Sixty Days to Live (22 page)

They ran on past the Mansion House, down Cornhill, Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, to the East End. In the Commercial Road Hemmingway noticed that many of the shops had been looted; but all was quiet now except for patrolling squads of police and an occasional armoured car rolling by on its solid rubber wheels.

At last they veered south and, a few minutes later, passed through the gates of the West India Dock. Crossing railway lines and bridges, they wound their way between Customs sheds and dark out-buildings until they eventually pulled up on a wharfside to which a big ship was moored. There were a dozen other vans there besides those of the convoy with which Hemmingway had come, and the women from the earlier arrivals were already moving slowly up the gangways under big arc-lights into the ship,

Hemmingway got down, said good-bye to the driver, and
waited patiently at the back of the van until the Sergeant came along and unlocked it. The van was pitch-dark inside and a blowsy woman fell out when the doors were opened. As she was helped to her feet she let out a stream of blasphemous curses.

‘Steady there,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Letting fly at us won’t do any good.’

An officer who had come up added: ‘For your own sakes, as well as ours, please don’t make a fuss. We’re going to put you in this ship, where you’ll be well fed and taken care of. As soon as you’re all on board it will take you out into the estuary of the Thames.’

‘Little trip to Southend, eh?’ said a fat old woman jovially.

‘That’s it, mother,’ laughed the officer. ‘We’re giving you a holiday for nothing and we want you to make the best of it. You’ll be much safer out there in the ship, too, than you would be in London.’

Hemmingway was standing just behind the officer, craning his head to catch the first glimpse of Lavina as she scrambled out of the van. The arc-lamps suddenly glinted upon golden hair. It was a natural blonde, but a second later, he saw the blue-eyed, haggard face beneath it; and his heart seemed to sink into his boots. It was not Lavina.

Although at times Hemmingway felt things very deeply, he was not given to showing his emotions freely. He had learned in adversity that it is only a waste of time to lose control of one’s feelings, for, like many successful people, he had had a hard struggle in his early days.

His father had been one of those old-fashioned professors who coupled a brilliant brain with a congenital disability to make or keep money. Even when the Professor had left his native city of Cardiff to take up the Chair in Mathematics which he had been offered at a minor American University, and so passed to what was for him comparative affluence, he had consistently fallen a prey to every rogue in the matter of his small investments; and he had an incurable habit of lending money to people who never paid him back. In addition, instead of marrying one of America’s ten thousand heiresses, he had married one of America’s ten million nice girls who have no money at all.

That she, too, had brains and could write interesting little monographs upon such subjects as Ming porcelain and the use of cosmetics in Ancient Egypt did not materially help the family budget.

In one respect Hemmingway’s inheritance was remarkably rich; as he had not only derived a remarkable flair for figures from his father but also a wide knowledge and love of all things beautiful from his mother. But in the material sense they had been able to do practically nothing for him at all.

His parents had been vague, kindly, untidy people, living in a world of ideas that far transcended any sort of social round or even the calls of their own kitchen. They had lived mostly on tinned foods, grudgingly served by a succession of hired helps who despised them for their lack of practicability and robbed them unmercifully, although they never knew it. No one ever
came to the house except visiting intellectuals, and when money ran short they just sacked the hired help, barely noticing the difference, and pigged it on their own until they could afford to engage a new one.

In consequence, Hemmingway’s childhood had been an exceptionally lonely one. He never went to parties or played with the neighbours’ children, so by the time he went to school he had not acquired the common basis upon which most youthful friendships are formed and was already something of a mystic. Added to which, he was mentally so far in advance of the other children of his age that they either disliked or were vaguely frightened of him. Only the fact that he was physically strong saved him from serious bullying, and after a time his schoolfellows were content to leave him to himself.

On the other hand, this isolation had its advantages; since, if his parents neglected him in other respects, they watched and tended the development of his brain with all the loving care that any horticulturist ever lavished on a black tulip.

Fortunately for all concerned, he loved reading and took to learning like a duck to water; so that during those countless hours when he should have been playing Redskins or Robbers with his contemporaries he was mastering subjects which few boys study until they have reached the University. He took scholarship examinations as a joke, so his education was little strain upon his thriftless parents; but it was after he had passed out of the University that his real troubles began.

It is one thing to have brains and quite another to convert them into money. He was a lanky, untidy youth in ill-fitting clothes. He lacked every social grace and had not even attempted to master the simplest sports. Moreover, he had not a single friend in the world who could be counted on to assist his advancement, except those connected with the scholastic profession; and that, with the example of his father before him, he was determined not to enter.

Although his reading had covered a multitude of subjects by no means all of them had been of a learned nature. Through autobiographies and magazines he was just as familiar with the social functions of a London Season as he was with the quantum theory; and, quite definitely, he wanted to qualify by means of money, personality and achievement for a place among the ruling
classes of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, how to set about it he had not the faintest idea.

Having no money, he decided to travel; which may sound a paradox, but is certainly not so in the case of a young man brought up in the United States. For two terms he slaved as a junior usher—a job he hated—at a local day school; but it enabled him to save enough to pay his fare to Europe, and during the next eighteen months he hiked through a dozen countries.

He found it intensely interesting to see the historic places of which he had read. Contact with people of various nationalities broadened his views immensely, and it enabled him to get into true perspective the political theories that he had formulated. But at the end of that time he suddenly woke up to the fact that, although tramping from city to city and doing odd jobs for a week or two here and there in order to earn his keep provided an excellent appendix to his magnificent education, it simply was not getting him anywhere at all. He was just as far from a seat in the Houses of Parliament or on the Board of the Bank of England as he had been two years before on leaving his University, and certainly no nearer to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

After a spell of work as translator for a German publisher in Bremen he had made enough to pay his passage home, and he settled in New York with the determination to carve out a career for himself just as millions of young men had done before him.

