Thomas Wolfe, page 325
It seemed to George then, as it seemed to him ever afterwards, one of the most generous acts he had ever known, and when he had somewhat recovered from the astonishment and joy which this unexpected news had produced in him, he sat down and wrote to Mr. McHarg and told him how he felt. In a short time he had an answer from him—a brief note, written from New York. Mr. McHarg said that he had spoken as he had because he felt that way about Webber’s book, and that he was happy to have had the opportunity of giving public acknowledgment to his feeling. He said that he was about to be awarded an honorary degree by one of America’s leading universities—an event which, he confessed with pardonable pride, pleased him all the more because the award was to be made out of season, in special recognition of his last book, and because the ceremony attending it was not to be part of the usual performance of trained seals at commencement time. He said that he was sailing for Europe immediately afterwards and would spend some time on the Continent, that he would be in England a little later, and that he hoped to see Webber then. George wrote back and told him he was looking forward to their meeting, gave him his address, and there for a time the matter rested.
Mrs. Purvis was a party to George’s elation, which was so exultant that he could not have kept the reason a secret from her if he had tried. She was almost as excited about his impending meeting with Mr. McHarg as he was. Together they would scan the papers for news of Mr. McHarg. One morning she brought the “nice ’ot cup” of Ovaltine, rattled the pages of her tabloid paper, and said:
“I see where ’e is on ’is way. ’E’s sailed already from New York.”
A few days later George smacked the crisp sheets of The Times and cried: “He’s there! He’s landed! He’s in Europe! It won’t be long now!”
Then came the never-to-be-forgotten morning when she brought the usual papers, and with them the day’s mail, and in the mail a letter from Fox Edwards, enclosing a long clipping from The New York Times. This was a full account of the ceremonies at which Mr. McHarg had been awarded his honorary degree. Before a distinguished gathering at the great university Mr. McHarg had made a speech, and the clipping contained an extended quotation of what he had had to say. George had not foreseen it. He had not imagined it could happen. His name shot up at him from the serried columns of close print and exploded in his eyes like shrapnel. A hard knot gathered in his throat and choked him. His heart leaped, skipped, hammered at his ribs. McHarg had put Webber in his speech, had spoken of him there at half a column’s length. He had hailed the younger man as a future spokesman of his country’s spirit, an evidence of a fruition that had come, of a continent that had been discovered. He called Webber a man of genius, and held his name before the mighty of the earth as a pledge of what America was, and a token of where it would go.
And suddenly George remembered who he was, and saw the journey he had come. He remembered Locust Street in Old Catawba twenty years before, and Nebraska, Randy, and the Potterhams, Aunt Maw and Uncle Mark, his father and the little boy that he had been, with the hills closing in around him, and at night the whistles wailing northward toward the world. And now his name, whose name was nameless, had become a shining thing, and a boy who once had waited tongueless in the South had, through his language, opened golden gateways to the Earth.
Mrs. Purvis felt it almost as much as he did. He pointed speechless to the clipping. He tapped the shining passages with trembling hand. He thrust the clipping at her. She read it, flushed crimson in the face, turned suddenly, and went away.
After that they waited daily for McHarg’s coming. Week lengthened into week. They searched the papers every morning for news of him. He seemed to be making a tour of Europe, and everywhere he went he was entertained and feted and interviewed and photographed in the company of other famous men. Now he was in Copenhagen. Now he was staying in Berlin a week or two. Later he had gone to Baden-Baden for a cure.
“Oh Lord!” George groaned dismally. “How long does that take?”
Again he was in Amsterdam; and then silence. Christmas came.
“I should ’ave thought,” said Mrs. Purvis, “’e’d be ’ere by now.”
New Year’s came, and still there was no word from Lloyd McHarg.
One morning about the middle of January, after George had worked all night, and now, in bed, was carrying on his usual chat with Mrs. Purvis, he had just spoken of McHarg’s long-deferred arrival rather hopelessly—when the phone rang. Mrs. Purvis went into the sitting room and answered it. George could hear her saying formally:
“Yes. Who shall I say? Who’s callin’, please?” A waiting silence. Then, rather quickly, “Just a moment, sir.” She entered George’s room, her face flushed, and said, “Mr. Lloyd Mc’Arg is on the wire.”
To say that George got out of bed would be to give a hopelessly inadequate description of a movement which hurled him into the air, bedclothes and all, as if he had been shot out of a cannon. He landed squarely in his bedroom slippers, and in two strides, still shedding bedclothes as he went, he was through the door, into the sitting room, and had the receiver in his hand.
“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 had 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 tomorrow, next day, Friday—next week if that suits you better.”
“Next week, hell!” he rasped. “How much time do you think I’ve got to wait around for lunch? You’re coming here for lunch today. 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 twenty 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! Shave!” 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 ear, 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 labored 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 today. 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 color 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 color.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, setting the shoes down. “But you do ’ave a way of puttin’ things. I ’ave to larf sometimes. . . . 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 his overcoat as he descended. Despite the early hour, his appetite had 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 signaled 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 mustaches who were driving hansom cabs at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee. This ancient vehicle now rolled sedately toward 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 around, 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 whiskey 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 recognized him instantly. He had seen McHarg’s pictures many times, but he now realized 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-colored 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 humor 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 color 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 toward George quickly, with his bony, knuckled hand extended in greeting, his lips twitching and bared nervously over his large teeth, his face turned wryly upward 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 toward 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:
