call the police?" I yelled.

"Come, let's go. Let's have a drink somewhere/' Rohlwog
urged. "This is the prelude to a new Germany, a new German
Rut-tor."

I struggled to tear myself out of Rohlwog's embrace, to go to
the rescue of the screaming men who were being beaten to a
pulp by the grim brown-clothed murderers, but his arms were
like a vise about me.

"Don't waste your pity. They are merely beating up people
of their own gang."

Herr Doktor Alfred Rosenberg, the theoretician of the Nazis,
was born in the Baltic provinces and probably has no more of
the blood he calls Aryan in his veins than the average Russian
or Pole. Rosenberg resided in Paris during World War I,
from 1914 to 1918. Why he was in Paris at the time instead of
being at the battle front has never been explained.

300 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

While living in the Jewish district of Paris, he became en-
gaged to a Jewish girl, the daughter of his employer.

After the Versailles treaty, Rosenberg returned to Germany,
made the acquaintance of the editor of the Volkischer Beo-
bachter, then a struggling anti-Semitic weekly, fitted his liter-
ary contributions to the policy and the language of the paper,
and became a Judenfresser.

Rosenberg's Judenfresserei in the Volkischer Beobachter
attracted the attention of Hitler, who shortly thereafter bought
a partnership in the paper and appointed Rosenberg its editor-
in-chief. From then on, Herr Doktor Rosenberg's paper every
day has reported lurid rapes of "pure Aryan" girls in Germany,
in Patagonia, Brazil, New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Rio de
Janiero, Bucharest, Budapest, and St. Louis. According to
him, the fifteen million Jews in the world have no occupation
other than the raping of Aryan girls.

I interviewed Rosenberg in the office of the Volkischer Beo-
bachter in the summer of 1932. By that time he was the editor-
in-chief of five other publications, all owned by Hitler. Tall,
thin, angular, gray-eyed, he sat behind an enormous desk and
looked like a very intelligent and worldly young man, the kind
one meets at publisher's tea parties and intellectual gatherings.
He smiled, leaned back in his revolving chair, rubbed his thin
hands, and asked, "What is it you want to know?"

"What I want to know is how you can get away with so much
in republican Germany? We in America also have a free press,

but . . "

He laughed. "Free press! America! You don't have a free
press there."

"If the Nazis ruled Germany, would they allow more freedom
to the press than we have in America?" I asked.

"Gott bewahre!" he cried out. "Only democrats believe in
a free press. I spit in their faces and kick their behinds, and
they take it because of the free-press fetish. We tell them
daily that we don't believe in freedom, in parliamentarianism,

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 301

in democracy, that once in power we will close the political
avenues by which they could ever come into power again, and
what do they do? Nothing. How can an intelligent man
believe in a democratic form of government in the face of all
this?"

"But tell me, Herr Doktor, do you believe in the theory of
race published in your papers and your magazines?"

"Das ist eine nebensache" (that is beside the point), he
answered. "The question is not whether I believe in them,
but whether I can make our readers believe in them/'

"But what about intellectual honesty?" I ventured.

"A bourgeois virtue, a weakness.*'

"You have lived in France, have you not?" I asked.

"Who told you that?" he shouted in a voice that was almost
a shriek.

"Oh, somebody."

"It must have been that Schweinhund, HanfstaengeL He
goes about telling stories about me! Some day I shall settle
his QuargeL Who told you?"

"A man by the name of Lichansky."

"Lichansky? I don't know anybody by that name."

"You never heard the name of Lichansky, on the Rue des
ficouffes, in the ghetto of Paris? Think again, Herr Doktor!"

"Never heard of him. Never. Never," he repeated in great
agitation.

"His daughter's name is Miriam. Does that refresh your
memory?"

"I don't know any Lichanskys and don't know any Miriams,
Look here, my dear fellow, I am a busy man."

He pressed a buzzer. A uniformed doorman, a Storm
Trooper, appeared.

"Show the Herr out"

I jumped into the first cab.

Back at the hotel, I told Fraulein Schurtz where I had been,
She grew pale. Her lips went white.

302 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

'What's the matter?"

"Nothing. I am glad I didn't know where you had gone. I
would have died of anxiety. Du lieber Herr Gott! Er geht
iiberall, wie ein Kind. (He goes everywhere like a child. )"

"But I had to interview Rosenberg. He was on my list."

"That murderer! He makes me feel ashamed to be a Ger-
man. I swear to you, he is no German."

Poor Irma. She was so intensely German that she denied
the Germanism of anyone who ran counter to her conception of
what Germans were. When I said something uncomplimen-
tary about Germans and Germany, she drew herself up to her
full five feet eight, looked at me out of her sky-blue eyes, and
beat her chest, shouting, "I am a German. I. I. V 9

On an afternoon in September, she took me to see some
friends of hers, five young actresses who lived in one small
apartment on the Alexander Platz and were all out of work.
Not one of the girls owned a complete outfit of clothes. Since
they were more or less the same size, when two girls had to go
out, three had to stay home. To preserve their clothes, they
practiced nudism In their rooms.

"You see," Irma said, "they feel it is more indecent to be
partly dressed than totally nude."

On the way to their apartment we bought Aufschnitte
(delicatessen, cheese, butter, bread), and several bottles of
beer to take to them.

Their nudity didn't shock me; at least I didn't act as if it did.
They were young and good looking, and acted so casually that
after a while I was more embarrassed by my clothes than by
their nudity. We were still eating when a fine young fellow,
neatly dressed, came in, kissed one of the girls, shook hands
almost formally with the four other nude girls, and was intro-
duced to Irma and me.

Suddenly I heard screams, shots, and windows crashing in
the street. I went to the window to look out, but the young
man yanked me away.

"You don't want to be shot, do you?"

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 303

While the girls dressed hurriedly, I asked, "But what has
happened?"

"Hitler's boys are looking for someone/' the young man in-
formed me. "One of theirs was lolled last night. Now they
are searching every house, every room, to find a known com-
munist and Mil him*"

"And the police?"

"They know better than to interfere. Keep your temper if
they come up here."

A moment later heavy boots marched up the stairway. The
girls acted at being indifferent. One was in the kitchen, wash-
ing the dishes. One sat at the writing table to write a letter.
One was knitting. A heavy boot thumped our door and a
harsh voice called, "Aufmachen" The young man opened the
door. Two S. S, men came in with revolvers drawn and left
the door wide open.

They were pimply young boys in their early twenties* but
they walked into the kitchen and from there into the other
room, opening doors with their boots and looking into the cup-
boards and under the beds, as if they were the official masters
of Germany.

One of them looked at me for a long time and then asked the
girls, "Wer ist der man? (Who is this man?)"

"Em Amerikaner" Irma replied.

"Ach, so!"

"Can I see your papers?" he asked me in New York-ese.

When he had handed me back my passport, I said, "You
couldn't do that in New York, could you?"

"Not now, but someday"

"Don't be so sure, buddy!"

"Maul Tialten" he shouted, and taming to the girls he or-
dered, "No one leaves this house tonight."

"Can't I leave?" I questioned.

