Prater Violet (2 page)

“Oh, in about an hour.”

“An
hour?
That is very long. How will you come?”

“By Underground.”

“Would it not be better to take a taxi?”

“No, it wouldn't,” I answered firmly, as I mentally reckoned up the cost of a fare from Kensington to Liverpool Street Station: “No better.”

“Why would it not be better?”

“It would be just as slow as the Underground. All the traffic, you know.”

“Ah, the traffic. Terrible.” A deep, deep snort, as of a dying whale about to sink to the bottom of the ocean forever.

“Don't worry,” I told him cheerfully. I felt quite kindly toward him, now that I had won my point about the taxi. “I'll be with you very soon.”

Bergmann groaned faintly. I knew that he didn't believe me.

“Good-bye, my friend.”

“
Auf Wiedersehen
 … No, I can't say that, can I? I haven't seen you yet.”

But he had hung up on me already.

“Was that the movie people again?” Richard asked, as I looked into the dining room.

“No. Well, yes, in a way. Tell you everything later. I've got to rush. Oh, and Mummy, I
might
be a little late for lunch.…”

*   *   *

COWAN'S HOTEL was
not
just across from the station. No place ever is, when they tell you that. I arrived in a bad temper, having been twice misdirected and once nearly knocked down by a bus. Also, I was out of breath. Despite my resolve to take Bergmann calmly, I had run all the way from the Underground.

It was quite a small place. The porter was standing at the door, as I came panting up. Evidently he'd been on the lookout for me.

“It's Mr. Usherwood, isn't it? The Doctor'll be glad to see you. He's been having a lot of vexation. Arrived a day before he was expected. Some mistake. No one to meet him at the boat. Trouble with his passport. Trouble with the Customs. Lost a suitcase. A regular mix-up. It happens that way, sometimes.”

“Where is he now? Upstairs?”

“No, sir. Just popped out for some cigarettes. Didn't seem to fancy what we had. You get to like those continental kinds, I suppose, if you're used to them. They're milder.”

“All right. I'll wait.”

“If you'll excuse me, you'd better go after him. You know what foreign gentlemen are, being strange to the city. They'll lose themselves in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Not that I won't say we wouldn't be the same, in their place. I'm sure I don't know what's become of him. He's been gone above twenty minutes already.”

“Which way?”

“Round the corner, to your left. Three doors down. You'll be sure to catch him.”

“What does he look like?”

My question seemed to amuse the porter. “Oh, you'll know him all right when you see him, sir. You couldn't mistake him in a million.”

The girl at the little tobacconist's was equally chatty. There was no need for me to try to describe Dr. Bergmann. His visit had made a great impression.

“Quite a character, isn't he?” she giggled. “Asked me what I thought about, being here all day long. I don't have much time to think, I told him.… Then we got to talking about dreams.”

Bergmann had told her of a doctor, somewhere abroad, who said that your dreams don't mean what you think they mean. He had seemed to regard this as a great scientific discovery, which had amused the girl and made her feel somewhat superior, because she'd always known that. She had a book at home which used to belong to her aunt. It was called
The Queen of Sheba's Dream Dictionary,
and it had been written long before this foreign doctor was born.

“It's ever so interesting. Suppose you dream of sausages—that's a quarrel. Unless you're eating them. Then it's love, or good health, the same as sneezing and mushrooms. The other night, I dreamed I was taking off my stockings and, sure enough, the very next morning, my brother sent me a postal order for five and six. Of course, they don't always come true like that. Not at once…”

Here I managed to interrupt, and ask her if she knew where Bergmann had gone.

He had wanted some magazine or other, she told me. So she'd sent him over to Mitchell's. It was down at the other end of the street. I couldn't miss it.

“And you'd better take him his cigarettes,” she added. “He left them lying here on the counter.”

