You Can't Go Home Again (77 page)

“No food,” he muttered and glared at George suspiciously. “What are you trying to do—run out on me?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, get your tooth-brush then, and hurry up. We’re going to get out of town.”

“All right. Only I think you’re making a mistake not to eat first. It’s there waiting for you if you’ll take it.”

George made it as persuasive as he could. He stood at the open door, with one foot upon the running-board. McHarg made no answer; he lay back against the seat with his eyes closed. But a moment later he tugged on the strap, pulled himself partly erect, and, with just a shade of obstinate concession, said:

“You got a cup of tea up there?”

“Of course. She’ll have it for you in two minutes.”

He pondered this information for a moment, then half unwillingly said: “Well, I don’t know. I might take a cup of tea. Maybe it would brace me up.”

“Come on,” George said quickly, and took him by the arm.

The driver and George helped him out of the car. George told the man to wait for them, that they would be back within thirty minutes, which McHarg quickly amended to fifteen. Then George opened the street door with his key and, slowly, carefully, helping the exhausted man, began to propel the tall and angular form up the narrow stairs. They finally got there. George opened the door, led him through into his sitting-room, and seated McHarg in his most comfortable chair, where he immediately let his head slump forward on his breast again. George lit the little open gas radiator which provided the room with the only heat it had, called Mrs. Purvis, who had heard them and was already coming from the kitchen, whispered quickly to her the circumstance of his being there and the identity of his distinguished visitor, and dispatched her at once to make the tea.

When she left the sitting-room McHarg roused himself a little and said: “Georgie, I fell all shot to hell. God, I could sleep a month.”

“I’ve just sent Mrs. Purvis for the tea,” George answered. “She’ll have it ready in a minute. That’ll make you feel better.”

But almost instantly, as if the effort to speak had used up his last energies, McHarg sank back in the chair and collapsed completely. By the time Mrs. Purvis entered with her tray and teapot, he no longer needed tea. He was buried in comatose oblivion—past tea or travel now, past everything.

She saw instantly what had happened. She put the tray down quietly and whispered to George: “‘E’s not goin’ anywhere just yet. ‘E will be needin’ sleep.”

“Yes,” George said. “That’s what he does need, badly.”

“It’s a shame to leave ‘im in that chair. If we could only get ‘im up, sir,” she whispered, “and into your room, ‘e could lie down in your bed. It’d be more comfortable for ‘im.”

George nodded, stooped beside the chair, got one of McHarg’s long, dangling arms round his neck and his own arm round McHarg’s waist, and, heaving, said encouragingly: “Come on, Mr. McHarg. You’ll feel better if you lie down and stretch out.” He made a manful effort and got out of the chair, and took the few steps necessary to enter the bedroom and reach the bed, where he again collapsed, this time face downwards. George rolled him over on his back, straightened him out, undid his collar, and took off his shoes. Then Mrs. Purvis covered him from the raw chill and cold, which seemed to soak right into the little bedroom from the whole clammy reek of fog and drizzle outside. They piled a number of blankets and comforters upon him, brought in a small electric heat reflector and turned it on in such a way that its warmth would reach him, the they pulled the curtains together at the window, darkened the room, closed the doors, and left him.

Mrs. Purvis was splendid.

“Mr. McHarg is very tired,” George said to her. “A little sleep will do him good.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, and nodded wisely and sympathetically. “You can see it’s the strain ‘e’s been under. Meetin’ all them people. And then ‘avin’ to travel so much. It’s easy to see,” she went on loftily, “that ‘e’s still sufferin’ from the fatigue of the journey. But you,” she said quickly—“should think you’d feel tired yourself, what with the excitement and ‘avin’ no lunch and all. Do come,” she said persuasively, “and ‘ave a bite to eat. The gammon is nice, sir. I could ‘ave it for you in a minute.”

Her proposal had George’s enthusiastic endorsement. She hastened to the kitchen, and soon came in again and told him lunch was ready. He went at once to the little dining-room and ate a hearty meal—gammon, peas, boiled potatoes, a crusty apple tart with a piece of cheese, and a bottle of Bass ale.

After that he returned to the sitting-room and decided to stretch out on the sofa. It was a small sofa and much too short for him, but he had had no sleep for more than twenty-four hours and it looked inviting. He lay down with his legs dangling over the end, and almost instantly fell asleep.

Later he was faintly conscious that Mrs. Purvis had come softly in, had put his feet upon a chair, and had spread a blanket over him. He was also dimly aware that she had drawn the curtains, darkened the room, and gone softly out.

