Youngblood hawke, p.101
Youngblood Hawke, page 101
Hawke said to Jeanne, "Dry your eyes. Crying is no contribution."
She said, putting a handkerchief to her face, "You're quite right."
He said, "Okay, I'm sorry I blew up. It seems to justify this business of babying me. I hope you understand that nothing can be more infuriating to a man. I know I'm tired, but I'm making it, Jeanne, I'm almost through this tunnel. My book's all but done. It'll earn tremendous sums. You can edit it while I rest up. I don't give a damn any more about poor Judd's review, it's as dead as he is."
Jeanne brightened up. "Now you're talking! Arthur, the thing is you're not very well, don't you know that? I was scared when I first saw you at the airport, and since then you've been through a grind that would put an ordinary man in a hospital."
Hawke was pacing the room in lunging strides, glancing now and then at Jeanne and Adam. "All right. This is all there is to tell me, right? I'm in the hole for another hundred thousand, more or less. This is the worst. There's no more hidden bad news you two are saving up for a time when I can take it better, eh?"
Adam said, "None, Arthur. None that I know of."
Jeanne said, "What else can there be? What are you driving at?"
"God knows," Hawke said. "I'm trying to collect myself here, that's all. I don't want any more shocks. I'm not in the best shape for taking them with a gallant grin. Okay. I have to go to a pep rally for the cast this afternoon, and then out of decency to the actors I ought to attend tonight's performance. I'm then going to disappear into a different New York hotel so that Maas can't trace me, and I won't leave it till I finish Boone County. After that we'll pick up the pieces as best we may. It'll take me less than a week. I must do it."
Lax said, "That makes sense. Don't write off this comedy, either. They may love it in the next few towns, and we can still pick up a healthy hunk of change, before it even gets to Broadway. It's funny as hell."
"It's rubbish," Hawke said. "I did my level best, but there's a natural law about silk purses and sows' ears. If it pays off it'll be luck. The script should have stayed in your file, Ferdie. However, I made a wrong decision, and that's that."
10
It was a melancholy meal they had in the huge ornate dining room, the more so because it was only half-past twelve and most of the tables were empty. Hawke ordered a steak but ate only a couple of bites of it. Adam kept looking at his watch and finally said he'd have to leave on the next train to attend a late afternoon seminar at the law school. Hawke said there was no reason for him not to leave at once. "I suppose you'll go with him," he said to Jeanne.
"If you don't mind," she said timidly, "I'd rather stay here with you."
"Suit yourself. There'll be nothing for you to do. I'll be busy in postmortems all afternoon. After the performance—which I'm sure you don't want to see—I'll take the first train out of here that I can catch. It'll probably be late at night."
Alarmed by his tone, Jeanne said with a forced laugh, "Well, if my hanging around comes under the head of babying you, Arthur, which seems to be the big crime at the moment—"
"I think perhaps it does. I'm not going to kill myself. Not with a good novel almost finished. Go ahead, go back with Gus. I'll telephone you as soon as I get to New York."
"No matter what time it is?" Jeanne was completely at sea, and full of dread, and above all she did not want to anger him further. His tirade in Lax's suite had shattered her.
"The minute I get in."
Jeanne had to decide on the spur of the moment, her mind was in a whirl, and she feared Arthur's displeasure above everything. "All right, then, I'll go now. Whatever you think best."
"That's best," Hawke said.
A little while later, when Hawke closed the taxicab door and said through the open window, "So long, Gus. See you later, Jeanne," she had a sickening sense that she was making a mistake. There was an unnatural wide stare that went with his cordial smile.
She said, "Look, darling, call me at dinner time, won't you?"
"Why?"
"I—well, I just want to be sure there's no change in plans."
"All right, I'll call you at dinner time." The taxi drove off.
Lax was waiting in Hawke's room when he came up. "Did they get off all right?"
"Sure."
"I wouldn't want the professor to miss his class."
"The professor misses nothing, and makes no mistakes. The professor is a very perfect gentle knight."
The agent said uneasily, "I'm sorry I threw the curve about the tax ruling."
"Better so. You wanted to talk to me, you said?"
