You Can't Go Home Again (80 page)

“How far is the nearest village?” George wheezed faintly.

“It’s about six miles, sir, I understand,” he whispered, with a look of desperation and terror in his eyes.

The expression on his face was too much for them. A strangled scream burst from Webber’s throat. Mrs. Reade bent forward, thrusting her wadded napkin over her mouth. As for Rickenbach Reade, he just lay back in his chair with lolling head and roared like one possessed.

The driver stood there, rooted to the spot. It was clear that he thought his time had come. These maniacs had him at their mercy now, but he was too paralyzed to flee. And they could do nothing to allay his nameless fear. They could not speak to him, they could not explain, they could not even look at him. Every time they tried to say something and glanced in his direction and caught sight of the little man’s blanched and absurdly tortured face, they would strangle with new whoops and yells and shrieks of helpless laughter.

But at last it was over. The mood was spent. They felt drained and foolish and sober and ashamed of themselves because of the needless fright they had given the little driver. So, calmly and gently, they told him to leave the car where it was and forget about it. Reade asked his butler to take care of the driver and put him up for the night in his own quarters.

“Yes, sir, yes, sir,” mumbled the little driver automatically.

“Very good, sir,” said the butler briskly, and led the man away.

They now arose from the table and went into the living-room. In a few minutes the butler brought in a tray with coffee. They sat round a cheerful fire and drank it, and had brandy afterwards. It was wonderfully warm and comforting to sit there and listen to the fury of the storm outside, and under the spell of it they felt drawn together, as if they had all known each other a long time. They laughed and talked and told stories without a trace of self-consciousness. Reade, seeing that George was still worried about McHarg, tried in various ways to allay his fears.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “I’ve known Knuck for years. He drives himself to exhaustion and I’ve seen him do it a dozen times, but it always comes out all right in the end. It’s astonishing how he does it. I’m sure I couldn’t. No one else could, but he can. The man’s vitality is amazing. Just when you think he’s done himself in, he surprises you by bounding up and beginning all over again, as fresh as a daisy.”

George had already seen enough to know that this was true. Reade told of incidents which verified it further. Some years before, McHarg had come to England to work on a new book. Even then his way of life had been enough to arouse the gravest apprehensions among those who knew him. Few people believed that he could long survive it, and his writing friends did not understand how he could get any work done.

“We were together one night,” Reade continued, “at a party that he gave in a private room at the Savoy. He had been going it for days, driving himself the way he does, and by ten o’clock that night he was all in. He just seemed to cave in, and went to sleep at the table. We laid him out on a couch and went on with the party. Later on, two of us, with the assistance of a couple of porters, got him out of the place into a taxi and took him home. He had a flat in Cavendish Square. The next day,” Reade went on, “we had arranged to have lunch together. I had no idea—not the faintest—that the man would be able to make it. In fact, I very much doubted whether he would be out of his bed for two or three days. Just the same, I stopped in a little before one o’clock to see how he was.”

Reade was silent a moment, looking into the fire. Then, with a sharp expiration of his breath, he said:

“Well! He was sitting there at his desk, in front of his typewriter,, wearing an old dressing-gown over his baggy old tweeds, and he was typing away like mad. There was a great sheaf of manuscript beside him. He told me he’d been at it since six o’clock and had done over twenty pages. As I came in, he just looked up and said: ‘Hello, Rick. I’ll be with you in a minute. Sit down, won’t you?’...Well!”—again the sharp expiration of his breath—“I had to sit down! I simply fell into a chair and stared at him. It was the most astonishing thing I had ever seen.”

“And was he able to go to lunch with you?”

“Was he able!” cried Reade. “Why, he fairly bounded from his chair, flung on his coat and hat, pulled me out of my seat, and said: ‘Come on! I’m hungry as a bear.’ And what was most astounding,” Reade continued, “was that he remembered everything that had happened the night before. He remembered everything that had been said, too—even the things that were said during the time when I should have sworn he was unconscious. It is an astonishing creature! Astonishing!” cried the Englishman.

• • • • *
        

In the warming glow of the fire and their new-found intimacy they had several more brandies, smoked endless cigarettes, and talked on and on for hours, forgetting the passage of time. It was the kind of talk which, freed of all constricting traces of self-consciousness, lets down the last barriers of natural reserve and lays bare the souls of men. George’s host was in high spirits and told the most engaging stories about himself, his wife, and the good life they were making here in the isolated freedom of their rural retreat. He made it seem not only charming and attractive, full of wholesome country pleasures, but altogether desirable and enviable. It was an idyllic picture that he painted—such a picture of rugged independence, with its simple joys and solid comforts, as has at one time or another haunted the imagination of almost every man in the turmoil, confusion, and uncertainties of the complex world we live in. But as George listened to his host and felt the nostalgic attractiveness of the images that were unfolded before him, he also felt a disquieting sense of something else behind it all which never quite got into the picture, but which lent colourings of doubt and falsity to every part of it.

For Rickenbach Reade, George began to see after a while, was one of those men who are unequal to the conditions of modern life, and who have accordingly retreated from the tough realities which they could not face. The phenomenon was not anew one to George. He had met and observed a number of people like this. And it was now evident to him that they formed another group or family or race, another of those little worlds which have no boundary lines of country or of place. One found a surprising number of them in America, particularly in the more sequestered purlieus of Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard University. One found them also in New York’s Greenwich Village, and when even that makeshift Little Bohemia became too harsh for them, they retired into a kind of desiccated country life.