"I said nobody/* he bellowed. "Nobody, that means you,

y>

too.

A shrill whistle from the street called the two uniformed

304 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

gangsters to the window. After a few rapid words with some-
one below, they left and ran down the stairs at top speed.

"The communists," Irma said, looking out of the window and
shutting it quickly.

"This has been going on for weeks/* one of the girls explained.
"The Nazis shoot, the communists stab, and then each set
searches all the houses for their enemies."

When the noise and the shooting Bad subsided, Irma said to
me, "Let's go/*

We shook hands all around and left.

At the bottom of the dark staircase, Irma stumbled over a
uniformed body curled up like a snail

"What do we do?" I asked.

"Run/* Irma Schurtz answered, dragging me after her, "run
back to the hotel."

We ran hand in hand to get the streetcar two blocks away,
but the end of the street had been barricaded with beds, tables,
chairs, doors, and packing boxes, and we were turned back by
people in workers' clothes with revolvers in their hands.

When we attempted to go back to the apartment we had just
left, we found that the people had hastily thrown up another
barricade behind us to protect the houses of that street from an
invasion by the S. S. men.

The women, disheveled and strong, kept on building up the
two barricades while the men shot at the S. S. men on the other
sides.

A little boy, not twelve, picked up the revolver which had
fallen out of the hand of a wounded man, called to a woman to
take the Kamerad away, and took his place behind a splintered
oaken door.

I was fascinated. Irma was hysterical. She ran between
the two barricades like an animal in a cage and pleaded that
she Lad to go home.

Suddenly two police cars with Schupos, armed police, moved

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 305

in close to both ends of the street. The next instant the people
disappeared from behind the barricades.

Irma pulled me into a hallway.

"Where to?"

"Any door will open. Come."

She knocked at a door. A moment later it opened into a
dark room, and a voice whispered, "Herein! 9

When we were inside, the same voice urged, "Ins bett.
Geschwind" and a hand guided me into the next room and into
a bed that was already crowded by four bodies.

When the noise had subsided, one of the men lit a lamp and
recognized Irma who had been in bed close to him a moment
before.

"Ach! Fraulein Schurtz, What an unexpected honor.
Kinder., Fraulein Irma Schurtz, the actress, is here/*

Irma scrambled out of bed and smiled at me.

<c We gave it to them tonight/* a flat-chested, middle-aged
woman said, going to the kitchen to set a pot of coffee on the
fire.

'Tomorrow, they'll give it to us,** a man said.

"Ja? but Moscow will never allow six million of us to fall into
their hands/*

"No?" the man remarked sarcastically. "She has too much
confidence in Moscow/* he said to me. "I haven't. Not since
Moscow ordered the communists to vote with the Nazis to de-
feat the Social-Democrat candidate and elect Goehring as
president of the Reichstag/'

The barricades were still there in the morning. The firemen
of Berlin refused to remove them, because cleaning streets was
not one of their duties; the street cleaners, because carrying
heavy furniture was no part of their work; and the police, of
course, wouldn't dirty their uniforms with such work.

Even at that early date, and long before the Nazis seized
power, Moscow was playing ball with them. If the German

306 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

communists liad not obeyed Moscow and kept their skirts clean,
Hitler would not have been able to smother them and all the
other socialist organizations in Germany. Hitler rose to power
hoisted upon a scaffold of many stupidities and treasons, but all
those crimes together were not so horrible as the crime of Mos-
cow that delivered the world into the hands of the enemies of
civilization.

XXVI

T LEFT Germany and went to Constantinople. At the bar of
JL the Hotel Europe, one of the Associated Press men said to
me over a whiskey and soda, "What the hell do you want to go
to Ankara for? Stay here. You can have lots of fun. Now
that the harems have been broken up, there are some pretty
dames loose in town. Have a gander at the dame coming in
now with that French runt."

"Who is she?"

"Italian, Austrian, and maybe Russian. A countess. Tall
dame. Me, I like 9 em tall. How about you?"

"Depends on the season of the year, color, age, and a few
other things. What is she doing in Constantinople?"

"Plays the piano, sings, paints, and sells ammunition."

"Who is she working for?"

"For Basil Zaharoff. Say, that's the guy you ought to meet.
I'll see whether I can fix it for you. I'll be back in a moment."

The A. P. man went to a little table near a window, clicked
his heels smartly, bowed, and was invited to sit down by the
woman after being introduced to the man.

A moment later he called me to join them.

"Roumania! So. Whom do you know there?" the countess
asked, heaving her perfumed bosom.

When I had enumerated a dozen or so names, she exclaimed,
"Then you must also know Mile. Elena Borshu."

307.

308 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

"Of course I know her/'

"Your friend here, Mr. Smith, tells me you want to meet Sir
Basil. What about?' 7

"To talk to him."

"Business?"

"No."

"If it is business, you'd better talk to me."

"What could I use a couple of cannon or a hundred machine
guns for?" I asked. "To shoot a publisher?"

"Well!" she reflected. "There are always revolutions, you
know. Captain Fournier, here, wants to dispose of a batch of
Loebels and Manlichers. Museum pieces. Couldn't even
have sold them to the Berbers a year ago, but now they, too,
will find customers."

"And if we don't sell them, I shall have had the pleasure of
having met you," the sparrowlike little Frenchman said, kissing
her fingers.

"Mexico used to be one of my best customers," Madame
sighed, powdering her nose, "but now they, too, have too many
newspapers."

I thought of the keeper of the brothel in Paris, Pascin's friend,
who had complained that his business was being ruined by too
much enlightenment of the people.

"Tell me the number of your room, and if I can arrange a
meeting with Sir Basil, I shall do so. He happens to be at the
Istanbul just now/' the countess suggested.

"How soon do you think that could be done? I am on my
way to Ankara."

"Ankara!" the countess cried out, replacing her powder puff
in the golden compact. "Ankara! Whom do you know
there?"

"No one "

"Oh! Sure? No one?"

"No one, unless Ismet Pasha happens to be there/*

"Oh, so you do know Ismet! He is Kemal Pasha's closest
friend."

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 309

Two hours later I found a note under my door on which was
written., "Sir Basil will see you at 6:15 in his room at the Istan-
bul."

Sir Basil Zaharoff, the mystery man of Europe, the man who
had made thousands of millions out of the traffic in instruments
of death, bounced up from a reclining chair by the window
when I was shown into the small room by his English butler,
and came forward to greet me, holding a small leather-bound
volume of poetry in his thin hands.

"Come, sit by the window. There is a lovely view over the
Bosporus this time of the day. So. Smoke?"

'"What are you reading?" I asked, when I had sat down.

"Musset. Alfred de Musset. My favorite poet. Do you
like him? Intoxicating poetry. Absolutely intoxicating."

With his gray goatee, Zaharoff looked like a middle-aged
professor of literature from the South of France. His voice
was almost too melodious.

"America! Interesting. But too harsh. Too young. Not
mellowed by time. Beautiful women. Beautiful. Beauti-
ful."

"Is there a great demand at present for ammunition?" I
asked, with my characteristic lack of tact.

