He had realised from the beginning that it was useless to ask if anyone had seen her. The only thing he could say was that he was searching for Lady Curry, a slim, good-looking girl of twenty-three, with golden hair and aquiline features. To inquire for her as Lavina Leigh would have been little better as, after her thirty hours as a prisoner, she could hardly now be recognisable as the beautifully-groomed film star.
Again and again Hemmingway ran his eye over fresh batches of women as they were brought into the marquees. In between whiles he returned to the crowded lawn or penetrated as far as the courtyard where the women were being shepherded into the vans. Hundreds of the prisoners had been removed during the time he had been searching, yet only the eastern end of the lawn showed signs that the evacuation was making any progress. Glancing at his watch, he realised that he had been in the grounds for three hours already and it would take hours yet before the whole great garden could be cleared of the thousands of prisoners.
His main hope now was that Lavina might be sleeping in a far part of the garden so that daylight would have come before she was collected into one of the batches. He knew that in the semi-darkness by the marquees he must be missing scores of women as they were led away, however frantically he looked to right and left; whereas, once dawn came, he would be able to scan each batch as it was shepherded into the courtyard. Tired and disspirited by this constant searching, which necessitated his turning his head first one way and then another without intermission, he began to fear that his task was completely hopeless.
At a quarter past four he visited the courtyard again. Another line of closed vans had been drawn up. The women were being helped into them by the soldiers and as each van was filled its door was locked behind them so that they could not jump out when the vans had left the Palace yard.
Suddenly, as the last van in the line of six was being loaded, he caught sight of a slim, golden-haired girl being helped up into it. Although he only glimpsed her for a moment, he felt certain it was Lavina and, all his depression gone in a second, he rushed forward. As he reached the van the last woman scrambled into it; a Guardsman slammed-to the door, an Officer locked it and handed the key to a Sergeant.
‘Stop!’ panted Hemmingway. ‘Lady Curry’s in that van. I’ve been searching for her all night.’
The Officer gave him a surprised glance. ‘Who’re you? What are you doing here?’ he asked quickly.
‘I’ve just told you. I’ve been searching for Lady Curry and I’ve only just spotted her. Please unlock that door again.’
‘Sorry.’ The Officer shook his head and signed to the Sergeant, who saluted and turned away. ‘It’s too late now. My orders are to get these women out of here with the least possible delay.’
‘But please,’ Hemmingway pleaded, as the right-hand van in the line began to move. ‘It won’t take you a minute to get the key back and unlock that door. She’s ill from shock and I’ve got to get her down to the country.’
‘Sorry,’ the Officer repeated. ‘I couldn’t release her, in any case, without an order.’
‘Then at least let me speak to her.’
The second and third vans were now moving towards the outer courtyard. The fourth was just about to follow.
‘No time now,’ the Officer said firmly. ‘You can see for yourself the convoy’s moving off.’
‘Then, for God’s sake, let me go with her.’
As Hemmingway spoke the fifth van ran forward and the sixth followed. The Officer shrugged helplessly but, now he had sighted it, Hemmingway was determined not to lose his quarry. Darting past the Officer, he raced the moving van and leapt up on to the box beside the driver.
‘What the hell?’ exclaimed the soldier as Hemmingway subsided, panting, beside him.
‘It’s all right,’ he gasped. ‘A friend of mine’s inside your van. There was no time to get her out so the Officer said I could come along with you.’
‘Oh, in that case—’ the driver shrugged. ‘Got a cigarette on you?’
Hemmingway produced his case and, as his van followed the convoy out of the front courtyard of the Palace into the Mall, the man took one.
From Trafalgar Square they turned into Northumberland Avenue and headed for the Embankment. As they ran smoothly through the almost deserted streets Hemmingway was considering his next move. Everybody seemed to have a definite order that none of the prisoners were to be released without a written sanction. If he waited until the van got to its destination the probability was that another Officer there would refuse Lavina her freedom. Was it possible to bribe the driver to halt the van on the way down and get her out before they arrived at the place they were bound for?’
‘D’you want to earn a fiver?’ he asked the man quietly.
‘Does a monkey like his nuts?’ replied the driver, with a grin.
‘Then, it’s easy money for you,’ Hemmingway went on. ‘My girl-friend is inside and yours is the last van in the convoy. Pull up when they turn the corner under the Bridge into Queen Victoria Street as though you’d had engine trouble. Unlock the van so that I can get my girl out, and the fiver’s yours with my eternal blessing.’
‘No go, Guv’nor,’ said the soldier regretfully. ‘I don’t suppose they’d miss her. What’s one piece of skirt in all these truck-loads? And I’d be happy to oblige you, but I haven’t got the key.’
‘Who has, then?’
‘The Sergeant, who’s riding on the leading van.’
‘Well,’ said Hemmingway, thinking of the steel case opener under his coat, which was digging into his ribs now that he was sitting down, ‘I shouldn’t imagine the lock’s very strong. We could break it open.’
‘Maybe we could, but we’re not going to. Think I’m going to be crimed for busting His Majesty’s property and helping prisoners to escape? Not likely!’
