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 …”
“But Stevie is going to draw us the great seal for the club. A dead fox lying on a field of purple heather crosse by a government issue rifle against the hills of Injah and …”
“No club 'ere … now you two club chaps git awiy from this 'ere table and get down among yer fellow sports-lovers and bird murderers … Murderers, that is what you all are. Killin' of them larks!”
“Not larks, dear, grouse.”
“Bird murderers … all of ya, shootin' and killin' an never bringin' 'ome even a feather for me 'at!”
The Colonel knew a lost cause when he was it and so he took our 'ats, I mean hats, and went down to the Injah Club to meet the chaps.
The Injah Club was not very top-drawer. It was made up of moth-eaten big game hunters, neo-Aristotelians, spurious clergymen, and a lot of high-sounding talk that never lasted past the hors d'oeuvres. It was shabby, comfortable, and contained the best bridge players in England.
An Englishman, known as Lord Bean among us, a member of Rifle Nature, lived by playing bridge and the suave implication that he would one day own half of Scotland. He was a lean Harrovian Englishman, a radical of aristocratic lineage, with the introspective, wide-set eyes of a mystic. He was just sitting down to lunch and we joine him.
The dish that day was sheep brains Bombay. I ate it often enough to know its secrets. Chop a pint of onions and fry in butter in a pan … No, I'm sorry, that is the Bombay curry. Let's start over. Clean and skin two sheep brains. Cook and simmer with a little water and mash them fine. Take four ounces of grated cheese, half a pint of cream, an egg well beaten, two chopped capers, and a little salt and pepper, mix well and add to mashed sheep brains. Simmer on a good fire, stirring all the while until the mixture will retain its shape when poured. Pour over rounds of toasted English muffins and top with slice olives, thin apple slices, and one boiled sultana raisin.
If the waiter wears a head towel and calls you sabib … that helps too. The Injah Club served a mulled claret, and then Lord Bean set up the usual double Scotch.
“Decent chaps in this club,” said the Colonel.
“No tiresome clique of intellectuals, anyway.”
“We should make Rifle Nature like this.”
“Ah, that is a point we shall take up after lunch.”
Outside the day cooked slowly in the hot streets, an the green of a park was broken by the silver chaos of birch trees.
After lunch Lord Bean lit a stogie, handed around a cheroot case, and we set fire to something that had once been tobacco and made plans.
Lord Bean blew smoke rings. “Nothing to it but get in the papers; that would attract attention and we could get some members that have tin … money to spare for a project as important to the welfare of the nation as Rifle Nature.”
“But how?” asked the Colonel, splashing a drop of soda into a double tumbler of Scotch.
Lord Bean polished his eyeglass, replaced it over one eye, and snapped his lean fingers. “I have it. A walking contest between America and England. The Empire lion against the Union buzzard.”
“Eagle,” I corrected him.
“Eagle,” nodded Lord Bean.
“But how?” asked the Colonel.
“You, Colonel, will be England, an Stevie here will be Ameriker.”
“America,” I said. “But I don't walk much.”
“Neither do I!” said the Colonel.
Lord Bean got and asked for a phone and called the Times and smiled at us and asked for a Mr. fliot (he asked for the small f) as he spelled it out. “Hello,ffiot, old man, how is the wife … Nice? That's good. ffiot old man, as a member of the Rifle Nature Club—charter member, I seem to remember—and feature editor on your bloody paper, you are about to get an American sort of thing, scoop, or shovel, they call it. A walking race between Colonel Bagsby Bags for England, and Stevie Longstreet, grandson of the great Confederate general, for America.”
I said, “Not a grandson, Gramp was on Grant's staff.”
Lord Bean waved me off … “Starts tomorrow morning, Waterloo Station, and walks to the Scot border.”
“I say,” said the Colonel.
“Sponsored by the Rifle Nature Club, prize, the solid gold Empire cup designed for the club, but not yet engraved (or ordered or paid for) and the whole of England and Ameriker (“America,” I said weakly) hanging on every graphic report of the progress of their heroes! Well, ffiot?”
There was a pause. “ffiot, remember you were my fag at Harrow. That's fine, old man, knew you'd come through.” He hung up and looked at the Colonel and myself. “You two chaps better get home and to bed.' Nothing like sleep … yes, nothing like it.”
“I don't like it!” said the Colonel.
“Sleep?”
“This walking race!”
“Old man, it's for the club …”
“Blast your club,” said the Colonel, “and you remember you were my fag at school!” (May I add here that the schoolboy fag is the chap who waits hand and foot, fetches water, runs errands, and cleans shoes for an older student.)
Lord Bean snapped his fingers. “We could get old Mugger Martin who beat you at polo in Injah. He would like to repeat his victory over you. He'll do it if I say you dropped out … too ol and all that. Now, what is his number? Old Mugger must be in tip-top form, runs a bike shop in Kent. Sorry to hear your leg is getting worse.”
The Colonel reached for a fresh Scotch. “Blast you to hell,” said the Colonel. “The day I can't outwalk ol Mugger you can bury me in Westminster Abbey.”
Lord Bean winked at me. “The trouble with England has always been not enough of her military men, generals preferred, were buried early enough in the Abbey.”
So, trapped, we shook hands on it an went home for tiffin.