"I thought you wanted to talk literature, poetry, music,"
Zaharoff said, rising. "Pour autre chose H y a mon bureau.
(For other things there is my office.)"

"Please understand," I pleaded. "Ever since I can remem-
ber, I have heard of Sir Basil Zaharoff, the famous dealer in
ammunition, but never a word about his love for de Musset.
I have to pinch myself to make sure that I am talking to the
man I have come to see."

"C'est un commerce comme un autre" he said, sitting down
and pushing the gun-metal cigarette box toward me as a token
of forgiveness.

And again I thought of the Parisian brothel keeper, who
probably would have used the same words. "A business like
any other/'

310 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

"I love poetry because poets alone can understand/* he said
ecstatically.

Basil Zaharoff, a thousand times a millionaire, the mystery
man of Europe,, the dealer in instruments o death, was a senti-
mentalist. The "Blue Danube Waltz," he said, brought tears
to his eyes. The greatest play was Les Deux Orphelines (The
Two Orphans).

When I rose to go, he begged., "Don't go yet. It's a great
pleasure to talk to someone who loves literature. Madame la
comtesse also likes poetry/ 5

"The same kind?"

"Yes and no, she is a little more sentimental. She is Hun-
garian. Splendid woman. Great company. She speaks many
languages. Plays the piano. Paints. I, too, write a little. I
have just written something about this view. If you care to
listen! 'The last quarter of the fireball disappearing on the
distant rim of the shimmering Bosporus is burning now with a
thousand living colors. Petulantly the blinking stars mirror
themselves in the sea . . . sprinkling the sea with myriads of
luminous little quivering points that rock themselves on the
rippling, dark-blue, bottomless sea.' How do you like it?"
Zaharoff asked, wiping his moist glasses.

At the door he asked, "Having lived so long across the ocean,
do you think America will fight in Europe in the next war?"

'"What do you think?" I questioned.

"I, I prefer de Musset to all the other poets."

When I came back to the hotel from my interview with
Zaharoff ? the comtesse invited me up to her apartment.

"Did you have a nice talk with Sir Basil?" she asked.

"Very nice. Quite a lover of poetry, isn't he?"

"Yes," and changing the conversation quickly, she said, "I
sent a telegram about you to Mile. Borshu. She has delegated
me to take care of you while you are in Constantinople."

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 311

"Very, very thoughtful of her."

"She is a dear. Would you mind dining with me at a nice
place I know?"

"With pleasure/*

"That's a dear. IVe sold Captain Founder's collection of old
sticks, and now he wants to come up and thank me. Let's go
before he comes/*

"I thought you said they were not salable/* I remarked,
helping her put on the cape.

"Everything is salable nowadays. I cabled to my agent in
Shanghai, and she took them. Fifteen minutes later my agent
in Hungary telegraphed to take them/'

"I suppose/' I asked, entering a car waiting outside, "you are
an expert on guns, eh?"

"Moi?" she replied. f Moi? I never see one/* And settling
back in the car, she explained, "We don't actually handle guns
and ammunition. We sell them. We seldom look at the
things. Somebody in China informs my agent he wants this
and that When I have an offer of something like what he
wants, I cable what I have to our nearest agent, who transacts
the business with the seller and the buyer. We have agents
all over the world. But does this interest you at all?"

"Immensely. Go ahead. Please/*

"How can such piffling things interest a man like you?" she
flattered, lighting a cigarette. "But you see how it works, don't
you? Some Balkan ordinance officer loses heavily at roulette
or baccarat. He knows our agent. She takes five hundred or
a thousand old sticks off his hands; that is, if we can deliver
them without involving her."

< I understand. Go ahead."

"Of course, you understand! It's simple. Someone wanting
to start a revolution in Afghanistan needs a thousand guns.
You understand, don't you? Sir Basil, of course, never bothers
with this stuff. This is really more or less my domain,"

312 ITS TPIE GYPSY IN ME

Across the table at the Fanoon, a dimly-lit, heavily gilded
restaurant looking like an ornate birdcage, Madame looked like
a naive widow on an escapade.

"What sort of man is Sir Basil really?" I asked.

"Very romantic. Thirty years ago he fell in love with a
certain lady of the nobility and, being a good Catholic, he
waited faithfully until she should be free. Last year her hus-
band died. Now he is waiting out her year of mourning, and
then the/11 get married. That's Sir Basil."

"From what I have heard about him, I would have expected
Sir Basil to have the husband shot thirty years ago."

"I have heard that in America they are saying terrible things
about him just because of his business. C'est un commerce
comme un autre. You'd love him if you really knew him. The
soul of honor and charity."

After dinner we went to another place, a night club where a
Gypsy band was playing beautiful Gypsy music. The leader,
Tanasse Stan, of a world-renowned musical Gypsy family,
recognized me and came over to greet me. He and I had once
been in love with the same Gypsy girl. Tanasse told the com-
tesse about it, and she laughed.

After the second glass of champagne, Madame hooked her
arm under mine and said, "If I weren't afraid of Sir Basil's dis-
approval, I'd be tempted to go with you to Ankara."

"Would he disapprove?"

"He? He wouldn't ever talk to me again."

After a while she pressed herself close to me and asked,
"There is one gun in America I am interested in. A light gun.
With the mechanism of a machine gun. The inventor is one
Garrand or Garland! Have you ever heard anything about
that gun?"

"No. Never"

"In certain circles everybody speaks about that gun," she said,
powdering her nose, "so I supposed everybody knew about it.
I suppose in your circles you take for granted that certain books
are known to everybody."

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 313

"Very, very philosophical, Madame."

"Call me Theresa . . . it's been a long time since anyone has
called me Theresa. Funny Sir Basil! Thirty years. She is an
old lady now. I have seen her. An old lady. Loebels and
Manlichers are museum pieces, but they still can shoot. He,
too, is a museum piece. Hello, there! A little more cham-
pagne. A little more. Only a little. Sir Basil is a great friend
of Goehring, yes, indeed. Great friend. I'll go to Samoa,
maybe to America. Should I go to America? I think 111 go to
Ankara with you. So you and that Gypsy were in love with
die same girl!"

After two weeks in Ankara, the hell hole of Asia Minor, the
new capital of Turkey, I honestly wished I had never heard of
die goddam place. Keinal Pasha, the ruler of Turkey, whom I
had come to interview, had gone to his farm in the hills, and
no one could tell me when he would be back or assure me that
he would receive me when he came.

My room was always abuzz with flies, mosquitoes, and bugs
of every variety. In the lobby and the diningroom, clerks, bell-
boys, and members of the diplomatic corps were continually
scratching themselves. The food was uneatable, the bottled
water from America was tepid, and the whole city reeked as if
it had been dunked in a pool of sweat, urine, and dust.

When I complained to a French representative of an indus-
trial company that I had been there already two weeks, Mon-
sieur Berard laughed.