"Just a little thing," Lax said, "then I'm off to the airport. I'm suing our mutual friend Roland Givney, and at some point my New York lawyer may ask you for a statement. You won't have to testify or anything. Just an affidavit."
Hawke said, throwing off his jacket and slumping into a chair, his head in his hands, "An affidavit? What about?"
"Well, you remember when I brought him to you for the proposal about the publishing house, in Kentucky? When I fetched you out of the mine?"
Hawke glanced up and smiled wearily. "Way back then? Yes."
"Well, I had a letter of agreement with him. I was to use my good offices to bring you together. If a publishing house resulted my fee was to be five thousand dollars. I mean it's not a fortune, but I don't like welshers, and he's refusing to pay. He says your Haworth House setup was a whole new negotiation. My lawyer says that's irrelevant, by the terms of the letter he clearly owes me the five grand, and I may as well collect it."
Hawke was so deep in his own thoughts that he hardly heard all this. "What? What does Givney owe you money for?"
Lax explained again. Hawke began to look at him with the same cordial wide-eyed smile that had upset Jeanne. "Ferdie, didn't you make a great point then that you expected no compensation for bringing Givney to me? You were doing it because you thought it might be a good thing for me."
"That's right. I expected no compensation from you, Art. I didn't see how I could get ten percent of an indefinite thing like tax savings. It was reasonable to get my compensation from Givney. He stood to be the big gainer if he tied in with Youngblood Hawke."
Hawke said in a tone of melancholy amusement, "You were selling Givney your connection with me."
"Now hell, Art, what a thing to say! The man made the proposal to me. He was a reputable publisher. I saw where you might do very well in such a setup—too bad it never worked out—and I didn't want to charge you, but I think my time was worth something. It usually is."
"Why didn't you tell me at the time that he was paying you, Ferdie?"
The agent blinked and slumped, and his head fell to one side. After a moment he said slowly, "If you think I was off base just forget the whole thing. I'll drop the suit."
"Not at all," Hawke said. "You're a business man. You've been a good agent, too. Tell your lawyer to send me the affidavit, and I'll sign it."
Lax said, "I mean the world doesn't run on charity, Art." He stood, and put on his hat, a gray straw thing shaped like Robin Hood's cap, without the feather. "Well, good luck. You just finish up that Boone County. We'll make a tremendous killing, I feel it in my bones, and that'll clear up all your worries." Lax held out his hand. Hawke perceptibly hesitated, then shook it. The agent noticed the hesitation, and blinked; but he said no more, and left, jamming on the hat without a feather.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
1
HAWKE did not appear at the theatre at four o'clock, when the meeting of the company was supposed to start. The players sat around the stage in their sharply stylish street clothes, defeated, deflated, muttering to each other, with now and then a bitter laugh rising over the funereal buzz. Feydal and Maas arrived together. The stage manager planted chairs for them in the middle of the fake flattened penthouse living room lit by one white bulb on a standing pole. Feydal ordered the lights thrown on and the bath of pink and amber rays immediately cheered things up. Soon Feydal had the cast laughing with jokes about his own mistakes in directing the play, and with anecdotes of out-of-town failures that had turned into smash hits. The fat Frenchman was beaming, buoyant, charged with optimistic energy. The Lady from Letchworth was going to fight on, no mistake about that! Maas interrupted him, when an assistant brought a scribbled slip of paper, to announce that there had been a line at the box office all day, and the treasurer had taken in, as of this moment, over eight hundred dollars! The actors cheered and clapped their hands, and slapped each other's backs. One after another they began to offer comments on the performance, and to suggest changes in the script. The meeting turned lively, in fact gay. Agreement emerged that all the show really needed was some rewriting, mainly an injection of more plot and about thirty good jokes. Nearly everybody had an idea for the author to work on. A clamor for Hawke arose. How could he be so late for such a decisive and fruitful conference? Maas left the stage to telephone the author, and returned a few minutes later looking stunned. Youngblood Hawke had checked out of his hotel, leaving no forwarding address! He had abandoned the company to its fate and vanished!
