“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 bad 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 to-morrow, next day, Friday—next week if that suits you better.”
“Next week, hell 1″ he rasped. “How much time do you think I’ve got to wait around for lunch? You’re coming here for lunch to-day. 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 t y 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! Shaver” 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 eat, 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 laboured on them she called in to him, a trifle wistfully: