You Can't Go Home Again (72 page)

“Hello, hello, hello!” he stammered. “Who—what—is that?”

McHarg was even quicker. His voice, rapid, feverish, somewhat nasal and high-pitched, unmistakably American, stabbed nervously across the wire and said:

“Hello, hello. Is that you, George?” He called him by his first name immediately. “How are you, son? How are you, boy? How are they ‘treating you?”

“Fine, Mr. McHarg!” George yelled. “It
is
Mr. McHarg, isn’t it? Say, Mr. McHarg-----”

“Now take it easy! Take it easy!” he cried feverishly. “Don’t shout so loud!” he yelled. “I’m not in New York, you know!”

“I know you’re not,” George screamed. “That’s what I was just about to say!”—laughing idiotically. “Say, Mr. McHarg, when can we----”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute! Let me do the talking. Don’t get so excited. Now listen, George!” His voice had the staccato rapidity of a telegraph ticker. Even though one bad never seen him, one would have got instantly an accurate impression of his feverishly nervous vitality, wire-taut tension, and incessant activity. “Now listen!” he barked. “I want to see you and talk to you. We’ll have lunch together and talk things over.”

“Fine! F-fine!” George stuttered. “I’ll be delighted! Any time you say. I know you’re busy. I can meet you to-morrow, next day, Friday—next week if that suits you better.”

“Next week, hell 1″ he rasped. “How much time do you think I’ve got to wait around for lunch? You’re coming here for lunch to-day. Come on! Get busy! Get a move on you!” he cried irritably. “How long will it take you to get here, anyway?”

George asked him where he was staying, and he gave an address on one of the streets near St. James’s and Piccadilly. It was only a ten-minute ride in a taxi, but since it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning George suggested that he arrive there around noon.

“What? Two hours? For Christ’s sake!” McHarg cried in a high-pitched, irritated voice. “Where the hell do you live anyway? In the north of Scotland?”

George told him no, that he was only ten minutes away, but that he thought he might want to wait two or three hours before he had his lunch.

“Wait two or three hours?” he shouted. “Say, what the hell is this, anyway? How long do you expect me to wait for lunch? You don’t keep people waiting two or three hours every time you have lunch with them, do you, George?” he said, in a milder but distinctly aggrieved tone of voice. “Christ, man! A guy’d starve to death if he had to wait on you!”

George was getting more and more bewildered, and wondered if it was the custom of famous writers to have lunch at ten o’clock in the morning, but he stammered hastily:

“No, no, certainly not, Mr. McHarg. I can come any time you say. It will only take me t y minutes or half an hour.”

“I thought you said you were only ten minutes away?”

“I know, but I’ve got to dress and shave first.”

“Dress! Shaver” McHarg yelled. “For Christ’s sake, you mean to tell me you’re not out of bed yet? What do you do? Sleep till noon every day? How in the name of God do you ever get any work done?”

By this time George felt so crushed that he did not dare tell McHarg that he was not only not out of bed, but that he’d hardly been to bed yet; somehow it seemed impossible to confess that he had worked all night. He did not know what new explosion of derision or annoyance this might produce, so he compromised and mumbled some lame excuse about having worked late the night before.

“Well, come on, then!” he cried impatiently, before the words were out of George’s mouth. “Snap out of it! Hop into a taxi and come on up here as soon as you can. Don’t stop to shave,” he said curtly. “I’ve been with a Dutchman for the last three days and I’m hungry as hell!”

With these cryptic words he banged the receiver up in George’s eat, leaving him to wonder, in a state of stunned bewilderment, just why being with a Dutchman for three days should make anyone hungry as hell.

Mrs. Purvis already had a clean shirt and his best suit of clothes laid out for him by the time he returned to his room. While he put them on she got out the brush and the shoe polish, took his best pair of shoes just beyond the open door into the sitting-room, and went right down on her knees and got to work on them. And while she laboured on them she called in to him, a trifle wistfully:

“I do ‘ope ‘e gives you a good lunch. We was ‘avin’ gammon and peas again to-day. Ah-h, a prime bit, too. I ‘ad just put ‘em on when ‘e called.”

“Well, I hate to miss them, Mrs. Purvis,” George called back, as he struggled into his trousers. “But you go on and eat them, and don’t worry about me. I’ll get a good lunch.”

“‘E’ll take you to the Ritz, no doubt,” she called again a trifle loftily.

