It was already dark when we walked back to Williams's house. Behind us walked Mr. Adams, arm in arm with Becky; and sighing, he muttered:

"No, no, gentlemen, it would be foolish to think that there are few remarkable people in America."

We passed the evening at the home of a certain Carmel architect where the local intellectuals gathered to spend an evening.

In a quite large Spanish hall, with wooden beams under the ceiling, a lot of people assembled. The host, as little as a doll, shaven, with long artistic hair, was respectfully offering to those who had gathered cooling drinks with syrups. His daughter walked up to the grand piano with a look of determination and sonorously played several pieces. Everyone listened with extreme attention. It reminded us of the dumb scene in Inspector-General. The guests stopped in the same positions as when the music found them, some with glass raised to the lips, others with their body bent in course of conversation, still others holding a plate on which lay the skimpy pastry. Only one little fellow, whose shoulders were equal in breadth to his height, did not evince sufficient delicacy. He was telling something out loud. His ears, overgrown with flesh and flattened, betrayed the boxer in him. Mr. Adams led us to him. He was presented to us as a former champion of the world, a Mr. Sharkey, a wealthy man (three million dollars), who had forsaken his affairs and was resting at Carmel among the radical intellectuals, with whom he keenly sympathized.

Mr. Sharkey joyfully stared out of his palish little eyes, and at once let us feel his muscles. All the guests had already felt Mr. Sharkey's muscles, but still he could not rest and was constantly bending his short and mighty arms.

"Let's have a drink," Mr. Sharkey said suddenly.

With these words he led away with him about fifteen people who were the guests of the architect, including his musical daughter and us, with the Williamses and the Adamses.

The champion of the world had a fine little house, the windows of which directly faced the Pacific Ocean, which rolled its moon-illuminated waves right up to it. Sharkey opened a closet from which appeared rums, gins, various sorts of whisky, and even a Greek mastika, that is, everything that was the very strongest ever prepared by the world's alcohol distilleries.

Having made some hellish mixtures and distributed the glasses among the guests, Mr. Sharkey opened his pale eyes wider than ever and began to lie at a great rate.

In the first place, he declared that he was convinced of the innocence of Bruno Hauptmann, the murderer of Lindbergh's baby, and he could even appear as a witness in this case, if he were not afraid to expose his connection with bootleggers.

Then he told us how once, while in command of a three-masted schooner, he got down to the South Pole, how the schooner was caught by ice and how the crew wanted to kill him, but he alone suppressed the mutiny of the whole crew and safely steered the ship into warm latitudes, This was too colourful, too corsairlike a tale, to refrain from having one more drink to celebrate the occasion.

Then Mr. Sharkey informed us that he admired radical intellectuals, and that in America it was necessary to make a revolution as soon as possible. Therefore, he led us into his bedroom and showed us three daughters sleeping in their three little beds. Here he told us quite romantic tale of how his wife had run away from him with his own butler, how he ran after her, caught up with her and, revolver in hand, compelled the treacherous butler to marry the woman he had seduced. He taught his little girls to march, regarding that as proper upbringing.

In short, Mr. Sharkey did not let his guests be bored for a single minute.

He led his guests into the gymnasium, took off his shirt, and naked to the waist, began to raise himself on the parallel bars. In conclusion, he put on his boxing gloves and challenged any and all comers to a friendly bout.

In Mr. Adams's eyes lit that little spark, that glint which we had seen before, when he had sat down in the electric chair and had sung spiritual hymns with the Molokans. That man had to try everything.

Someone put leather gloves on his hands, and, with a boyish whoop, he flung himself headlong at the champion of the world. The retired champion began to hop all around Mr. Adams, shielding himself in make-believe fear. Both fat men hopped around and whooped hysterically with laughter. In the end Mr. Adams fell on a bench and began to rub his slightly injured shoulder. Then the guests drank another glass and went home.

In the morning, after bidding farewell to Lincoln Steffens, we departed for Hollywood.

Half a year later we received a letter from our friend, Mr. Adams. The envelope was full of newspaper clippings, and we learned much news about Carmel. Rhys Williams finished his book about the Soviet Union but now, with the publication of the project of the new constitution, he again resumed his work in order to enter into the book the necessary additions.

The kind Mr. Sharkey, as naive as a child, captain of a schooner and bootlegger, champion of the world, Sharkey proved to be a police agent connected with a fascistic ex-soldier's organization, and besides that—an old provocateur who at one time had betrayed Big Bill Haywood, the famous leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. And he was not at all Mr. Sharkey. He was also Captain Boxy, alias Berge, alias Forester. At the time of the war, when he betrayed Bill Haywood in Chicago, he was the famous Chicago racketeer who bore the name "Captain X."

And a month later we read in the papers that in the city of Carmel, the state of California, in the seventieth year of his life, the writer Lincoln Steffens died.

And so it was not fated for him to die in the land of socialism.

He died from paralysis of the heart—at his typewriter. On the paper which stuck out of it was an unfinished article about the Spanish events. The last words of that article were the following:

"We Americans must remember that we shall have to wage a similar battle against the Fascists."

35 Four Standard Types

IT IS TERRIBLE to say it right out, but Hollywood, whose fame has gone around the world hundreds of times, Hollywood, about which in the last twenty years more books have been written than in two hundred years about Shakespeare, the great Hollywood, on whose firmament stars rise and fall a million times faster than astronomers have told us about it, Hollywood, of whom dream hundreds of thousands of girls in all ends of the terrestrial globe—this Hollywood is dull, hellishly dull. And if a yawn continues several seconds in any small American town, here it stretches into a full minute. And there are times when one simply cannot muster enough strength to close his mouth. There you sit, your eyes squinting with boredom, your mouth wide open, like a trapped lion.

Hollywood is a correctly planned, excellently paved, and finely lighted J city in which live three hundred thousand people. All these three hundred thousand either work in the motion-picture industry or serve those who work in it. The entire city is occupied with one business—it makes pictures, or, as they say in Hollywood, it "shoots" pictures. The noise of the photographing apparatus is much like the noise of a machine-gun, and it is from that resemblance the term "shoot" is derived. All this honourable community "shoots" in one year nearly eight hundred pictures—like all other figures in America, a grandiose figure.

The first stroll through Hollywood streets was sheer torment for us. Strange! Most of the passers-by seemed familiar. We could not rid ourselves of the thought that we had met these people somewhere, that we were acquainted with them, and that we knew something about them. But where we had seen them and what we knew about them—you could kill us, but we could not remember!