Feydal stilled the panicky reaction of the actors. In a voice rolling like thunder, he said he could not believe it. Hawke was the most stable, reliable, cooperative playwright he had ever known. Youngblood Hawke was a truly great author. There was some misunderstanding, some crossing of signals. He would call New York and straighten the matter out. He recessed the meeting, went to a backstage telephone, and called Gus Adam's office; but the lawyer was not there. He then called Jeanne Fry.
Jeanne, who had arrived at her apartment only a short while earlier, was getting Jim ready for a walk in Central Park. She heard Feydal's news with a stab of dismay, a sharp real pain. No, she told Feydal, she did not know where Hawke could be. She remembered his plan to go to an unnamed hotel in New York, and—without telling it to Feydal—she hoped that this was what he had done. But Hawke had said he would attend the meeting first, and stay in Philadelphia for the performance. This action was unlike him. He had drudged faithfully through the last weeks of the ordeal the farce venture had become, largely out of loyalty to the actors. She promised Feydal to notify Maas in Philadelphia as soon as she heard from Hawke. Feydal said he himself was flying off to Hollywood in an hour.
"Dear Cerberus, do tell our dear lad that this is no time to bow out. Jock Maas will begin rewriting the script, he has no conscience whatever, and he'll make a hideous hash of it. Really, my love, utter catastrophe is days away unless Hawke returns."
Jeanne said, "I'm afraid the catastrophe occurred when Arthur gave you the play to do."
"Nonsense, my dear. Courage in adversity! One doesn't abandon ship at the first bit of heavy weather. It's not like Hawke and I'm sure there's some simple explanation of his disappearance." Then came the famous chuckle that the whole world had smiled at in movies. "And I'm not at all sure you don't know the secret. You're a deep one, Cerberus. Produce your author, I tell you, or all is lost. Ta ta."
She took Jim to the park, unable to face a vigil at the telephone. Walking in the hot, dusty zoo from one animal cage to another amid the pushing afternoon crowds, she endured torments of fear. She prolonged her stay as long as she could. When she came home, Elizabeth told her that there had been no calls. Jeanne could not eat. She would have liked to get drunk, but she feared that a crisis might be gathering that would demand a clear head. She would not even allow herself her evening martini. At seven she telephoned Adam. The lawyer was as startled as she had been. He said he would call the Philadelphia hotel and then try some of the more likely New York hotels.
He came to Jeanne's apartment at nine, looking sombre. He kept staring at the floor, puffing on his pipe, his red face sharpened by worry lines. It was almost hopeless, he said, to try to track the author down among the hundreds of Manhattan hotels. Who could say that he had not slipped off to Brooklyn or Newark instead, or even to another hotel in Philadelphia? Notifying the police was unthinkable. A missing-person alarm for Young-blood Hawke would be a damaging news story, especially linked to Newton Leffer's lawsuit, which was going to start next week unless some deliverance came to pass. There was nothing to do but sit tight and hope that Hawke himself would soon appear. He was opposed to checking the Philadelphia hospitals; that might start rumors which could get into the newspapers. If something had happened to the writer he would be readily identified at any hospital, and Jeanne would hear about it. However, the talk about hospitals made him decide to call Dr. Eversill in Hovey.
It took some time to get through to the mountain town. The old man, awakened from his sleep, said nothing but grumpy "Uh-huhs" for a while, and Adam could hear him yawning. Then Eversill asked the lawyer pointed questions about Hawke's recent behavior. Adam told him about the wild outburst over Lax's disclosure of the new tax assessment.
Eversill said, "I can't blame him. Seems to me you people up there been hunting Art Hawke to death like an animal. He's a good boy. He's conscientious, that's most of his trouble, he's too blame conscientious. He's been a fool too, getting himself in the hands of moneylenders and Broadway nuts and all. New York's no place for a mountain boy. I think Art's going to show up one place or another pretty soon, maybe Philadelphia, maybe New York, maybe even back here. If he does show there, you put him to bed right away, no matter how fine he seems, d'you hear? And call me right away, and I'll decide what to do next, but get him to bed."
Adam said, "Why, what do you think is wrong with him?"