"Two weeks! Two weeks! And you complain! I have
been here three months. And there are others, from Italy,
Sweden, and England, who have been here longer than that!
And on appointments, monsieur! On appointments! But
why should he care? He owns this hotel. The longer we stay
here-"

Suddenly, one afternoon, the hotel came to life. Clerks and
bellboys got into new uniforms, the tables of the diningroom

314 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

were freshened up with newly laundered tablecloths, the piano
was dusted off, and a pianist, a violinst, and two extremely
painted young women descended upon the place.

"What's up?" I asked the head waiter.

"Kemal Pasha has come down from his f arm! 9

The government house, only a few minutes from the hotel,
was pullulating with black-coated people carrying briefcases
under their arms and cluttering the lobby of the place.

I spoke to one of the secretaries and told him that Ismet
Pasha had arranged for an immediate interview for me.

"His excellency knows you are here. If he wants to see you,
he will let you know," the man said.

"When?"

"Today, tomorrow, next time he comes down from the farm,
how should I know?"

Four days later, on a Thursday night, the diningroom door
was thrown open, and the pianist and the violinist interrupted
a Viennese waltz to plunge into the Turkish national anthem.
Everybody rose as a six foot, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven
man, bareheaded, with his collar unbuttoned, his coat on his
arm, and a cigarette-holder between his teeth, appeared at the
door.

After Kemal Pasha had signaled that everyone should sit
down, he picked himself a table against the wall opposite me,
and sat down. Eight giants in long black coats appeared and
placed themselves, two in each corner of the room. At a nod,
the head waiter, a white-haired old man, brought a bottle of
cognac and a glass and placed them on Kemal's table.

Kemal wiped the inside of the glass with his napkin, and
then, after looking at the seal and the label on the bottle, poured
himself a full wineglass of cognac and drank it in one gulp.

His head sat like a huge bullet between his shoulders. His
face was sallow and slightly pock-marked. His chin was almost
as wide as his forehead. His hands, hairy, enormous, and with
spatulated short fingers, were the hands of a peasant.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 315

He ate the pieces of broiled goafs meat directly from the spit
without troubling to use knife, fork, or plate. When he was
through with one spit, the waiter handed him another.

He slowed up after having eaten half a dozen spits of broiled
meat. He put the last one down only partly consumed, pushed
the chair back a little from the table > filled Ms glass with the
rest of the bottle, looked around, lit a fresh cigarette, and stuck
it slowly in the amber cigarette-holder. Throwing liis head
back, he looked vacantly into space for a moment. Then he
squirmed in his chair, rose, grabbed one of the painted girls,
and began to waltz with her in the center of the room, whirling
from the piano in the rear to the door by which he had entered.

A quarter of an hour later, Kemal Pasha unceremoniously
left bis dancing partner, took the other painted woman, danced
her limp, then danced the girl violinist off her feet, and returned
to his table to finish the cold meat on the spit and to pour him-
self another drink from the fresh bottle that had been placed on
his table.

I was fascinated by the strength and flexibility of his move-
ments, but I was suffocating in the stagnant air of the room.

After a third glass of cognac from the second bottle, Kemal
rose and put his coat on. Everybody rose. The men who had
stood at the four corners of the room began to converge toward
him when he signaled them to stay where they were, motioned
to everybody to sit down again, then crossed to my table, and
said to me in French as he sat down opposite me, "I am Mus-
tapha Kemal."

When the waiter came over, he growled at him to bring a
fresh bottle with two "clean" glasses.

We looked each other straight in the eye, a la Turque, and
I had a chance to fathom the wolfish gray-green eyes fixed upon
me. We were still looking into each other's eyes when the
waiter placed the bottle and the glasses on the table.

And then die ruler of Turkey proceeded to interview me.
Where was I born? When did my father die? When did I

316 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

first leave Roumania? What languages did I speak? Whom
did I know in Europe? Why had I come to Ankara to inter-
view him?

I answered every question simply and directly and then said,
"I have come six thousand miles to interview you, and you are
interviewing me."

"You are being paid in dollars to interview me, aren't you?
I, too, want to be paid in information/' he said, chuckling and
smiling as he offered me one of his cigarettes.

"Tell me, how much wheat does the United States produce a
year?*'

"I don't know."

<< Within a, million bushels?"

"I don t know"

"Guess"

"I could look it up in an almanac and let you know."

"Do you know how much corn you produce?"

"No."

"Tell me, is it true that every home, every apartment, in
North America has a bath?"

"Not every one, but some sixty per cent of the homes have
baths"

"How do you know that?"

"I remember having read it somewhere."

"And you haven't read how much wheat or corn America
produces?"

"I probably have, but don't remember."

Again he chuckled and smiled as he filled my glass and his.

"It isn't very important or you would know. What did you
see in Germany?"

When I had told him, he said, "You should tell this to your
people at home. The vultures are sharpening their claws.
You Americans are selling them the very guns with which you
and your children will be killed. Are you stupid, or are you
crazy? Does profit mean more to you than life? Why does

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 317

your government allow you to sell ammunition to the prospec-
tive enemies of your country? You are selling them the tools
and the machines with which they'll make the bombers to blow
you to pieces. If I had the raw material you have, but had no
immediate use for it, I'd let it all become rust and powder be-
fore Td sell an ounce to my potential enemies. You, born in
the Dobrogea, ought to know the Russians. They talk world
peace but they're selling ammunition to the Germans. And
they'll side with them in the next war. I have listened to Mac-
Donald's speeches. He should be teaching elocution in a girls'
school instead of being the prime minister of England. And
that fool Baldwin! Why are your people doing nothing at all?
Do you want to commit suicide by handing another the gun
with which to shoot you?"

He filled our glasses again.

''What do they say about me in America? That I am cruel,
profligate, and a drunkard? I know. I know. I am an Al-
banian Moslem, not a Turk. I am the son of a soldier, and I
am keeping my Beza, my holy promise not to allow the enemies
of the people I rule to destroy us. And we Albanians keep
our Bezos, as you no doubt know."

While he talked, the music played, and no one moved from
his seat.

"Do you want to dance? No. I like to dance. It limbers
me up. But these women get tired too easily. I'll dance a
little more, and then you'll come with me to the farm and meet
my mother. Do you still speak Turkish? . . . Why only a few
words?" And with that he left me to dance the two women
off their feet again.

When he had left the second woman, he returned to my
table, put on his coat, looked contemptuously at the half-empty
bottle, and asked, "Do you care for another drink? No. Good.
Let's go."

I asked permission to go up to my room and change; I was
wet through and through. One of the men in the Prince

318 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Alberts wanted to follow me to my room, but Kemal waved him
aside. Stepping out of my clothes to sponge myself, I noticed
that I was trembling, that every part of me was aquiver. Was
it pneumonia or excitement?

A few hours later at break of day, after a most excruciating
trip on a corduroy road, a heavy-set old woman received Kemal
with loud reproaches at the gate of the farm, scolded him for
being unclean, unwashed, for staying up nights, being drunk,
and for bringing a giaour, an unbeliever, to her home.