Later still, as she prepared to leave for the day, George heard her open the door and listen for a moment; then, very quietly, she tiptoed across the floor and opened the bedroom door and peered in. Evidently satisfied that all was well, she tiptoed out again, closing the doors gently as she went. He heard her creep softly down the stairs, and presently the street door closed. He fell asleep again and slept soundly for some time.

When George woke again it had grown completely dark outside, and McHarg was up and stirring about in the bedroom, evidently looking for the light. George got up and switched the light on in the sitting-room, and McHarg came in.

Again there was an astonishing transtormation in him. His short sleep seemed to have restored his vitality, and restored it to a degree and in a direction George had not wanted. He had hoped that a few hours of sleep would calm McHarg and make him see the wisdom of getting a really sound rest before proceeding farther on his travels. Instead, the man had wakened like a raging lion, and was now pacing back and forth like a caged beast, fuming at their delay and demanding with every breath that George get ready to depart instantly.

“Are you coming?” he said. “Or are you trying to back out of it? What are you going to do, anyway?”

George had waked up in a semi-daze, and he now became conscious that the door-bell was ringing, and had been ringing for some time. It was probably this sound which had aroused them both. Telling McHarg that he’d be back in a moment, George ran down the stairs and opened the door. It was, of course, McHarg’s chauffeur. In the excitement and fatigue of the afternoon’s event he had completely forgotten him, and the poor fellow had been waiting all this time there in his glittering chariot drawn up before Webber’s modest door. It was not yet quite five o’clock in the afternoon, but dark comes early in the dismal wintry days of London’s ceaseless fog and drizzle, and it was black as midnight outside. The street lights were on, and the shop fronts were shining out into the fog with a blurred and misty radiance. The street itself was still and deserted, but high up over the roof-tops the wind was beginning to swoop in fitful gusts, howling faintly in a way that promised a wild night.

The little chauffeur stood patiently before George when he opened the door, holding his visored cap respectfully in his hands, but he had an air of restrained anxiety about him which he could not conceal. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but I wonder if you know whether Mr. Mc’Arg ‘as changed ‘is plans?”

“Plans? Plans?” George stammered, still not quite awake, and he shook his head like a dog coming out of the water in an effort to compose himself and bring order to his own bewilderment. “What plans?”

“About going to Surrey, sir,” the little man said gently, yet giving George a quick and rather startled look. Already the painful suspicion, which later in the evening was to become a deep-rooted conviction, that he was alone and under the criminal direction of two dangerous maniacs, had begun to shape itself in the chauffeur’s consciousness, but as yet he betrayed his apprehension only by an attitude of solicitous and somewhat tense concern. “You know, sir,” he continued quietly, in a tone of apologetic reminder, “that’s where we started for hearlier in the hafternoon.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Yes, I remember,” George said, running his fingers through his hair and speaking rather distractedly. “Yes, we did, didn’t we?”

“Yes, sir,” he said gently. “And you see,” he went on, almost like a benevolent elder speaking to a child—“you see, sir, one is not supposed to park ‘ere in the street for so long a time as we’ve been ‘ere. The bobby,” he coughed apologetically behind his hand, “‘as just spoken to me, sir, and ‘as told me that I’ve been ‘ere too long and will ‘ave to move. So I thought it best to tell you, sir, and to find out if you know what Mr. Mc’Arg intends to do.”

“I—I think he intends to go on with it,” George said. “That is, to go on to Surrey as we started out to do. But—you say the bobby has ordered you to move?”

“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said patiently, and held his visored cap and looked up at George and waited.

“Well, then—” George thought desperately for a moment, and then burst out: “Look here, I’ll tell you what you do. Drive round the block—drive round the block----”

“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said, and waited.

“And come back here in five minutes. I’ll be able to tell you then what we’re going to do.”

“Very good, sir.” He inclined his head in a brief nod of agreement, put on his cap, and got into his car.

George closed the door and went back up the stairs. When he entered the sitting-room, McHarg had on his overcoat and hat and was pacing restlessly up and down.

“It was your driver,” George said. “I forgot about him, but he’s been waiting there all afternoon. He wants to know what we’re going to do.”

“What we’re going to do?” McHarg shrilled. “We’re going to get a move on! Christ Almighty, man, we’re four hours late already! Come on, come on, George!” he rasped. “Let’s get going!”

George saw that he meant it and that it was useless to try to change his purpose. He took his brief-case, crammed tooth-brush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream and brush, and a pair of pyjamas into it, put on his hat and coat, switched off the lights, ands led the way into the hall, saying: “All right. I’m ready if you are. Let’s go.”

