You Can't Go Home Again (68 page)

So in the late summer of 1934 he sailed from New York, went straight to London, took a flat, and settled down to hard, intensive labour. All through the autumn and winter of that year he lived in London in his self-imposed exile. It was a memorable time for him, a time during which, as he was later to realise, he discovered an entire new world. All the events, the experiences, and the people that he met became engraved indelibly upon his life.

And the event which exercised the most profound influence upon him in that alien air was his meeting with the great American author, Mr. Lloyd McHarg. Everything seemed to lead up to that. And what made his meeting with Mr. McHarg so important to him was that now, for the first time, he met a living embodiment of his own dearest and most secret dream. For when Mr. Lloyd McHarg swept like a cyclone through his life, George knew that he was having his first encounter in the flesh with that fair Medusa, Fame herself Never before had he beheld the lady, or witnessed the effects of her sweet blandishments. Now he saw the whole thing for himself._

32. The Universe of Daisy Purvis

On arriving in London, George had the good fortune to sublet a flat in Ebury Street. The young military gentleman who condescended to let him have the place possessed one of those resounding double-jointed names that one comes across so often among the members of the upper or would-be-upper branches of English society. George was never able to get all the mouth-filling syllables of that grand name quite straight, but suffice it to say that his landlord was a Major Somebody Somebody Somebody Bixley-Dunton.

He was a good-looking man, tall, young, ruddy, with the lean and well-conditioned figure of a cavalryman. He was an engaging kind of fellow, too—so engaging that when he made the arrangements which permitted George to take over the premises, he managed to insinuate into his bill for rent a thumping sum that covered all the electricity and gas he had used in the preceding two quarters. And electricity and gas, as George was to discover, came high in London. You read and worked by one, sometimes not only through the night, but also through the pea-soup opacity of a so-called day. And you bathed and shaved and cooked and feebly warmed yourself by the other. George never did figure out just exactly how the engaging Major Bixley-Dunton did it, but he managed it so adroitly that George was half-way back to America some six months later before it dawned on his unsuspecting mind that he had occupied the modest dwelling only two quarters but had paid four whacking assessments for the whole year’s gas and electricity.

George thought he was getting a bargain at the time, and perhaps he was. He paid Major Bixley-Dunton in quarterly instalments—in advance, of course—at the rate of two pounds ten shillings a week, and for this sum he had the advantage of being the sole occupant, at night at least, of a very small but distinctly authentic London house. It was really a rather tiny house, and certainly a very inconspicuous one, in a section noted for the fashionable spaciousness and magnificence of its dwellings. The building was three storeys tall, and George had the top floor. Below him a doctor had his offices, and the ground floor was occupied by a small tailor shop. These other tenants both lived elsewhere and were present only during the day, so at night George had the whole house to himself.

He had a good deal of respect for the little tailor shop. The venerable and celebrated Irish writer, Mr. James Burke, had his pants pressed there, and George had the honour of being present in the shop one night when the great man called for them. It was a considerable moment in Webber’s life. He felt that he was assisting at an impressive and distinguished ceremony. It was the first time he had ever been in such intimate contact with such exalted literary greatness, and most fairminded people will agree that there are few things in the world more intimate than a pair of pants. Also, even at the moment that Mr. Burke entered the shop and demanded his trousers, George was requesting the return of his own. This homely coincidence gave him a feeling of perfectly delightful understanding and identity of purpose with a gentleman whose talents had for so many years been an object of his veneration. It gave him an easy and casual sense of belonging to the inner circle, and he could imagine someone saying to him:

“Oh, by the way, have you seen anything of James Burke lately?”

“Oh yes,” he could nonchalantly reply, “I ran into him the other day in the place where we both go to have our pants pressed.”

And night after night as he worked in his sitting-room on the third floor, at that hour the solitary lord and master of that little house, toiling on the composition of a work which he hoped, but did not dare believe, might rival in celebrity some of James Burke’s own, he would get at times the most curious and moving sense of companionship, as if a beneficent and approving spirit were there beneath that roof with him; and through the watches of the night it would speak to him with the eloquence of silence, saying:

“Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here—here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labour and your dream.”