The dictator of Turkey stood the scolding of his old mother
with bowed head and then said, "Mother, he may be an un-
believer, but he understands our language, and," as I was taking
off my shoes before crossing the door, he added, "knows our
customs/'

The old lady patted me on the arm, murmured something,
and appeared in the room a few moments later bearing a
wooden tray with small squares of bread, a saucer with salt,
and two glasses of water in each of which was a teaspoon of
Peltea? rose-petal sherbet.

"Give me your IBeza? Kemal said, after I had eaten bread in
his house, "that you will show me what you have written about
me before you send it to America.**

I promised. A moment later lie was asleep in his clothes,
reclining on the couch.

Soon afterward, his mother opened the door softly and
beckoned me to follow her out. Outside, she handed me a
small cup of black coffee to drink standing up, then gave me a
bag of food and told me that the car was waiting for me down
the road so that the noise of the engine shouldn't wake her
chiu&huck, her little boy,

Kemal was a true Albanian, Nothing is so sacred to an
Albanian as the keeping of a promise. One day an officer of

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 319

the army came to Kemal's room and said, "We have sentenced
a soldier to be shot for insubordination. According to custom
we have asked him what his last wish was, and he said, 1 want
to see Kemal Pasha/ Shall I bring him in now?"

Kemal was in no mood to see anyone just then and said so.

Two weeks later the officer asked Kemal to see the sentenced
soldier, but again Kemal was in no mood. Two weeks after
that, the officer said to Kemal, "That soldier is our only prisoner.
We have to keep a dozen men because of him, feed them, and
keep them warm. He has become the town's hero. Boys and
girls promenade beneath the window of the prison. Please see
him, and let's finish the business."

"Bring him in," Kemal said.

When the soldier was brought in before Kemal, he called out,
"Kemal Pasha, I am an Albanian. I give you my Beza. Let
me go home to see my wife before I am shot."

"Let him go/' Kemal said to the officer.

Six weeks later the officer rushed into Kemal's office and
shouted, "He has come back/'

"Who?"

"The Albanian soldier we have sentenced to death! He has
corne back."

"And why shouldn't he have come back?" Kemal asked.
"Didn't he give me his Beza?''

"But . . . you will pardon him now, Kemal Pasha, won't
you?" the officer begged.

"He hasn't come back to be pardoned," Kemal said. "He
has come back to be shot. Do your duty."

Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize
winner, had never had a greater admirer than I was. Hamsun,
too, had plied all the trades and had done every kind of manual
labor. He had been a shoemaker in St. Paul, a street car con-
ductor in Chicago, and a school janitor's helper in New York

320 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

He, too, had been in love with Paris, despite the privations and
humiliations he had suffered in that city.

Hamsun's early debut as a writer, except that he had written
in his native tongue, had been almost like my own. Hunger.,
Pan Ideal, Redaktor Lynge, and Victoria,, his first four novels,
were cries of revolt against man's injustice to man.

When a famous young Danish writer who had translated
several of my books into Norwegian, called on me in Copen-
hagen to say that Hamsun was in Denmark and wanted to
see me, I didn't believe him. I had met the man accidentally
on the Qrka, a small transatlantic boat, and he, his wife, Lisle
Bell and his wife, and I had spent many hours together over
whiskeys and soda in the bar of the boat. Knowing him to
be a practical joker, I suspected that he was pulling my leg
in good old Danish fashion. He was one who might take me
somewhere, introduce me to some peach-hued, stout barmaid,
and say, "Isn't she better to meet than that old scrooge, Ham-
sun?"

But the Dane hadn't been spoofing. It was Knut Hamsun
and not a barmaid that we met in a little hotel room that gray,
rainy day.

Hamsun, tall, thin, sharp-faced, and austere, looked at me
from under his bushy eyebrows, but said nothing, while my
friend, six foot six and three hundred pounds, hovered over us
and smiled.

"If you were a young woman, he wouldn't be so shy," my
friend finally said, bursting out in peals of laughter.

"Of course not," I said, and regained my composure.

"My publisher in New York also published your first book,"
Hamsun finally opened the conversation. "Was anything done
about those awful conditions you described in your book?"

Because my friend did not know the book in question, Ham-
sun told him what it was about and began a discussion on
economic conditions in Europe and America. He was on the
right track as long as he spoke about conditions in Europe and

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 321

America, but he held the opinions of Hitler and Goebbels about
democracy and parliamentarianism, thundered against the in-
ternational bankers, and grew sarcastic when he spoke of the
political set-ups in England, France, and the United States.

"How can the man who wrote Hunger have such political
opinions?" I asked.

Hamsun dismissed my question with a gesture of the hand
and continued his bombast against the degenerate democracies.
And he wouldn't be contradicted, he, the oracle of Aryanism
in Scandinavia! The world, he said, must be ruled by dictators
who owe no account to the ruled.

The Danish writer's face twitched, and his eyes narrowed
down to slits, as he said, "That kind of theory may be what the
Germans would accept, but you can't expect the Scandinavian
countries to accept it, Knut Hamsun."

"Yes, I do. I hope soon to see Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden, and all the other Germanic nations brought together
into one unit," Hamsun shouted, "governed by one theory and
one head."

"Come," my friend said, taking me by the arm, "we shouldn't
have come here. Good day" and he dragged me to the door.

I looked back several times, as one does when he is torn away
from the coffin of a dear friend, and was still stunned when we
reached the street.

Hours later, the two of us sat opposite each other in a bar-
room with our second empty bottle between us, and we cried
and cried. When one of his friends asked why we cried,
Hjalmar answered, "A very dear friend has died. We are
just back from the funeral."

Late that night we were still drinking. Before going home,
Hjalmar read something out of Hamsun from a book he had
carried in his pocket for Hamsun to autograph.

"No, no," he cried, "it can't be the same man."

"Of course not, Hjalmar. I know it wasn't. You played
another one of your practical jokes on me."

322 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

My memory about what happened during the next two weeks
in Copenhagen is very hazy. I remember going to see my
Scandinavian publishers with my friend, both of us not exactly
sober, and Hjalmar telling them that I had been drinking be-
cause of grief, because someone very dear to me had died.
Touched by my bereavement, the publisher, a charming old
viking, took us out to give me another and yet another kvich to
help me over the first hours of grief.

At another bar we met a magazine editor who had corre-
sponded with me for years. Hjalmar explained to him that 1
wasn't a habitual drunkard, but that someone dear to me had
died, and that he had to keep me drunk lest I do myself harm.
The editor, a very understanding fellow, bought me a couple
more drinks to help me overcome the first hours of my grief and
invited some friends of his, artists, journalists, and musicians,
to help me get over the shock of my friend's death.

Having been invited to appear before the Swedish Anthro-
pological Society, whose secretary had written a long mono-
graph about my On New Shores in the yearbook of the society,
I kept sober the whole day, but took a drink just before leaving,
when I read a speech Hamsun had delivered the previous day,
and never appeared at the hall.

"Was it a man or a woman?*' the magazine editor asked, late
that night.

"A man," my friend whispered.

"Well," the editor mused, "now I understand. A woman one
forgets eventually, but a man, a friend, is more difficult to for-
get. I understand now. Have another drink. I know what
the loss of a friend can mean to a man/*

While I was drinking with the magazine editor, Hamsun
came into the tap room. I felt a strange exhilaration as I
walked up to him and said, << What are you doing here? You
are dead. I have buried you and mourned you and drowned
you in fifty bottles of fire water. Step back into your coffin."