For all such people the country became the last refuge. They bought little farms in Connecticut or Vermont, and renovated the fine old houses with just a shade too much of whimsey or of restrained good taste. Their quaintness was a little too quaint, their simplicity a little too subtle, and on the old farms that they bought no utilitarian seeds were sown and no grain grew. They went in for flowers, and in time they learned to talk very knowingly about the rarer varieties. They loved the simple life, of course. They loved the good feel of “the earth”. They were just a shade too conscious of “the earth”, and George had heard them say, the women as well as the men, how much they loved to work in it.

And work in it they did. In spring they worked on their new rock garden, with the assistance of only one other man—some native of the region who had hired himself out for wages, and whose homely virtues and more crotchety characteristics they quietly observed and told amusing stories about to their friends. Their wives worked in the earth, too, attired in plain yet not unattractive frocks, and they even learned to clip the hedges, wearing canvas gloves to protect their hands. These dainty and lovely creatures became healthily embrowned: their comely forearms took on a golden glow, their faces became warm with soaked-up sunlight, and sometimes they even had a soft, faint down of gold just barely visible above the cheek-bone. They were good to see.

In winter there were also things to do. The snows came down, and the road out to the main highway became impassable to cars for three weeks at a time. Not even the trucks of the A. & P. could get through. So for three whole weeks on end they had to plod their way out on foot, a good three-quarters of a mile, to lay in provisions. The days were full of other work as well. People in cities might think that country life was dull in winter, but that was because they simply did not know. The squire became a carpenter. He was working on his play, of course, but in between times he made furniture. It was good to be able to do something with one’s hands. He had a workshop fitted up in the old barn. There he had his studio, too, where he could carry on his intellectual labours undisturbed. The children were forbidden to go there. And every morning, after taking the children to school, the father could return to his barn-studio and have the whole morning free to get on with the play.

It was a fine life for the children, by the way. In summer they played and swam and fished and got wholesome lessons in practical democracy by mingling with the hired man’s children. In winter they went to an excellent private school two miles away. It was run by two very intelligent people, an expert in planned economy and his wife, an expert in child psychology, who between them were carrying on the most remarkable experiments in education.

Life in the country was really full of absorbing interests which city folk knew nothing about. For one thing, there was local politics, in which they had now become passionately involved. They attended all the town meetings, became hotly partisan over the question of a new floor for the bridge across the creek, took sides against old Abner Jones, the head selectman, and in general backed up the younger, more progressive element. Over week-ends, they had the most enchanting tales to tell their ciry friends about these town meetings. They were full of stories, too, about all the natives, and could make the most sophisticated visitor howl with laughter when, after coffee and brandy in the evening, the squire and his wife would go through their two-part recital of Seth Freeman’s involved squabble and lawsuit with Rob Perkins over a stone fence. One really got to know his neighbours in the country. It was a whole world in itself. Life here was simple, yet it was so good.

In this old farm-house they ate by candle-light at night. The pine panelling of the dining-room had been there more than two hundred years. They had not changed it. In fact, the whole front part of the house was just the same as it had always been. All they had added was the new wing for the children. Of course, they had had to do a great deal when they bought the place. It had fallen into shocking disrepair. The floors and sills were rotten and had had to be replaced. They had also built a concrete basement and installed an oil furnace. This had been costly, but it was worth the price. The people who had sold them the house were natives of the region who had gone to seed. The farm had been in that one family for five generations. It was incredible, though, to see what they had done to the house. The sitting-room had been covered with an oilcloth carpet. And in the dining-room, right beside the beautiful old revolutionary china chest, which they had persuaded the people to sell with the house, had been an atrocious gramophone with one of those old-fashioned horns. Could one imagine that?

Of course they had had to furnish the house anew from cellar to garret. Their city stuff just wouldn’t do at all. It had taken time and hard work, but by going quietly about the countryside and looking into farmers’ houses, they had managed to pick up very cheaply the most exquisite pieces, most of them dating back to revolutionary times, and now the whole place was in harmony at last. They even drank their beer from pewter mugs. Grace had discovered these, covered with cobwebs, in the cellar of an old man’s house. He was eighty-seven, he said, and the mugs had belonged to his father before him. He’d never had no use for ‘em himself, and if she wanted ‘em he calc’lated that twenty cents apiece would be all right. Wasn’t it delicious! And everyone agreed it was.

The seasons changed and melted into one another, and they observed the seasons. They would not like to live in places where no seasons were. The adventure of the seasons was always thrilling. There was the day in late summer when someone saw the first duck flying south, and they knew by this token that the autumn of the year had come. Then there was the first snowflake that melted as it fell to usher in the winter. But the most exciting of all was the day in early spring when someone discovered that the first snowdrop had opened or that the first starling had come. They kept a diary of the seasons, and they wrote splendid letters to their city friends:

“I think you would like it now. The whole place is simply frantic, with spring. I heard a thrush for the first time to-day. Overnight almost, our old apple-trees have burst into full bloom. If you wait another week, it will be too late. So do come, won’t you? You’ll love our orchard and our twisted, funny, dear old apple-trees. They’ve been here, most of them, I suspect, for eighty years. It’s not like modern orchards, with their little regiments of trees. We don’t get many apples. They are small and sharp and tart, and twisted like the trees themselves, and there are never too many of them but always just enough. Somehow we love them all the better for it. It’s so New England.”

So year followed year in healthy and happy order. The first year the rock garden got laid down and the little bulbs and alpine plants set out. Hollyhocks were sown all over the place, against the house and beside the fences. By the next year they were blooming in gay profusion. It was marvellous how short a time it took. That second year he built the studio in the barn, doing most of the work with his own hands, with only the simple assistance of the hired man. The third year—the children were growing up now; they grow fast in the country—he got the swimming-pool begun. The fourth year it was finished. Meanwhile he was busy on his play, but it went slowly because there was so much else that had to be done.