‘I’ll make it a tenner,’ Hemmingway offered.
The driver shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate, but it can’t be done; not if you made it fifty. In ordinary times I might have chanced it for ten or twenty quid—staged a little plot about you knocking me out or something—but in these days it just isn’t worth it. They court-martial people for as little as blinkin’ an eyelid; though, mind you, with all the trouble they’re having and no sleep or anything, I don’t blame ’em. But I’m not taking any chances of being pooped in a cell because I want to be free to run for it when the old comet arrives.’
Where he proposed to run to he did not specify, but, seeing that further attempts to bribe him were quite useless, Hemmingway had to contain his impatience as well as he could for the rest of the journey.
They ran on past the Mansion House, down Cornhill, Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, to the East End. In the Commercial Road Hemmingway noticed that many of the shops had been looted; but all was quiet now except for patrolling squads of police and an occasional armoured car rolling by on its solid rubber wheels.
At last they veered south and, a few minutes later, passed through the gates of the West India Dock. Crossing railway lines and bridges, they wound their way between Customs sheds and dark out-buildings until they eventually pulled up on a wharfside to which a big ship was moored. There were a dozen other vans there besides those of the convoy with which Hemmingway had come, and the women from the earlier arrivals were already moving slowly up the gangways under big arc-lights into the ship,
Hemmingway got down, said good-bye to the driver, and waited patiently at the back of the van until the Sergeant came along and unlocked it. The van was pitch-dark inside and a blowsy woman fell out when the doors were opened. As she was helped to her feet she let out a stream of blasphemous curses.
‘Steady there,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Letting fly at us won’t do any good.’
An officer who had come up added: ‘For your own sakes, as well as ours, please don’t make a fuss. We’re going to put you in this ship, where you’ll be well fed and taken care of. As soon as you’re all on board it will take you out into the estuary of the Thames.’
>
‘Little trip to Southend, eh?’ said a fat old woman jovially.
‘That’s it, mother,’ laughed the officer. ‘We’re giving you a holiday for nothing and we want you to make the best of it. You’ll be much safer out there in the ship, too, than you would be in London.’
Hemmingway was standing just behind the officer, craning his head to catch the first glimpse of Lavina as she scrambled out of the van. The arc-lamps suddenly glinted upon golden hair. It was a natural blonde, but a second later, he saw the blue-eyed, haggard face beneath it; and his heart seemed to sink into his boots. It was not Lavina.
15
THE GREAT EVACUATION
Although at times Hemmingway felt things very deeply, he was not given to showing his emotions freely. He had learned in adversity that it is only a waste of time to lose control of one’s feelings, for, like many successful people, he had had a hard struggle in his early days.
His father had been one of those old-fashioned professors who coupled a brilliant brain with a congenital disability to make or keep money. Even when the Professor had left his native city of Cardiff to take up the Chair in Mathematics which he had been offered at a minor American University, and so passed to what was for him comparative affluence, he had consistently fallen a prey to every rogue in the matter of his small investments; and he had an incurable habit of lending money to people who never paid him back. In addition, instead of marrying one of America’s ten thousand heiresses, he had married one of America’s ten million nice girls who have no money at all.
That she, too, had brains and could write interesting little monographs upon such subjects as Ming porcelain and the use of cosmetics in Ancient Egypt did not materially help the family budget.
In one respect Hemmingway’s inheritance was remarkably rich; as he had not only derived a remarkable flair for figures from his father but also a wide knowledge and love of all things beautiful from his mother. But in the material sense they had been able to do practically nothing for him at all.
His parents had been vague, kindly, untidy people, living in a world of ideas that far transcended any sort of social round or even the calls of their own kitchen. They had lived mostly on tinned foods, grudgingly served by a succession of hired helps who despised them for their lack of practicability and robbed them unmercifully, although they never knew it. No one ever came to the house except visiting intellectuals, and when money ran short they just sacked the hired help, barely noticing the difference, and pigged it on their own until they could afford to engage a new one.
In consequence, Hemmingway’s childhood had been an exceptionally lonely one. He never went to parties or played with the neighbours’ children, so by the time he went to school he had not acquired the common basis upon which most youthful friendships are formed and was already something of a mystic. Added to which, he was mentally so far in advance of the other children of his age that they either disliked or were vaguely frightened of him. Only the fact that he was physically strong saved him from serious bullying, and after a time his schoolfellows were content to leave him to himself.
On the other hand, this isolation had its advantages; since, if his parents neglected him in other respects, they watched and tended the development of his brain with all the loving care that any horticulturist ever lavished on a black tulip.
Fortunately for all concerned, he loved reading and took to learning like a duck to water; so that during those countless hours when he should have been playing Redskins or Robbers with his contemporaries he was mastering subjects which few boys study until they have reached the University. He took scholarship examinations as a joke, so his education was little strain upon his thriftless parents; but it was after he had passed out of the University that his real troubles began.
It is one thing to have brains and quite another to convert them into money. He was a lanky, untidy youth in ill-fitting clothes. He lacked every social grace and had not even attempted to master the simplest sports. Moreover, he had not a single friend in the world who could be counted on to assist his advancement, except those connected with the scholastic profession; and that, with the example of his father before him, he was determined not to enter.
Although his reading had covered a multitude of subjects by no means all of them had been of a learned nature. Through autobiographies and magazines he was just as familiar with the social functions of a London Season as he was with the quantum theory; and, quite definitely, he wanted to qualify by means of money, personality and achievement for a place among the ruling classes of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, how to set about it he had not the faintest idea.
Having no money, he decided to travel; which may sound a paradox, but is certainly not so in the case of a young man brought up in the United States. For two terms he slaved as a junior usher—a job he hated—at a local day school; but it enabled him to save enough to pay his fare to Europe, and during the next eighteen months he hiked through a dozen countries.
He found it intensely interesting to see the historic places of which he had read. Contact with people of various nationalities broadened his views immensely, and it enabled him to get into true perspective the political theories that he had formulated. But at the end of that time he suddenly woke up to the fact that, although tramping from city to city and doing odd jobs for a week or two here and there in order to earn his keep provided an excellent appendix to his magnificent education, it simply was not getting him anywhere at all. He was just as far from a seat in the Houses of Parliament or on the Board of the Bank of England as he had been two years before on leaving his University, and certainly no nearer to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
After a spell of work as translator for a German publisher in Bremen he had made enough to pay his passage home, and he settled in New York with the determination to carve out a career for himself just as millions of young men had done before him.
Yet that was far easier determined than accomplished. Apart from physical labour, teaching and translating seemed to be his only marketable assets. He wrote some short stories and a novel, but no one would take them. It seemed that he had not that kind of mind. He made few friends, although he gradually bettered his appearance and was quick to pick up social mannerisms on the rare occasions when he was able to mix with moneyed people of culture.
For three years he maintained a bitter struggle, taking job after job to keep himself alive, but he chucked one after the other directly he realised that each was nothing but a blind alley and had saved a few weeks’ rent.
Towards the end of that time he took a job as a professional guide to a New York tourist agency. He knew the city well by then, and few people could have done better justice to the Art collections and antiques in its museums. In taking the job he had hoped that he would at least come into contact with a number of interesting people and, perhaps, improve himself by going about with them; but he was bitterly disappointed.
Nine out of ten of the visitors whom he had to take round were idle, stupid people with more money than sense. The magnificent Egyptian collection in the Metropolitan Museum bored them to tears. Most of them did not know a Van Dyck from a Reubens, and when he took them to the Indian Museum, where treasures can be seen from the whole American continent which have no counterpart in any European collection, they grumbled bitterly because it was six miles from the centre of the city and they considered the time involved in a visit practically wasted.
All that most of them wanted to see was the view from the top of the Empire State Building, the great cinemas and stores, and, particularly, the night haunts. Both women and men kept him up taking them to places until the small hours of the morning, so that he found himself jaded and exhausted when he had to report to the office to take on another sightseer at 10 o’clock the following morning.
He made up his mind to chuck that too as soon as he had saved enough in tips—which was practically all he got out of it—to lay off for a little and look for something else. But, all unknown to
him, his lucky star was just about to appear above the horizon.
Sir Samuel Curry had been in New York on a business trip. Negotiations had hung fire owing to the illness of an American steel king and were not completed until ‘Sam’ had missed his boat by a couple of hours; so he had found himself in New York with nothing to do for three days until he could leave for England on the next.
He had often visited New York before but it occurred to him now that it might be rather an idea to see something of the place outside its social life, which he already knew well. He decided that, anyhow, he would devote a day to looking round; the other two could easily be passed with the host of hospitable Americans who had only to be rung up and would be delighted to entertain him.
The hotel had a tie-up with the agency with which Hemmingway worked, so he was sent along to report to Sam and they spent the day together. Sam was not really a brilliant man. His success was due to clear-headedness, honesty in his business dealings, a colossal capacity for hard work, and a flair for employing people in the right places who were more gifted than himself.
When they parted that evening Sam had not rung up any of his American friends with the idea of filling in his next two days. Instead, he told Hemmingway to report again the following morning. He had been struck by the unusual way in which Hemmingway quite casually assessed artistic trends and ancient customs in terms of money.
Having found, for once, an interested listener, he explained, while taking Sam round the museums, how changes of climate had made or wrecked historic markets; how fortunes had been made by modern designers who were clever enough to study and adopt ancient fashions; how the germ of every modern invention had preceded it by hundreds of years, but remained undeveloped through lack of initiative or capital. But always there was that quiet preoccupation with finance applied to encyclopædic knowledge—the kind of knowledge that not one financier in a thousand possessed.
On the second night Sam kept Hemmingway to dine with him at the Ritz Carlton, and they talked upon a multitude of subjects which did not ordinarily come into the sphere of a professional guide. By that time Sam was absolutely convinced that in this tall, wise-eyed young man he had got something; and details never mattered to Sam once he had made up his mind about a thing. When they parted that night he said:
Sixty Days to Live Page 17