"Pleasel" Hamsun said, brushing me aside. "I don't know
you."

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 323

"Of course you don't, I am your undertaker. Dead men
don't know their undertakers. But I know you. I have seen
you naked and touched the corpse of the you that once lived,
Knut Hamsun."

"Please, won't somebody free me of this individual?" Hamsun
pleaded, but nobody would take me off him.

"Go back to your coffin, Knut Hamsun. You are dead.
Don't come among the living."

In the end, someone lifted me up in his arms and carried
me to my room, where I slept the clock around.

That drinking spree was a grand experience. I said things
and did things I would not have said or done while sober.

The ability to get drunk is one of those faculties, like laugh-
ter, which distinguish man from the other mammals. It is a
distinction for which I am very grateful to the gods. Shocks
a trifle too hard to bear while sober, like some of the more seri-
ous surgical operations, can be weathered comfortably with
the help of a potent anaesthetic. And even if good liquors are
dangerously pleasant to the taste, that is no reason why we
should avoid them when we need their soothing quality.

Knut Hamsun had been my ideal. The discovery that he,
too, was in the ranks of the betrayers of civilization had un-
nerved me. Italy had its Pirandello; Germany, its brothers
Strasser and Gerhart Hauptmann; France, its Doriot and La
Roque; England, its Mosley; and Spain, its Unamuno. Poland
and Czechoslovakia were swarming with ghouls waiting to feed
their vanity on the corpses of the dead. Russia had its Maxim
Gorki, who sold out to Stalin for a mess of dollars in the banks
of Capri, but I had not expected Hamsun to feed on the slime
left by the passing of the Asiatic hordes a thousand years ago.

In Rome I listened to that orangutan-mouthed Mussolini
orate from the balcony of his palace to the bareheaded, empty-
headed, vociferating mass underneath. A dead man was talk-
ing to tens of thousands of gesticulating dead men, stinking as

324 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

if they had been dead a long time, yet anomalously singing
"Giovineza/' the song of youth.

Like the Russians, the Germans, and the Japanese, who have
sunk back a thousand years to find a level of culture which they
hadn't really risen above, the Italians are now calling them-
selves a young nation! What is there so young about them, the
rejection of even the implications of civilization?

Civilizations, like human beings, are bom, mature, and die.
The death agony of a civilization is a horrible thing to watch.
Its bowels empty themselves unchecked, and the rotting body
wallows in its own excrements while the toothless, sore-eaten
mouth sings "Hosannas." The maggots that feed on such putre-
faction spread themselves and cause the disintegration of even
healthy bodies. It is possible, though not probable, that
should the "young nations" prevail, the general dissolution of
modern civilization would not reach America until after the end
of my natural days, but I was brought up by a pantheistic father
and cannot think of myself as separate from the eternal mesh
and fabric of the past and the future. We pantheists do suffer
in our flesh for all that has happened in the past anywhere in
this world to any human beings. Our minds anticipate, by
more than we dare tell, all that will happen anywhere to any
people in the future.

Personally, I can take a drink to level myself down to the
unfeeling or abandon myself in the arms of a woman until I
have lost all consciousness of the agony of this world, but I
cannot keep on drinking or holding the ecstasy of forgetful-
ness forever.

Neither drink nor sex has ever been more than a temporary
anaesthetic. Music, dance, back-breaking work, fist fights,
and loud talk have often given me some joyous respite, but
when I sober up, I realize that I, myself, must do something
to retard or avoid the disintegration of the world in which I
live. Such behavior is as selfish as cleaning out a flesh wound
in my own body before general gangrene has set in.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 325

Listening to Mussolini, I tried to analyze what has made the
youth of certain countries flock to the banners of totalitarian-
ism. The leaders of the totalitarian movements and states are
easy to understand, They lust for power, power unchecked,
untrammeled. When they propose the Fiihrer principle, it is
with the understanding that they would not submit to the dic-
tates of a Fiihrer, but that they would be the Fiihrers.

Nietzsche said that only those who know how to obey can
also command. Sophistry! Stalin didn't obey, not even
Lenin, whose last will he refused to make public.

Kemal Pasha never obeyed an order while he was an officer
in the Sultan's army and slapped the face of General Lyman
von Sanders when the German general of the Turkish army in-
sisted that his orders be obeyed.

Mussolini, a deserter from the Italian army before the first
World War, returned from Switzerland to serve in the Italian
army only after he had become a paid agent of the French.

Of Hitler, Goehring, Goebbels, and Himinler so much has
already been said that I can only repeat that not one of them
has ever obeyed orders, not even the dictates of reason.

Why, then, do the youth of so many countries flock to the
banners of the Fiihrers? The more intelligent do so because
they want to become leaders. With them totalitarianism is not
a philosophy, but a career, a business. The unintelligent ones
accept the Fiihrer principle because obeying orders relieves
them of responsibility, of individual action, and permits them
to commit mass cruelty, anonymous cruelty.

The cruelty of any mass is greater than the multiple of the
usual cruelty of the individuals of that mass. Revolutions,
wars, pogroms, purges, and liquidations are expressions of mass
sadism.

As an apology of Nazism, it is often suggested that the Ger-
mans are considerably happier now under Hitler than they
were under the republic or under the Kaiser. Has, then, the
happiness of the German people depended on the axman's

326 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

block and the daily murders committed in the Gestapo cellars
and in the concentration camps? Are the Italians also happier
since Mussolini has reduced them to thoughtless rubber stamps
and amused them with the stomach cramps of those to whom
he has given the castor oil treatment? Are the Russians, too,
happier since liquidation has become a theory of government,
and the Spaniards now that the garrote functions again.

The truth is that under a totalitarian government no one is
permitted to be unhappy. The unhappy ones are shot, liqui-
dated, beheaded, or made to swallow a liquid bomb, the castor
oil of Benito Mussolini.

The Poles watched with glee the maceration of the Jews and
applauded the Nazis who had thrown them a temporary bone
from the body of the Czechs.

Had England, France, and the Scandinavians not allowed the
Nazis to wax strong on the blood of their victims, there would
have been no war today.

The answer to Cain's "Am I my brother's keeper?" is "Yes."
But the financiers and profiteers are more anxious to keep their
boodle together than to preserve the integrity of their souls and
their countries.

Bolsheviks, Nazis, Fascists, and Phalangists hoisted them-
selves to power by denouncing dictatorships. Mussolini
marched on Rome to break the dictatorship of the unions; on
Ethiopia to free the natives from the tyranny of their rulers;
and on Greece to save them from the clutches of England.
Hitler orated against the illegal procedures of the Weimar re-
public. Japan invaded China to rescue the Chinese from the
Chinese.

If we are to save civilization, we should destroy its self-
appointed saviors wherever found and under whatever guise,
before it is too late.