“Oh,” George answered easily as he pulled on his shirt, “I don’t think he likes those places. People of that sort,” he shouted with great assurance, as if he were on intimate terms with “people of that sort”—“they don’t go in for swank as a rule. He’s probably bored stiff with it, particularly after all he’s been through these past few weeks. He’d probably much rather go to some simple place.”

“Um. Shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Purvis reflectively. “Meetin’ all them artists and members of the nobility. Probably fed up with it, I should think,” she said. “I know I should be,” which meant that she would have given only her right eye for the opportunity. “You might take ‘im to Simpson’s, you know,” she said in the offhand manner that usually accompanied her most important contributions.

“There’s an idea,” George cried. “Or to Stone’s Chop House in Panton Street.”

“Ah yes,” she said. “That’s just off the ‘Ay Market, isn’t it?”

“Yes, runs between the Hay Market and Leicester Square,” George said, tying his tie. “An old place, you know, two hundred years or more, not quite so fancy as Simpson’s, but he might like it better on that account. They don’t let women in,” he added with a certain air of satisfaction, as if this in itself would probably recommend the place to his distinguished host.

“Yes, and their ale, they say, is grand,” said Mrs. Purvis.

“It’s the colour of mahogany,” George said, throwing on his coat, “and it goes down like velvet. I’ve tried it, Mrs. Purvis. They bring it to you in a silver tankard. And after two of them you’d send flowers to your own mother-in-law.”

She laughed suddenly and heartily and came bustling in with the shoes, her pleasant face suffused with pink colour.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, setting the shoes down. “But you do ‘ave a way of puffin’ things. I ‘ave to larf sometimes…1 Still, in Simpson’s—you won’t go wrong in Simpson’s, you know,” said Mrs. Purvis, who had never seen any of these places in her whole life. “If ‘e likes mutton—ah-h, I tell you what,” she said with satisfaction, “you do get a prime bit of mutton there.”

He put on his shoes and noted that only ten minutes had passed since Mr. McHarg hung up. He was now dressed and ready, so he started out the door and down the stairs, flinging on lovercoat as he descended. Despite the early hour, his appetite ad been whetted by his conversation, and he felt that he would be able to do full justice to his lunch. He had reached the street and was hailing a taxi when Mrs. Purvis came running after him, waving a clean handkerchief, which she put neatly in the breast-pocket of his coat. He thanked her and signalled again to the taxi.

It was one of those old, black, hearselike contraptions with a baggage rack on top which, to an American, used to the gaudy, purring thunderbolts of the New York streets, seem like Victorian relics, and which are often, indeed, driven by elderly Jehus with walrus moustaches who were driving hansom cabs at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee. This ancient vehicle now rolled sedately towards him, on the wrong side of the street as usual—which is to say, on the right side for the English.

George opened the door, gave the walrus the address, and told him to make haste, that the occasion was pressing. He said: “Very good, sir,” with courteous formality, wheeled the old crate round, and rolled sedately up the street again at exactly the same pace, which was about twelve miles an hour. They passed the grounds of Buckingham Palace, wheeled into the Mall, turned up past St. James’s Palace into Pall Mall, thence into St. James’s Street, and in a moment more drew up before McHarg’s address.

It was a bachelors’ chambers, one of those quiet and sedate-looking places that one finds in England, and that are so wonderfully comfortable if one has the money. Inside, the appointments suggested a small and very exclusive club. George spoke to a man in the tiny office. He answered:

“Mr. McHarg? Of course, sir. He is expecting you…John,” to a young man in uniform and brass buttons, “take the gentleman up.”

They entered the lift. John closed the door carefully, gave a vigorous tug to the rope, and sedately they crept up, coming to a more or less accurate halt, after a few more manipulations of the rope, at one of the upper floors. John opened the door, stepped out with an “If you please, sir,” and led off down the hall to a door which stood partially open and from which there came a confused hum of voices. John rapped gently, entered in response to the summons, and said quietly:

“Mr. Webber calling, sir.”

There were three men in the room, but so astonishing was the sight of McHarg that at first George did not notice the other two. McHarg was standing in the middle of the floor with a glass in one hand and a bottle of Scotch whisky in the other, preparing to pour himself a drink. When he saw George he looked up quickly, put the bottle down, and advanced with his hand extended in greeting. There was something almost terrifying in his appearance. George recognised him instantly. He had seen McHarg’s pictures many times, but he now realised how beautifully unrevealing are the uses of photography. He was fantastically ugly, and to this ugliness was added a devastation of which George had never seen the equal.

