“Mr. Webber calling, sir.”
There were three men in the room, but so astonishing was the sight of McHarg that at first George did not notice the other two. McHarg was standing in the middle of the floor with a glass in one hand and a bottle of Scotch whisky in the other, preparing to pour himself a drink. When he saw George he looked up quickly, put the bottle down, and advanced with his hand extended in greeting. There was something almost terrifying in his appearance. George recognised him instantly. He had seen McHarg’s pictures many times, but he now realised how beautifully unrevealing are the uses of photography. He was fantastically ugly, and to this ugliness was added a devastation of which George had never seen the equal.
The first and most violent impression was his astonishing redness. Everything about him was red—hair, large protuberant ears, eyebrows, eyelids, even his bony, freckled, knuckly hands. (As George noticed the hands he understood why everyone who knew him called him “Knuckles”.) Moreover, it was a most alarming redness. His face was so red that it seemed to throw off heat, and if at that moment smoke had begun to issue from his nostrils and he had burst out in flames all over, George would hardly have been surprised.
His face did not have that fleshy and high-coloured floridity that is often seen in men who have drunk too long and too earnestly. It was not like that at all. McHarg was thin to the point of emaciation. He was very tall, six feet two or three, and his excessive thinness and angularity made him seem even taller. George thought he looked ill and wasted. His face, which was naturally a wry, puckish sort of face—as one got to know it better, a pugnacious but very attractive kind of face, full of truculence, but also with an impish humour and a homely, Yankee, freckled kind of modesty that were wonderfully engaging—this face now looked as puckered up as if it were permanently about to swallow a half-green persimmon, and it also seemed to be all dried out and blistered by the fiery flames that burned in it. And out of this face peered two of the most remarkable-looking eyes in all the world. Their colour must originally have been light blue, but now they were so bleached and faded that they looked as if they had been poached.
He came towards George quickly, with his bony, knuckled hand extended in greeting, his lips twitching and bared nervously over his large teeth, his face turned wryly upwards and to one side in an expression that was at once truculent, nervously apprehensive, and yet movingly eloquent of something fiercely and permanently wounded, something dreadfully lacerated, something so tender and unarmed in the soul and spirit of the man that life had got in on him at a thousand points and slashed him to ribbons. He took George’s hand and shook it vigorously, at the same time bristling up to him with his wry and puckered face like a small boy to another before the fight begins, as if to say: “Go on, now, go on. Knock that chip off my shoulder. I dare and double-dare you.” This was precisely his manner now, except that he said:
“Why you—why you monkeyfied—why you monkeyfied bastard, you! Just look at him!” he cried suddenly in a high-pitched voice, half-turning to his companions. “Why you—who the hell ever told you you could write, anyway?” Then cordially: “George, how are you? Come on in, come on over here!”
And, still holding Webber’s hand in his bony grip, and taking his arm with his other hand, he led him across the room towards his other guests. Then, suddenly releasing him, and striking a pompous oratorical attitude, he began to declaim in the florid accents of an after-dinner speaker:
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is my peculiar privilege, and I may even say my distinguished honour, to present to the members of the Hog Head Hollow Ladies Leeterary, Arteestic, and Mutual Culshural Society our esteemed guest of honour—a man who writes books that are so God-damned long that few people can even pick ‘em up. A man whose leeterary style is distinguished by such a command of beautiful English as she is wrote that he has rarely been known to use less than twenty-one adjectives where four would do.”
He changed abruptly, dropped his oratorical attitude, and laughed a sudden, nervous, dry, falsetto laugh, at the same time mauling Webber in the ribs with a bony finger. “How do you like that, George?” he said with immediate friendly warmth. “Does that get ‘em? Is that the way they do it? Not bad, eh?” He was obviously pleased with his effort.