‘What else is there to do?’
Wells’s humble origin had left its mark, not in his work or outlook, but as in my own case, in an over-emphasis of personal sensitiveness. I remember once he aspirated an ‘h’ in the wrong place and blushed to the roots of his hair. Such a little thing for a great man to blush about. I remember him talking about an uncle who had been head gardener of a titled Englishman’s estate. His uncle’s ambition had been that Wells should go into domestic service. Said H. G. ironically: ‘But for the grace of God I might have been a second butler!’
Wells wanted to know how I became interested in socialism. It was not until I came to the United States and met Upton Sinclair, I told him. We were driving to his house in Pasadena for lunch and he asked me in his soft-spoken way if I believed in the profit system. I said facetiously that it required an accountant to answer that. It was a disarming question, but instinctively I felt it went to the very root of the matter, and from that moment I became interested and saw politics not as history but as an economic problem.
Wells questioned my having, as I thought, extrasensory perception. I told him of an incident which might have been more than a coincidence. Henri Cochet, the tennis player, another friend and I went into a cocktail bar in Biarritz. Three gambling wheels were on the bar-room wall, each with numbers from one to ten. Dramatically I announced, half in fun, that I felt possessed with psychic power, that I would spin the three wheels, and that the first wheel would stop at nine, the second at four and the third at seven. And, lo, the first wheel stopped at nine, the second at four and the third at seven – a million-to-one chance.
Wells said it was purely a coincidence. ‘But the repetition of coincidence is worthy of examination,’ I said, and related a story that happened to me as a boy. I was passing a grocer’s shop in Camberwell Road and noticed the shutters were up, which was unusual. Something prompted me to climb on the window-ledge and look through the diamond hole of the shutter. Inside it was dark and deserted, but the groceries were all there, and there was a large packing-case in the centre of the floor. I jumped from the ledge with a sense of repugnance and went on my way. Soon after, a murder case exploded. Edgar Edwards, an affable old gentleman of sixty-five, had acquired five grocery stores by simply bludgeoning the owners to death with a sash-weight and then taking over their business. In that grocery shop in Camberwell, in that packing-case, were his three last victims, Mr and Mrs Darby and their baby.
But Wells would have none of it; he said that it was commonplace in everyone’s life to have many coincidences, and that it proved nothing. That was the end of the discussion, but I could have told him of another experience, of the time when I as a boy stopped at a saloon in the London Bridge Road and asked for a glass of water. A bluff, amiable gentleman with a dark moustache served me. For some reason I could not drink the water. I pretended to, but as soon as the man turned to talk to a customer I put the glass down and left. Two weeks later, George Chapman, proprietor of the Crown public house in the London Bridge Road, was charged with murdering five wives by poisoning them with strychnine. His latest victim had been dying in a room above the saloon the day he gave me the glass of water. Both Chapman and Edwards were hanged.
Apropos of the esoteric, about a year before I built my house in Beverly Hills I received an anonymous letter stating that the writer was a clairvoyant and in a dream had seen a house perched on a hill-top, fronted by a lawn that came to a point like the bow of a boat, a house with forty windows and a large music room with a tall ceiling. The ground was the sacred site upon which ancient Indian tribes had made human sacrifice two thousand years ago. The house was haunted and must never be left in darkness. The letter stated that so long as I was never alone in it and there was light, there would be no visitations.
At the time, I dismissed the letter as being written by a crank and put it aside as something odd and amusing. But going through my desk two years later, I came upon the letter and reread it. Strangely enough, the description of the house and lawn was accurate. I had not counted the windows and thought I would do so, and to my astonishment I found there were exactly forty.
Although not a believer in ghosts, I decided to experiment. Wednesday was the staff’s night off and the house was empty, so I dined out. Immediately after dinner I returned home and went into the organ room, which was long and narrow like the nave of a church, and had a Gothic ceiling. After drawing the curtains I turned out every light. Then, groping my way to an armchair, I sat in silence for at least ten minutes. The heavy darkness stimulated my senses and I imagined shapeless forms floating before my eyes; but I rationalized that it was the moonlight coming through a slight crack in the curtains, reflected on a crystal decanter.
I pulled the curtains closer and the floating forms disappeared. Then again I waited in the darkness – it must have been five minutes. As nothing happened, I began talking audibly: ‘If there are spirits here, please give me a manifestation.’ I waited for some time, but nothing happened. Then I continued: ‘Isn’t there some way of communicating? Perhaps