The first and most violent impression was his astonishing redness. Everything about him was red—hair, large protuberant ears, eyebrows, eyelids, even his bony, freckled, knuckly hands. (As George noticed the hands he understood why everyone who knew him called him “Knuckles”.) Moreover, it was a most alarming redness. His face was so red that it seemed to throw off heat, and if at that moment smoke had begun to issue from his nostrils and he had burst out in flames all over, George would hardly have been surprised.

His face did not have that fleshy and high-coloured floridity that is often seen in men who have drunk too long and too earnestly. It was not like that at all. McHarg was thin to the point of emaciation. He was very tall, six feet two or three, and his excessive thinness and angularity made him seem even taller. George thought he looked ill and wasted. His face, which was naturally a wry, puckish sort of face—as one got to know it better, a pugnacious but very attractive kind of face, full of truculence, but also with an impish humour and a homely, Yankee, freckled kind of modesty that were wonderfully engaging—this face now looked as puckered up as if it were permanently about to swallow a half-green persimmon, and it also seemed to be all dried out and blistered by the fiery flames that burned in it. And out of this face peered two of the most remarkable-looking eyes in all the world. Their colour must originally have been light blue, but now they were so bleached and faded that they looked as if they had been poached.

He came towards George quickly, with his bony, knuckled hand extended in greeting, his lips twitching and bared nervously over his large teeth, his face turned wryly upwards and to one side in an expression that was at once truculent, nervously apprehensive, and yet movingly eloquent of something fiercely and permanently wounded, something dreadfully lacerated, something so tender and unarmed in the soul and spirit of the man that life had got in on him at a thousand points and slashed him to ribbons. He took George’s hand and shook it vigorously, at the same time bristling up to him with his wry and puckered face like a small boy to another before the fight begins, as if to say: “Go on, now, go on. Knock that chip off my shoulder. I dare and double-dare you.” This was precisely his manner now, except that he said:

“Why you—why you monkeyfied—why you monkeyfied bastard, you! Just look at him!” he cried suddenly in a high-pitched voice, half-turning to his companions. “Why you—who the hell ever told you you could write, anyway?” Then cordially: “George, how are you? Come on in, come on over here!”

And, still holding Webber’s hand in his bony grip, and taking his arm with his other hand, he led him across the room towards his other guests. Then, suddenly releasing him, and striking a pompous oratorical attitude, he began to declaim in the florid accents of an after-dinner speaker:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is my peculiar privilege, and I may even say my distinguished honour, to present to the members of the Hog Head Hollow Ladies Leeterary, Arteestic, and Mutual Culshural Society our esteemed guest of honour—a man who writes books that are so God-damned long that few people can even pick ‘em up. A man whose leeterary style is distinguished by such a command of beautiful English as she is wrote that he has rarely been known to use less than twenty-one adjectives where four would do.”

He changed abruptly, dropped his oratorical attitude, and laughed a sudden, nervous, dry, falsetto laugh, at the same time mauling Webber in the ribs with a bony finger. “How do you like that, George?” he said with immediate friendly warmth. “Does that get ‘em? Is that the way they do it? Not bad, eh?” He was obviously pleased with his effort.

“George,” he now continued in a natural tone of voice, “I want you to meet two friends of mine. Mr. Bendien, of Amsterdam,” he said, presenting Webber to a heavy-set, red-faced, elderly Dutchman, who sat by the table within easy reaching distance of a tall brown crock of Holland gin, of which, to judge from his complexion, he had already consumed a considerable quantity.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” cried McHarg, striking another attitude, “allow me to introduce that stupendous, that death-defying, that thrill-packed wonder of the ages, that hair-raising and spine-tingling act which has thrilled most of the crowned heads of Europe and all of the deadheads of Amsterdam. Now appearing absolutely for the first time under the big tent. Ladies and gentlemen, I now take pleasure in introducing Mynheer Cornelius Bendien, the Dutch maestro, who will perform for you his celebrated act of balancing an eel on the end of his nose while he swallows in rapid succession, without pausing for breath, three—count ‘em—three brown jugs of the finest imported Holland gin. Mr. Bendien, Mr. Webber…How was that, boy, how was that?” said McHarg, laughing his shrill falsetto, and turning and prodding Webber again with an eager finger.