Mitchell's, also, remembered the foreign gentleman, but less favorably than the girl at the tobacconist's. There seemed to have been a bit of an argument. Bergmann had asked for
The New World-Stage,
and had become quite indignant when the boy naturally supposed it was a theatrical magazine, and had offered him
The Stage
or
The Era
instead. “Hopeless. Nothing to do,” I could imagine him groaning. At length, he had condescended to explain that
The New World-Stage
was about politics, and in German. The boy had advised him to try the bookstall inside the station.

It was at this point that I lost my head. The whole business was degenerating into a man-hunt, and I could only run, like a bloodhound, from clue to clue. It wasn't until I had arrived, gasping, in front of the bookstall that I realized how silly I'd been. The bookstall attendants were much too busy to have noticed anybody with a foreign accent; there had probably been several, anyway, within the past half hour. I glanced wildly around, accosted two likely looking strangers, who regarded me with insulted suspicion, and then hurried back to the hotel.

Again, the porter was waiting for me.

“Bad luck, sir.” His manner was that of a sympathetic spectator toward the last man in an obstacle race.

“What do you mean? Isn't he here yet?”

“Come and gone again. Wasn't a minute after you left. ‘Where is he?' he asks, same as you. Then the phone rings. It was a gentleman from the studio. We'd been trying to get him all morning. Wanted the Doctor to come out there, right away, as quick as he could. I said you'd be back, but he wouldn't wait. He's like that, sir—all impatience. So I put him in a taxi.”

“Didn't he leave any message?”

“Yes, sir. You was to meet them for lunch, at the Café Royal. One o'clock sharp.”

“Well, I'm damned.”

I went into the lobby, sat down in a chair and wiped my forehead. That settled it. Who in hell did they think they were? Well, this would be a lesson to me. One thing was certain: they wouldn't hear from me again. Not if they came to the house and sat on the doorstep all day long.

*   *   *

I FOUND THEM in the Grill Room.

I was ten minutes late, a little concession to my injured vanity. The headwaiter knew Mr. Chatsworth and pointed him out to me. I paused to get a first impression before approaching their table.

A gray bushy head, with its back to me, confronted a big pink moon-face, thin, sleek, fair hair, heavy tortoise-shell glasses. The gray head was thrust forward intently. The pink face lolled back, wide open to all the world.

“Between you and me,” it was saying, “there's just one thing the matter with them. They've got no
savoir vivre.
”

The pale round eyes, magnified by their lenses, moved largely over the room, included me without surprise: “It's Mr. Isherwood, isn't it? Very glad you could come. I don't think you two know each other?”

He didn't rise. But Bergmann jerked to his feet with startling suddenness, like Punch in a show. “A tragic Punch,” I said to myself. I couldn't help smiling as we shook hands, because our introduction seemed so superfluous. There are meetings which are like recognitions—this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential, I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.

Bergmann, I am sure, was aware of what I was thinking. “How do you do,
sir?
” He gave the last word a slight, ironic emphasis. We stood there, for a moment, looking at each other.

“Sit down,” Mr. Chatsworth told us, goodhumoredly.

He raised his voice.
“Garçon, la carte pour monsieur!”
Several people looked around. “You'd better have the Tournedos Chasseur,” he added.

I chose Sole Bonne Femme, which I don't like, because it was the first thing I saw, and because I was determined to show Chatsworth that I had a will of my own. He had already ordered champagne. “Never drink anything else before sunset.” There was a little place in Soho, he informed us, where he kept his own claret. “Picked up six dozen at an auction last week. I bet my butler I'd find him something better than we had in the cellar. The blighter's so damned superior, but he had to admit I was right. Made him pay up, too.”

Bergmann grunted faintly. He had transferred his attention to Chatsworth, now, and was watching him with an intensity which would have reduced most people to embarrassed silence within thirty seconds. Having eaten up his meat with a sort of frantic nervous impatience, he was smoking. Chatsworth ate leisurely, but with great decision, pausing after each mouthful to make a new pronouncement. Bergmann's strong, hairy, ringless hand rested on the table. He held his cigarette like an accusing forefinger, pointed straight at Chatsworth's heart. His head was magnificent, and massive as sculptured granite. The head of a Roman emperor, with dark old Asiatic eyes. His stiff drab suit didn't fit him. His shirt collar was too tight. His tie was askew and clumsily knotted. Out of the corner of my eye, I studied the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose, the bushy black hair in the nostrils. The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave—the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humored and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power; the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men.