Because love relations are beautiful, we don't absolve the
rapist and the degenerate. Because we believe that every
mature man and woman should perform some sort of daily work,

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 327

we don't excuse slavery and do not urge that the murderers,
the thieves, and the hangmen should be required to operate so
many hours every day.

The people of this country have their backs up against a
wall and are faced with the choice of either fighting to remain
individuals or surrendering to the despoilers and becoming
pieces of jelly with no responsibilities of their own and no will
of their own. One has to choose one side or the other.

We are fools to allow the totalitarian in our midst to con-
tinue their political opposition to us and to treat them as legi-
mate political opponents. Totalitarians kill their political
enemies after they have defeated them!

Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler have killed all those who have
allowed them to grab power. We in this country should know
by now the processes of the political wolves. Totalitarians
of all shades should be treated as predatory animals, as crim-
inals at large, and not as political antagonists.

All this presented itself clearly to me while I was in Italy in
1932. The Italians are simple people and no good at hiding
or covering up their thoughts. They don't obscure their sim-
ple-mindedness with more obscure philosophies and theories.
They said quite simply, "We are poor. We can become rich
by robbing the wealthy. Individually we know how to do it,
but as a nation, we must proceed in a different way. Mussolini
knows that game. Countries don't become wealthy by work-
ing hard, but by robbing other countries. That's how France
and England have become rich. Now Mussolini plans to take
it away from them. Viva Mussolini!"

XXVII

WHEN I came home from Europe, I realized that the
house in the country, which had given me so much pleas-
ure, was now too big. Three of our children had married.
Only Mirel, the youngest, was with us. In the studio I had
built for her she was working on a large mural in which a hun-
dred or more people were standing about a speaker whose
glaring eyes and open mouth stamped him as a fanatic. The
other faces showed ecstasy, desire for vengeance, and religious
transport. Some looked as if they were on the road to Gol-
gotha; others as if on the road to a paradise. Mirel had
digested well the letters I had sent from abroad. At the next
family meeting, my in-laws and my married children thought
I was generalizing and exaggerating.

"You are too pessimistic. It is preposterous to think that
Germany could be ruled by a man like Hitler. Don't publish
your fears. You'll look ridiculous and ruin your reputation/*
they said.

A few months later Hitler was in power, and the Reichstag
palace was burned; the Nazis unleashed their fury upon all
those who had opposed them, and Gerhart Hauptmann, after
running away to Switzerland, came back to his beloved father-
land and wrote the first Nazi play, Die Goldene Harfe.

"But, Konrad, who could have believed itl"

Ever since, whenever the totalitarians have done something

328

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 329

to outrage the world, I see people raise their eyes to the heavens
and say, "Who could have believed it!"

I talked to editors and publishers about the danger to our
democracy, to all democracies. No one was much interested,
and no one wanted to understand that the governments of
France and England did not represent their people. It was
hard to make them realize that the ocean was no obstacle to
the radio and the telephone, weapons that can be used in a
more destructive manner than tanks and bombers.

"Too fantastic,'* they said. Von Zieckurch, the editor of
Pictorial Review, published only part of the material I had
gathered for him in Europe. A German-American in the or-
ganization prevented him from printing anything derogatory
to Germany or the Nazis. When Von Zieckurch put up some
fight in my behalf, he lost the editorship of die magazine, and
died shortly afterward.

In November we closed and shuttered the house, bought a
trailer wagon, hitched it to our car, and Naomi, Mirel, and I
went a-Gypsying through our country, stopped wherever we
felt like stopping, and traveled sixteen thousand miles in five
months to reach California.

A story about the trials and tribulations of the migratory
workers in California was returned to me by the editor of a
national magazine with the following note, "Such conditions
don't exist in the United States, and if they do, we ought not
to talk about them/'

The note frightened me not a little. "Such conditions don t
exist, and if they do, we ought not to talk about them/' What
else should I talk about? Had I not earned the right to talk
about conditions as I saw them in this country?

Meanwhile the women of Spain had voted out of power the
liberal government that had given them the vote and had re-
turned to power those who had repeatedly said they would take
the vote from them. Had women ever been more perverse!

330 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

What was significant was the fact that the first Spanish republic
had been defeated by Hitler and Mussolini in their first battle
against democracy.

No one here saw the danger to our country. No one wanted
to realize that a wedge was being driven in Spain at the weakest
point to split open the democratic structure under which we
here live.

I spoke about Spain before women's clubs and universities,
in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, and Arkan-
sas and tried to explain that we were part of the world and
not a fragment of a continent.

I was glad to see Chaplin again, but was disappointed in
him.

Twenty years of success, adulation, and riches had dulled his
perceptions. He was no longer incensed at injustice, believed
in capital punishment now that he was no longer in danger
of ever being subjected to it, thought the Japanese were a won-
derful people and were civilizing Asia, and believed that suc-
cess, either individual or national, was a proof of superiority.
I had loved the impish elf and was pained to see him fall prey
to such mental slush.

After six months in California, during which Naomi and
Mirel painted and exhibited, and I talked and talked, but did
little else, we went back East in our trailer by a different route,
the Southern one, and camped here and there, wherever we
could or were allowed to.

After one of my lectures in Virginia, a woman jumped up on
the platform and shouted, "We have come here to hear a color-
ful personality talk to us colorfully about a colorful people.
Instead of that, he has painted a dismal picture of a world we
are not interested in. We are not interested in what is hap-
pening in Europe."

After several such experiences I stopped lecturing and began
to write again.

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 331

Instead of love stories, I wrote a book on the Crusades and
another on the Balkans. The last chapter of The Incredible
Balkans pictured Carol's flight from Roumania. There was
only one trouble with the Balkan book; it was six years ahead
of time.

The house in Connecticut was too big. I had taken great
pride in the barns and the fields, but now that I wasn't per-
mitted to do any physical work as a result of the beating I had
received from the Roumanian hoodlums, barns, fields, horses,
and cows were of no interest to me. My two black Perche-
rons, Jimmy and Lady, were getting fat and lazy.

Before all the leaves of the maple trees were on the lawn, we
were again on the go. I was happier in the ten-by-twenty
trailer wagon than in the big house.

We were in Texas when President Roosevelt was elected the
second time.

While we were on the road, the Franco rebellion had gotten
into full swing. England and France could have avoided what
has since happened to them if they had come to the assistance
of the legally elected government of Spain. The Tories of
England and the cowards of France, who ruled their countries,
knifed the loyalists in the back, refused to sell them armament,
and winked at Hitler and Mussolini, who sent guns and planes
to Franco and tens of thousands of "volunteer" soldiers and
officers. The stupid Tories and cowards were afraid to have a
liberal Spain as neighbor. Should England, as I hope, win the
war, England will emerge a much more socialistic country than
Spain was at the time of the Second Republic. As for us, we
refused to sell arms to the government of Spain, but sold guns
and ammunition to Germany and Italy, who passed them on to
Franco and his Moors. The wedge was widening the crack
in the democratic structure, and we sold the hammers to the
wreckers. And now we must buttress the walls we have
helped to undermine, lest we, too, be buried also under the
d6bris.