I borrowed the sweaters of a tennis player across the hall, and he advise me to take it easy and breathe through my nose. I said he had a better nose for it than I had. Terribly serious, he admitted it …
There was nothing I could do but try to sleep, but someone across the court was playing flute music on a flute with a tired air column, and next door to me a little clerk (called “clark” of course) was trying to grow muscles on his arms and was lifting some weights around. Anyway, I thought of that long, long walk to Scotland and I packed a small bag and took off my shoes an tiptoed down the stairs and out into the street.
There was no one but a cat paying a call in a can of garbage (called a “dust bin” in this odd nation) and a large bobby on the corner sleeping under his helmet while he leaned against a very old building. London after dark is like a movie set, only real. I walked a long time towards the India docks, then found a mission-type flop house where no one would look for me. Every one had a small coffin of a room to sleep in and the morning breakfast consisted of prayer, cold water, more prayer, and a motto to write to our mother, and hard bread and a wallpaper paste called oatmeal.
I decided to get out of London. As I crossed town hunting the high roa that passed through Sherwood Forest, I ran into a crowd of people and a short truck with a newsreel camera on its roof.
I stopped a large woman in bedroom slippers who was carrying a quart of ale home. “What's going on?”
“Goin' on … some damn fools flinging their fices in the public eye agin!”
“Oh.”
“Goin' to walk to Scotland thiy are … now ain't that somethin'?”
“Oh.”
“Can't ya siy anythin' but oh?”
I lifted my hat politely and went away quickly as someone cheered Ameriker … and I found the road and kept on going and all that day I lifted my thumb often enough to get about fifty miles out of London in some motor cars that were braving the winds of spring on old Briton highways that had seen the Romans pass in spear and plume hat … and the eagles of Rome ha marched here prouder than the American eagle on my passport carried inside my pocket.
I stopped that night at a small inn in a village that sounded like Mungleon-The-Joan-Harrison, which I was tol was near Plundee-On-The-Swinngle or a place that sounded like it. This may sound funny to us … but I remember once in London not being amused at an English traveler who got some cheap, cut-rate laughter by saying he remembered places in America called Broken Wagon, Texas, Double Groan, California, and Arrow Feather, Ohio (he sai it O-he-oh). So I suppose the English will think there is nothing amusing about places that sound like Mungleon and Plundee.
Anyway, the inn was not very goo and the next day I climbed a muddy hill and stood in the cold wind from the North Sea trying to get a lift away from this nest of sheep and mutton eaters. At noon a small car began to climb the hill, like an angry egg beater mounting a pile of brown ice cream. It plashed to a groaning stop and a man's voice from the bottom of the thing said,
“Hop in, your bloody young fool!”
And there looking up at me, with a bloodshot eye, was Colonel Bagsby Bags. I got in and sat down and the motor (the size of a pencil sharpener) starte and we went on. The Colonel said to me, “No use both of us running away.”
“You, too?”
“Bloody well yes! I might have stayed in bed had I known you were going to cop a beat.”
“What about the walking match?”
“Oh, it's in clover. Lord Bean got two black horses.”
“Horses?”
“Just in a way of speaking. The American is a native of Italy who once shined the shoes of Teddy Roosevelt at a place called the Battery, an the Englishman, well …”
“Well, Colonel?”
“The Englishman is a small cockney named Peterski, a rubber in a Turkish bath in Limehouse run by a Hungarian. A sad day for England and America.”
“But a good day, Colonel, for Rifle Nature.”
“Don't talk to me about that blaste club! Damndest fool idea since Pickwick!”
“You like Dickens?”
“Like him! I can't read Little Nell without bursting out laughing!”
“Oh …”
“Stevie, get rid of that habit of saying oh. Say something else.”
“Is there any good food on this road?”
“Hungry?”
“As if I had really walked to the Scot border.”
We had a good laugh at that, an went on until we found an inn that had a blue boar on its sign and an English king on its letterhead and a dining room smelling like heaven … the heaven of a meat eater, of course.
The Colonel found out that the innkeeper had been in Injah in his time and served 'is King among the outposts and pestholes, so a solid union and good food were in prospect …
The innkeeper was also the local butcher and he took us into his icebox and showed us the brave oxen that would serve us our meals, and we sai we would stay a week.
That night we had roast beef. English roast beef—the best I ever ate. The innkeeper had a simple way of cooking it. He made a thick plaster of rock salt and plastered it over a huge roast until the whole roast was plastered into a hard crust of salt. This object he put into his oven for two hours; then it was taken out and the heavy white crust of rock salt removed with a hammer.
He cut into the roast at once an served us the rare center of the roast, hot and mellow, soft and tender, an like no other roast I have ever eaten. The only side dishes were a wedge of Yorkshire pudding and a sauce of whipped horse-radish and egg sala dressing.
This we had with an imported type Falernian wine that was imported in barrels, all that was to be had, and very good it was. That night on the ten o'clock wireless we heard that the big international walking race was still on. I went back to reading Morte d'Arthur, and the Colonel snored on the gaudy brocade club chair in the bar, while the innkeeper sang “The British Grenadiers …”
The race ended badly. The American was arrested by the local constabulary for trespassing on the lawn of an Anglican vicar (he had run across the place as a short cut, taking a Savonnerie rug and trumeau mirror with him).
The Englishman reached the Scottish border and kept going; he turned out to be a maître d'hôtel with three wives, all after him, and he welcomed the chance to break out of the British Isles. Rifle Nature turned out to be one of the follies of the age, like Peace in Our Times or Rhumba in Three Easy Lessons.