For a while that summer in England, when the bull market still hung high, I went to the seashore and sat among the sounds of rocking buoys tolling as children building castles in the sand filled with kelp and dulse. And the sand artists reverently made Pallas Athene out of mud with a red apple for a navel, and Herbert Hoover out of clay, and beyond the town, the hills were creased like fat green bellies … and the steamy cough of the London train filled in between.
I was broke, drawings had not been selling, and my landlady, the most strait-laced of Presbyterians, preserve in gin (which she secretly drank), was kind enough not to ask for the rent. I wanted to go back to London but lacked the fare … but then a fat Dutchman, who live attached to a long-stemmed meerschaum pipe, came to me one day, asking if I could paint his dog, who was six years old. And I did and got enough money to get back to London on the train, where I shared a compartment with a duchess who claimed she had been rejuvenated by potassium thiocyanate and the writings of Ben Hecht. We matched basal metabolisms all the way to London an played bridge, and she took my last six shillings. I doubt now that she was a duchess at all, and as for Ben Hecht, well, I think he is merely an invention of Sam Goldwyn's fertile mind …
I moved to my room at Bagsby Bags, the refined lodging house in the city of London where I spent so much of my time after peddling cartoons to the English magazines (I found out that English humor is not to be laughed at). Mrs. Bags was proud to have an artist in the house and she would let me run two months behind in the rent; the rest of the lodgers could go only one month behind.
Colonel Bags never admitted he ran a lodging house. “Just a jolly sort of club for some decent chaps, you know,” he used to say when talking to a new roomer. He was having a fine season at Epsom Downs that year making book (although Mrs. Bags always said, “Halbert, ‘e’s a publisher, you know. Alwiys talkin' about the books he mikes …”).
I came down to breakfast of kippers and rashers of bacon and that vile ink that passes for coffee among the brave Britons … and the Colonel was already tucking in his breakfast surrounded by the empty eggshells, and was reading the London Times, a solid block of ether that puts half of England to sleep over its tray every morning. He looked up and held out a red hand from which the first finger was missing (“Lost the bloody beggar in Injah, you know. Had it gwaned off by a native fakir. Ah Injah, damn bloody hot, damn bloody fun. Ever eat a real curry?”).
“My lad,” said Colonel Bagsby Bags, “a few of us sporting starkers and shots have formed a club.” He wiped egg from his Eton tie and smiled at me. “You see me in these sordid surroundings and perhaps forget that I once ha money, china, family paintings, and a bit of a past.”
“The kippers are very good this morning.” I said.
“About this club some of us chaps have put together. It's very close … Just ten of us to date.”
“What's it called?” I said, spooning up orange jam.
“The London Rifle and Nature Club. Some call us the Feeble Freddies, but we refer to ourselves … only among members, of course, as Rifle Nature. Good, short, an rather witty, what?”
“I don't pretend to understand English humor, Colonel.”
“Blast that kind of talk. Becky, me love!” he shoute to his wife in the kitchen.
“Oh, stow yer shoutin'. Hain't I got ears, dearie?” She came in and kissed him and kissed me … everyone kisse her, a house rule of sorts. “Well now, Halbert, ‘ow was everything this mornin’?”
The Colonel hugged her. “Charming, dear.”
She slapped his hands and smiled. “No you don't, Halbert. No slap and tickle this morning … I know some 'ow yer askin' for something. Now hout with it … what's acomin' up between you two?”
“The Rifle Nature Club, which I honor by being president, is looking for a good address … and …”
“No you don't … not 'ere. Not them bloody gaspin' sports-lovers in this premise …”
Pinterest