332 ITS THE GYPSY IN ME

Had the democracies acted then in self-preservation, we
wouldn't now be running the danger of losing what we have
striven for during a thousand years. As things stand now, it
looks as if the profit system is about to swallow itself after de-
stroying democracy. What I dread is not economic commu-
nism, but political communism and totalitarianism.

When we arrived in Hollywood again, my agent told me one
day that a motion picture producer, who had Gary Cooper
under contract for one picture, was in the market for a special
kind of a story.

Needing money, I thought of an unfinished novel, based on
the life of Sir Richard Burton, that I had on hand. I reduced
the content to a dozen pages, and sent the synopsis to my agent.

Two days later the producer made me an offer.

Unwilling to haggle, I told my agent to accept the bid and
make the contract.

When he offered to close the deal, the first offer was with-
drawn, and a more disadvantageous one was substituted.

I then offered the story personally to a second producer who
became interested in my story, but the first producer informed
him that he had priority, and, since the producers wouldn't
compete against each other, I was forced to accept a still lower
offer by the first one or lose the sale altogether.

Every producer in Hollywood had become a Mussolini, had
rebuilt his office, placing his desk far away from the entrance,"
and was issuing ultimatums.

The money from the sale of the Burton story bought a new
car and a new trailer and gave me leisure to do some relief
work for the refugees of the dust bowl camped at Schafters,
some ninety miles from Hollywood. It seemed incomprehen-
sible why a nation that made a present of sixty-five million
bushels of wheat to the Chinese shouldn't feed die hungry of
its own people!

Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen Gahagan, and some

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 333

other members of the motion picture profession raised enough
money to give a Christmas dinner to fifteen thousand hungry
Oakies.

My wife, my daughter, and I lived in a cabin in Schafters
and did what we could to help them. Half of the people were
practically naked. Many of the children had pellagra.
Families of ten slept in one bed or huddled on the floor of a
tent.

Some of those landless farmers had been on the road five
years, but still carried a plough on their trucks, hoping to use
it some day.

It was strange to see them group themselves by states, the
people from Arkansas in one bunch and those from Oklahoma
in another. The burden of their talk was that they were not
to blame for what had happened to them. No one would admit
that he had been tractored out of his home and land, or that
they were all victims of their own stupidity and ignorance, hav-
ing ploughed up land that should have been left for grass.

Before the influx of the Oakies in California, when labor
wasn't over-plentiful, cotton pickers had been paid a dollar
and twenty-five cents a hundred.

To reduce the price of picking, the large cotton growers sent
out agents and leaflets and used the radio to inform the Oakies
on the road that there was plenty of work, well-paid and pleas-
ant, in the land of perpetual sunshine.

The Oakies swarmed into the Golden State. When there
were ten times too many laborers, the growers cut the price
down to seventy cents a hundred.

The Oakies refused to work for that price and fought sheriffs
and vigilantes who burned their tents down or ordered them
out of the county, ostensibly for sanitary reasons. When some
of the hungrier bands of Oakies did accept work, fields that
were ordinarily picked in a month by a hundred men were
picked in a week by a thousand.

The picking over, the migratory workers were ordered out

334 IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME

of the county lest they become a plague on it. The same peo-
ple who had enticed the dust bowl migrants to California to
obtain cheap and plentiful labor were the loudest to protest
against their presence after the labor was done.

All this was in a play I was working on, but before I had
finished it, John Steinbeck's splendid book came out, and I
dropped my project.

The wounds inflicted upon me by the Roumanian hoodlums
years before opened again, and I was taken to the hospital on
Christmas day.

I was doing some work on a picture for Deanna Durbin,
when Benito Mussolini's son, who had come to Hollywood at
the invitation of a producer, sent word that he wanted to visit
our studio. During the noon hour technicians and actors got
together and sent word to the front office that they refused to
vouch for Vittorio Mussolini's life if he set foot within a stage
building.

During that noon hour someone had read aloud the passage
in Vittorio's book in which he described the poetico-aesthetic
joy he had experienced watching one of his bombs fall into a
group of Ethiopians,

All the other motion picture studios advised Vittorio that his
life was not safe if he visited them. Some actors and actresses
threatened to abandon work the moment he appeared on a mo-
tion picture set.

Oh, yes, the political instincts of our people are healthy.
The political instincts of most people under a democracy are
healthy. The English and the French peoples were not to
blame for the attitude of their government toward totalitarian-
ism. The French and the English peoples were pleading with
their governments to let them go to the rescue of the Spanish
democracy. It had just happened that both the English and
the French were ruled by the most cowardly and undemocratic
elements of their political machines.

The people of America, too, were with the loyalists and were

IT'S THE GYPSY IN ME 335

shamed by the hypocrisy of those who refused to admit there
were German and Italian soldiers and armament in Franco's
camp even after they had seen those things with their own
eyes.

Hats off to the workers in the motion picture industry for
their reception to Vittorio Mussolini in Hollywood. It was the
first ray of light in the dismal picture of three hundred million
ostriches keeping their heads buried in the sand.

The producer who had bought my Burton story went out
of business, but, before doing so, he sold my story to another
company for ten times as much as he paid me.

"It's a very good story/' he informed me, grinning.

I sold another story, one based on the life of Hans Christian
Andersen, for Gary Cooper, and that, too, is about to be sold
to another producer, for twenty times what I was paid for it.

And so we went back East, by car and trailer Gypsies De
Luxe.

XVIII

A FTER THIRTY YEARS of writing, I feel that I am at the
/JL beginning and not at the end of my career. I have pub-
lished thirty-five volumes and more than five hundred stories.
There isn't a word that I have written that I regret.

This country has given me honors and fame for which I have
paid in my own coin. I have given the best that there was in
me. I shall continue to do so. I have not written for money;
I have demanded money for what I have written.

We are on the eve of a great struggle, a struggle that will
decide whether we shall live with greater and greater dignity
as men, or in lower and lower abjection as slaves. I shall fight
on the side of more and not less democracy, of more and not
less freedom, and for a greater measure of folk participation
in the affairs of this country. I know that all my children are
with me to the last struggle; that they would rather we all
perish than live in a slave world.

Our democracy has made mistakes, and it will continue to
make them. But only under a democracy can past mistakes be
corrected. We'd much sooner be wrong in a democracy than
right in a totalitarian state.

We, the Bercovicis, know our country. We have been
through it a dozen times and listened to the hopes and aspira-
tions of myriads of people in a dozen languages. I know this
country. Our democracy can be betrayed, but it cannot be de-
feated. It may stumble, but it will not fall.

336

ITS THE GYPSY IN ME 337

I look back at the last thirty-five years and ask myself, "If you
had to do it over again, would you?** And the answer is "Yes,
I would."

I would come again in an immigrant boat, marry the same
woman, have the same children and the same friends, suffer the
same disappointments, enjoy the same successes, make the
same mistakes, quarrel with the same enemies, kiss the same
women, drink the same wine, and write the same stories. But
there is one thing I wouldn't do again, and that is face empty-
handed, a monster in the Sports Palast of Berlin,

However, millions of others have made the same mistake.
And while there is life, there is hope.

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