McHarg had accepted his success and his triumph with the exultant elation of a boy. He had received the award of his honorary degree, symbolising the consummation of his glory, with blazing images of impossible desire. And then, almost before he knew it, it was over. The thing was his, it had been given to him, he had it, he had stood before the great ones of the earth, he had been acclaimed and lauded, all had happened—and yet, nothing had happened.
Then, of course, he took the inevitable next step. With a mind surcharged with frre, with a heart thirsting for some impossible fulfilment, he took his award, and copies of all the speeches, programmes, and tributes, sailed for Europe, and began to go from place to place; looking for something that he had no name for, something that existed somewhere, perhaps—but where he did not know. He went to Copenhagen—wine, women, aquavit, and members of the Press, then women, wine, members of the Press, and aquavit again. He went to Berlin—members of the Press, wine, women, whisky, women, wine, and members of the Press. So then to Vienna—women, wine, whisky, members of the Press. Finally to Baden-Baden for a “cure”—cure, call it, if you will, for wine, women, and members of the Press—cure, really, for life-hunger, for life-thirst, for life-triumph, for life-defeat, life-disillusionment, life-loneliness, and lifeboredom—cure for devotion to men and for disgust of them, cure for love of life and for weariness of it—last of all, cure for the cureless, cure for the worm, for the flame, for the feeding mouth, for the thing that eats and rests not ever till we die. Is there not some medicine for the irremediable? Give us a cure, for God’s sake, for what ails us! Take it! Keep it! Give it back again! Oh, let us have it! Take it from us, damn you, but for God’s sake bring it back! And so good night.
Therefore this wounded lion, this raging cat of life, forever prowling past a million portals of desire and destiny, had flung himself against the walls of Europe, seeking, hunting, thirsting, starving, and lashing himself into a state of frenzied bafflement, and at last had met—a red-faced Dutchman from the town of Amsterdam, and had knocked about with the red-faced Dutchman for three days on end, and now hates red-faced Dutchman’s guts and would to God that he could pitch him out of the window, bag and baggage, and wonders how in God’s name the whole thing began, and how he can ever win free from it and be alone again—and so now is here, pacing the carpet of his hotel room in London.
The presence of Mr. Donald Stoat was more puzzling. Mynheer Bendien at least had a certain earthy congeniality to recommend him to McHarg’s interest. Mr. Stoat had nothing. Everything about the man was calculated to rub McHarg the wrong way. He was pompous and pretentious, his judgments, such as they were, were governed by a kind of moral bigotry that was infuriating, and, to cap it all, he was a complete and total fool.
He had inherited from his father a publishing business with a good name and a record of respected accomplishment. Under his leadership it had degenerated into a business largely devoted to the fabrication of religious tracts and text-books for the elementary grades. Its fiction list was pitiful. Mr. Stoat’s literary and critical standards were derived from a pious devotion to the welfare of the jeune fille. “Is it a book,” he would whisper hoarsely to any aspiring new author, at the same time rolling his eyebrows about—“is it a book that you would be willing for your young daughter to read?” Mr. Stoat had no young daughter, but in his publishing enterprises he always acted on the hypothesis that he did have, and that no book should be printed which he would be unwilling to place in her hands. The result, as may be imagined, was fudge and taffy, slop and goo.
George had met Mr. Stoat quite casually some years before he had later been invited to his house. He was married to a large, full-bosomed female with a grim jaw who wore a perpetually frozen grin round the edges of her mouth and eyeglasses which were attached to a cord of black silk. This formidable lady was devoted to art and had not let her marriage to Mr. Stoat interfere with that devotion. Indeed she had not let marriage interfere even with her name, but had clung to her resounding maidenly title of Cornelia Fosdick Sprague. She and Mr. Stoat maintained a salon, to which a great many people who shared Cornelia Fosdick Sprague’s devotion to art repaired at regular intervals, and it was to one of these meetings of the elect that George had been invited. He still remembered it vividly. Mr. Stoat had telephoned him a few days after their first casual meeting and had pressed the invitation upon him.