From wine, Chatsworth had passed, by a natural sequence of ideas, to the Riviera. Did Bergmann know Monte Carlo? Bergmann grunted negatively. “I don't mind telling you,” said Chatsworth, “that Monte's my spiritual home. Never cared much about Cannes. Monte's got a
je ne sais quoi,
something all its own. I make a point of getting down there for ten days every winter. Doesn't matter how busy I am. I just pull up stakes and go. I look at it this way; it's an investment. If I didn't have my time at Monte, I just couldn't stand this bloody London fog and drizzle. I'd come down with the flu, or something. Be in bed for a month. I'm bloody well doing the studio a favor; that's what I tell them.
Garçon!
”

Pausing to order Crêpes Suzette, without consulting either of us, Chatsworth went on to explain that he wasn't a gambler, really. “Have to do enough gambling in the motion-picture business, anyway. Roulette's a damn silly game. Only fit for suckers and old women. I like chemmy, though. Lost a couple of thousand last year. My wife prefers bridge. I tell her that's her bloody insularity.”

I wondered if Bergmann's English was equal to understanding all this. His expression was getting more and more enigmatic. Even Chatsworth seemed to be aware of it. He was becoming a little unsure of his audience. He tried another opening, which began by congratulating the headwaiter on the Crêpes Suzette. “Give Alphonse my compliments, and tell him he's excelled himself.” The headwaiter, who evidently knew just how to handle Chatsworth, bowed deeply. “For you, monsieur, we take a leetle beet extra trouble. We know you are connoisseur. You can appreciate.”

Chatsworth fairly beamed. “My wife tells me I'm a bloody Red. Can't help it. It just makes me sick, the way most people treat servants. No consideration. Especially chauffeurs. You'd think they weren't human beings. Some of these damned snobs'll work a man to death. Get him up at all hours. He daren't call his soul his own. I can't afford it, but I keep three: two for day and the other fellow for the night. My wife's always after me to sack one of them. ‘Either we have three,' I tell her, ‘or you drive yourself.' And she'll never do that. All women are bloody bad drivers. But at least she admits it.”

Coffee was served, and Chatsworth produced a formidable red morocco-leather case of beautiful workmanship, as big as a pocket Testament, which contained his cigars. They cost five and sixpence each, he informed us. I refused, but Bergmann took one, lighting it with his grimmest frown. “Once you've got a taste for them, you'll never smoke anything else,” Chatsworth warned him, and added graciously, “I'll send you a box tomorrow.”

The cigar somehow completed Chatsworth. As he puffed it, he seemed to grow larger than life size. His pale eyes shone with a prophetic light.

“For years, I've had one great ambition. You'll laugh at me. Everybody does. They say I'm crazy. But I don't care.” He paused. Then announced solemnly, “Tosca. With Garbo.”

Bergmann turned, and gave me a rapid, enigmatic glance. Then he exhaled, with such force that Chatsworth's cigar smoke was blown back around his head. Chatsworth looked pleased. Evidently this was the right kind of reaction.

“Without music, of course. I'd do it absolutely straight.” He paused again, apparently waiting for our protest. There was none.

“It's one of the greatest stories in the world. People don't realize that. Christ, it's magnificent.”

Another impressive pause.

“And do you know who I want to write it?” Chatsworth's tone prepared us for the biggest shock of all.

Silence.

“Somerset Maugham.”

Utter silence, broken only by Bergmann's breathing.

Chatsworth sat back, with the air of a man who makes his ultimatum. “If I can't get Maugham, I won't do it at all.”