When they got out into the foggy drizzle of the street, the car was just wheeling to a halt at the kerb. The chauffeur jumped out and opened the door for them. McHarg and Webber got in. The chauffeur climbed back into his seat, and they drove swiftly away, down the wet street, with a smooth, cupped hissing of the tyres. They reached Chelsea, skirted the Embankment, crossed Battersea Bridge, and began to roll south-westward through the vast, interminable ganglia of outer London.

It was a journey that Webber remembered later with nightmare vividness. McHarg had begun to collapse again before they crossed the Thames at Battersea. And no wonder! For weeks, in the letdown and emptiness that had come upon him as a sequel to his great success, he had lashed about in a frenzy of seeking for he knew not what, going from place to place, meeting new people, hurling himself into fresh adventures. From this impossible quest he had allowed himself no pause or rest. And at the end of it he had found exactly nothing. Or, to be more exact, he had found Mynheer Bendien in Amsterdam. It was easy to see just what had happened to McHarg after that. For if, at the end of the trail, there was nothing but a red-faced Dutchman, then, by God, he’d at least find out what kind of stuff a red-faced Dutchman was made of. Then for several days more, in his final fury of exasperation, he had put the Dutchman to the test, driving him even harder than he had driven himself, not even stopping to eat, until at last the Dutchman, sustained by gin and his own phlegmatic constitution, had used up what remained of McHarg’s seemingly inexhaustible energies. So now he was all in. The flare of new vitality with which he had awakened from his nap had quickly burnt itself out: he lay back in the seat of the car, drained and emptied of the fury which had possessed him, too exhausted even to speak, his eyes closed, his head rolling gently with the motion of the car, his long legs thrust out limply before him. George sat beside him, helpless, not knowing what to do or where he was going or how and when it would end, his gaze fixed upon the head of the little driver, who was hunched up behind the wheel, intent upon the road, steering the car skilfully through the traffic and the fog-bound night.

The enormous ganglia of unending London rolled past them—street after street wet with a dull gleam of rain-fogged lamps, mile after mile of brick houses, which seemed steeped in the fog and soot and grime of uncounted days of dismal weather, district after district in the interminable web, a giant congeries of uncounted villages, all grown together now into this formless, monstrous sprawl. They would pass briefly through the high streets of these far-flung warrens. For a moment there would be the golden nimbus of the fog-blurred lights, the cheerful radiance of butcher shops, with the red brawn of beef, the plucked plumpness and gangling necks of hung fowls, and the butchers in their long white aprons; then the wine and liquor stores, and the beer-fogged blur and warmth and murmur of the pubs, with the dull gleam of the rain-wet pavement stretching out in front; then pea-soup darkness again, and again the endless rows of fog-cheat houses.

At last they began to come to open country. There was the darkness of the land, the smell of the wet fields, the strung spare lights of night across the countryside. They began to feel the force of the wind as it swooped down at them across the fields and shivered against the sides of the car. It was blowing the fog away and the sky was lifting. And now, against the damp, low, thick, and dismal ceiling of the clouds, there was an immense corrupted radiance, as if all the swelter, smoke, and fury of London’s unending life had been caught up and resumed there. With every revolution of the wheels the glow receded farther behind them.

And now, with the lonely countryside all round him, George became conscious of the mysterious architecture of night. As he felt the abiding strength and everlastingness of the earth, he began to feel also a sense of exultation and release. It was a feeling he had had many times before, a feeling that every man who lives in a vast modern city must feel when, after months within the hive of the city’s life—months of sweat and noise and violence, months of grimy brick and stone, months of the incessant thrust and intershift and weaving of the endless crowd, months of tainted air and tainted life, of treachery, fear, malice, slander, blackmail, envy, hatred, conflict, fury, and deceit, months of frenzy and the tension of wire-taut nerves and the changeless change—he leaves the city and is free at last, out beyond the remotest filament of that tainted and tormented web. He that has known only a jungle of mortared brick and stone where no birds sing, where no blade grows, has now found earth again. And yet, unfathomable enigma that it is, he has found earth and, finding it, has lost the world. He has found the washed cleanliness of vision and of soul that comes from earth. He feels himself washed free of all the stains of ancient living, its evil and its lust, its filth and cruelty, its perverse and ineradicable pollution, But curiously, somehow, the wonder and the mystery of it all remains, its beauty and its magic, its richness and its joy, and as he looks back upon that baleful glow that lights the smoky blanket of the sky, a feeling of loss and loneliness possesses him, as if in gaining earth again he has relinquished life.