Ever sincerely yours,

James Burke’s Pants

One of the most memorable experiences of George Webber’s six months in London was his relationship with Daisy Purvis.

Mrs. Purvis was a charwoman who lived at Hammersmith and for years had worked for “unmarried gentlemen” in the fashionable districts known as Mayfair and Belgravia. George had inherited her, so to speak, from Major Bixley-Dunton, and when he went away he gave her back to him, to be passed on to the next young bachelor gentleman—a man, George hoped, who would be worthy of her loyalty, devotion, idolatry, and humble slavery. He had never had a servant in his life before. He had known Negro servants during his boyhood in the South; since then he had had people come in once or twice a week to clean up the various places where he had lived; but never before had he owned a servant body and soul, to the degree that her interests became his interests and her life his life; never before had he had anyone whose whole concern was the preservation of his comfort and welfare.

In appearance, Mrs. Purvis might have been the prototype of a whole class. She was not one of those comic figures so often pictured in the drawings of Belcher and Phil May, those pudgy old women who wear shawls and little Queen Victoria bonnets perched upon their heads, whose most appropriate locale seems to be the pub, and whom one actually does see in London pubs, sodden with beer and viciousness. Mrs. Purvis was a self-respecting female of the working class. She was somewhere in her forties, a woman inclined to plumpness, of middling height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and pink-complexioned, with a pleasant, modest face, and a naturally friendly nature, but inclined to be somewhat do her dignity with strangers. At first, although she was at all times courteous, her manner towards her new employer was a little distant. She would come in in the morning and they would formally discuss the business of the day—what they were going to have for lunch, the supplies they were going to “git in”, the amount of money it would be necessary to “lay out”.

“What would you like for lunch to-day, sir?” Mrs. Purvis would say. “‘Ave you decided?”

“No, Mrs. Purvis. What would you suggest? Let’s see. We had the chump chop yesterday, didn’t we, and the sprouts?”

“Yes, sir,” Mrs. Purvis would reply, “and the day before—Monday, you may recall—we ‘ad rump steak with potato chips.”

“Yes, and it was good, too. Well, then, suppose we have rump steak again?”

“Very good, sir,” Mrs. Purvis would say, with perfect courtesy, but with a rising intonation of the voice which somehow suggested, delicately and yet unmistakably, that he could do as he pleased, but mat she rather thought his choice was not the best.

Feeling this, George would immediately have doubts. He would say:

“Oh, wait a minute. We’ve been having steak quite often, haven’t we?”

“You ‘ave ‘ad it quite a bit, sir,” she would say quietly, not with reproof, but with just a trace of confirmation. “Still, of course----” She would not finish, but would pause and wait.

“Well, rump steak is good. All that we’ve had was first-rate. Still, maybe we could have something else to-day, for a change. What do you think?”

“Should think so, sir, if you feel that way,” she said quietly. “After all, one does like a bit of variety now and then,
doesn’t
one?”

“Of course. Well, then, what shall it be? What would you suggest, Mrs. Purvis?”

“Well, sir, if I may say so, a bit of gammon and peas is rather nice sometimes,” with just a trace of shyness and diffidence, mixed with an engaging tinge of warmth as she relented into the informality of mild enthusiasm. “I ‘ad a look in at the butcher’s as I came by this mornin’, and the gammon was nice, sir. It
was
a prime bit, sir,” she said now with genuine warmth. “Prime.”

After this, of course, he could not tell her that he had not the faintest notion what gammon was. He could only look delighted and respond:

“Then, by all means, let’s have gammon and peas. I think it’s just the thing to-day.”

“Very good, sir.” She had drawn herself up again; the formal intonation of the words had put her back within the fortress of aloofness, and had put him back upon his heels.

It was a curious and disquieting experience, one that he was often to have with English people. Just when he thought that finally the bars were down and the last barriers of reserve broken through, just when they had begun to talk with mutual warmth and enthusiasm, these English would be back behind the barricade, leaving him to feel that it was all to do over again.

“Now for your breakfast to-morrow mornin’,” Mrs. Purvis would continue. “‘Ave you decided what you’d like?”

“No, Mrs. Purvis. Have we anything on hand? How are our supplies holding out?”

“They
are
a bit low, sir,” she admitted. “We ‘ave eggs. There is still butter left, and ‘arf a loaf of bread. We’re gittin’ low on tea, sir. But you could ‘ave eggs, sir, if you like.”

Something in the faint formality of the tone informed him that even though he might like to have eggs, Mrs. Purvis would not approve, so he said quickly:

“Oh, no, Mrs. Purvis. Get the tea, of course, but no more eggs. I think we’ve had too many eggs, don’t you?”

“You
‘ave
, sir, you know,” she said gently—“for the last three mornin’s, at any rate. Still—” Again she paused, as if to say that if he was determined to go on having eggs, he should have them.

“Oh, no. We mustn’t have eggs again. If we keep on at this rate, we’ll get to the point where we can’t look an egg in the face again, won’t we?”

She laughed suddenly, a jolly and full-throated laugh. “We will, sir, won’t we?” said Mrs. Purvis, and laughed again. “Excuse me for larfin’, sir, but the way you put it, I ‘ad to larf. It was quite amusin’, really.”

“Well, then, Mrs. Purvis, maybe you’ve got some ideas. It’s not going to be eggs, that’s one thing sure.”

“Well, sir, ‘ave you tried kippers yet? Kippers are quite nice, sir,” she went on, with another momentary mellowing into warmth. “If you’re lookin’ for a change, you could do worse than kippers. Really you could, sir.”

“Well, then, we’ll have kippers. They’re the very thing.”

“Very good, sir,” She hesitated a moment and then said: “About your supper, sir—I was thinkin’----”

“Yes, Mrs. Purvis?”

“It just occurred to me, sir, that, seein’ as I’m not here at night to cook you a ‘ot meal, we might lay in somethin’ you could prepare for yourself. I was thinkin’ the other day, sir, workin’ as you do, you must get ‘ungry in the middle of the night, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it, sir, if you could have somethin’ on ‘and?”

“I think it would be a wonderful idea, Mrs. Purvis. What do you have in mind?”

“Well, sir,” she paused briefly again, reflecting quietly, “we might git in a bit of tongue, you know. A bit of cold tongue is very tasty. I should think you’d find it most welcome in the middle of the night. Or a bit of ‘am. Then, sir, you would ‘ave your bread and butter and your mustard pickle, and I could even git in a jar of chutney, if youlike, and you know ‘ow to make tea yourself, don’t you, sir?”

“Of course. It’s a good idea. By all means, get in tongue or ham and chutney. Is that all, now?”

“Well, sir,” she reflected a moment longer, went to the buffet sideboard, opened it, and looked in. “I was just wonderin’ ‘ow you are for beer, sir…Ah-h,” she exclaimed, nodding with satisfaction, “it
is
gittin’ a bit low, sir. You ‘ave only two bottles left. Shall we lay in a ‘arf-dozen bottles?”

“Yes. No—wait a minute. Better make it a dozen, then you won’t have to be running out to order it again so soon.”

“Very good, sir.” Again the formal rising intonation, this time, he thought, with approval. “And what do you prefer, the Worthington or Bass?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Which is better?”

“They’re both first-rate, sir. Some people prefer one kind and some another. The Worthington, perhaps is a trifle lighter, but you won’t go wrong, sir, whichever one you order.”

“All right, then, I’ll tell you what you do—suppose you order half a dozen of each.”

“Very good, sir.” She turned to go.

“Thank you, Mrs. Purvis.”

“‘Kew,” she said, most formally and distantly now, and went out quietly, closing the door gently but very firmly after her.

As the weeks went by, her excessive formality towards George began to thaw out and drop away. She became more and more free in communicating to him whatever was on her mind. Not that she ever forgot her “place”. Quite the contrary. But, while always maintaining the instinctive manner of an English servant towards her master, she also became increasingly assiduous to her slavish attentions, until at last one would almost have thought that her duty towards him was her very life.

Her devotion, however, was not quite as whole and absolute as it appeared to be. For three or four hours of the day she had another master, who shared with George her service and her expense. This was the extraordinary little man who kept doctor’s offices on the floor below. In truth, therefore, Mrs. Purvis had a divided loyalty, and yet, in a curious way, she also managed to convey to each of her employers a sense that her whole-souled obligation belonged to him, and to him alone.