Yet that was far easier determined than accomplished. Apart from physical labour, teaching and translating seemed to be his only marketable assets. He wrote some short stories and a novel, but no one would take them. It seemed that he had not that kind of mind. He made few friends, although he gradually bettered his appearance and was quick to pick up social mannerisms on the rare occasions when he was able to mix with moneyed people of culture.

For three years he maintained a bitter struggle, taking job after job to keep himself alive, but he chucked one after the other directly he realised that each was nothing but a blind alley and had saved a few weeks’ rent.

Towards the end of that time he took a job as a professional guide to a New York tourist agency. He knew the city well by then, and few people could have done better justice to the Art collections and antiques in its museums. In taking the job
he had hoped that he would at least come into contact with a number of interesting people and, perhaps, improve himself by going about with them; but he was bitterly disappointed.

Nine out of ten of the visitors whom he had to take round were idle, stupid people with more money than sense. The magnificent Egyptian collection in the Metropolitan Museum bored them to tears. Most of them did not know a Van Dyck from a Reubens, and when he took them to the Indian Museum, where treasures can be seen from the whole American continent which have no counterpart in any European collection, they grumbled bitterly because it was six miles from the centre of the city and they considered the time involved in a visit practically wasted.

All that most of them wanted to see was the view from the top of the Empire State Building, the great cinemas and stores, and, particularly, the night haunts. Both women and men kept him up taking them to places until the small hours of the morning, so that he found himself jaded and exhausted when he had to report to the office to take on another sightseer at 10 o’clock the following morning.

He made up his mind to chuck that too as soon as he had saved enough in tips—which was practically all he got out of it—to lay off for a little and look for something else. But, all unknown to him, his lucky star was just about to appear above the horizon.

Sir Samuel Curry had been in New York on a business trip. Negotiations had hung fire owing to the illness of an American steel king and were not completed until ‘Sam’ had missed his boat by a couple of hours; so he had found himself in New York with nothing to do for three days until he could leave for England on the next.

He had often visited New York before but it occurred to him now that it might be rather an idea to see something of the place outside its social life, which he already knew well. He decided that, anyhow, he would devote a day to looking round; the other two could easily be passed with the host of hospitable Americans who had only to be rung up and would be delighted to entertain him.

The hotel had a tie-up with the agency with which Hemmingway worked, so he was sent along to report to Sam and they spent the day together. Sam was not really a brilliant man. His success was due to clear-headedness, honesty in his business
dealings, a colossal capacity for hard work, and a flair for employing people in the right places who were more gifted than himself.

When they parted that evening Sam had not rung up any of his American friends with the idea of filling in his next two days. Instead, he told Hemmingway to report again the following morning. He had been struck by the unusual way in which Hemmingway quite casually assessed artistic trends and ancient customs in terms of money.

Having found, for once, an interested listener, he explained, while taking Sam round the museums, how changes of climate had made or wrecked historic markets; how fortunes had been made by modern designers who were clever enough to study and adopt ancient fashions; how the germ of every modern invention had preceded it by hundreds of years, but remained undeveloped through lack of initiative or capital. But always there was that quiet preoccupation with finance applied to encyclopædic knowledge—the kind of knowledge that not one financier in a thousand possessed.

On the second night Sam kept Hemmingway to dine with him at the Ritz Carlton, and they talked upon a multitude of subjects which did not ordinarily come into the sphere of a professional guide. By that time Sam was absolutely convinced that in this tall, wise-eyed young man he had got something; and details never mattered to Sam once he had made up his mind about a thing. When they parted that night he said:

‘Tell the agency to-morrow morning that you’re leaving. I’ll pay them compensation if necessary. Here’s a thousand dollars to pay any bills you may have and buy any odds-and-ends you want. Pack your bags and meet me here at 8 o’clock to-morrow night. The
Normandie
sails at 10 and I’m taking you with me to Europe.’

Hemmingway’s big chance had come. He asked no questions, neither did he give way to the immense elation he felt and pour out a spate of jumbled thanks. He just gave that sudden radiant smile of his and said:

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll be here.’

From that moment Hemmingway was made. On the voyage back Sam saw that he was no young man to put into an ordinary job, however good. He was so vastly knowledgeable, so sound
in all his views, that he would be infinitely more valuable as an ideas man and an assessor before whom to place all sorts of knotty problems for a fresh, clear, logical opinion.

When Hemmingway arrived in London he stepped into another world—the world he had dreamed of for years. Sam installed him in St. James’s Square, introduced him to his friends, and taught him the intricacies of his many businesses. Soon Hemmingway was formulating a score of new schemes for investing Sam’s surplus profits, and Sam found himself never taking any major decision without talking it over with him first.

Very wisely Sam never made him a director of any of his companies, as he did not want Hemmingway’s energies dissipated in the tiresome routine of board meetings. He worked alone in his room at St. James’s Square and remained, outwardly, no more than Sam’s private secretary; but within a few months he had mastered the essentials of Sam’s innumerable interests, and in the following seven years he made him another million.

His salary was princely and, with the handsome presents that Sam made him after every successful deal they pulled off together, he now had many thousands of pounds’ worth of investments of his own. That Sam would do nothing without him was known in big business circles; so, in spite of his lack of official position in any of the companies, he had power, influence and prestige.