"I hope nothing. This taking off without telling anybody sounds like epileptic behavior. He may need treatment right away. If he's all right and he's just disappeared for a while to get the lot of you out of his hair I can find that out pretty quickly, but you do as I say."
Adam took Jeanne out to a restaurant. After a couple of cocktails they both ruefully agreed that they weren't hungry, and there was no point in ordering food. Jeanne consented to go to a movie, to create a stretch of blank time in which Hawke might call. The colored shadows jigged and dissolved without meaning on the screen for two hours, while she sat scared in the darkness. When she got home there had been no calls from Hawke, but three from Maas in Philadelphia, demanding news of the author's whereabouts.
She did not close her eyes that night. She was afraid to take a sleeping pill, in case news should come. At two in the morning she gave up the tortured tossing in hot gloom, got up, made herself a cheese sandwich, and spent the rest of the night in the living room on the sofa, working over a trashy Civil War novel that Ross Hodge had given her, and comparing this dreary task, with a sick heart, to the brilliant excitement of having a new Hawke manuscript in her hands.
The next day was perhaps the longest and most anguished in her life. Morning blazed into noon, noon sloped into a sultry afternoon, night came on, and still there was no word from Hawke. Jeanne paced her apartment, went out and shopped, spent two hours at the Hodge Hathaway office, killed two more hours at the hairdresser, calling her apartment often. Twice she telephoned the theatre in Philadelphia. Adam came again in the evening; and since one becomes used to anything, even the rack of uncertainty, this night they ate and drank. Adam was wavering about notifying the police. Another forty-eight hours at most, he said, and they would have no other course.
Jeanne's doorbell rang at about eleven-thirty the next day, when she was expecting nobody. She rushed to the door, and there stood a fat pale perspiring postman, who smiled and showed two rows of big teeth that seemed frightening. He held a thick manila envelope plastered with stamps. "Airmail special delivery registered, ma'am," he said, giving her a yellow register slip to sign. She could see Hawke's writing on the envelope. She scurried to her bedroom with the package and tore it open raggedly, breaking a nail so that her finger bled.
The contents were a sheaf of Hawke's long manuscript pages clipped together. Inserted in the clip were several smaller sheets of an airline's flimsy bluish stationery. She fell on her bed and read Hawke's letter.
Jeanie, my love—
I've done it. These are the last pages of Boone County. I've just finished the book on a Pan Am plane to Miami, bumping through a thunderstorm, so some of the sheets may be a bit harder to decipher. But I've finished it, Jeanie. I've finished my biggest and best book. I think I deserve a few points for effort, because I've finished it against odds.
I can't tell for sure what its fate will be. I should think it would be a widely read book for all its tragedy, because it's full of truth and the storytelling, unless I'm much mistaken, is as good as anybody can do who is alive now. Of course I'm nowhere for symbolism or poetry or the despair of civilization business. That side of the street has to be worked by other hands, but for the plain tale told by the daylight of Cervantes, without fancy figure-skating, I think Boone County will stand for a while, maybe. I also feel as though I've used the last drop of gas in a drying tank to cough and shudder to the last page. But I've done it.
Now, Jeanne, when you edit this one be careful about slashing out the somewhat long dollars-and-cents stuff on how the coal business works in Letchworth (Boone), and the occasional paragraphs where I talk straight to the reader. I know this technique is a high crime nowadays but I've never conformed to the current fads of the English teachers. I'm a nineteenth-century novelist, as Quentin Judd rightly said. I think that century holds the main vein of the art. Beyond a certain apprentice period a man should stop paying attention to critics and write as he pleases. I've done that in this book from start to finish for the first time. I wrote Evelyn to please the critics and you saw what happened; though I still love Evelyn and think she'll hang around for a few years, too.
I'm sure Mr. Leffer will give you the mss. so you can get to work on it without delay. It's to his interest to see that the book gets to the press fast. But if he makes legal difficulties you'll find a stack of photostats in the cabin in Hovey where I wrote most of Boone. There you'll also find your black gloves, and my will.
I wrote the will in one of my anxious spells. I'm having another one right now; I'm drenched in sweat though this plane is chilly. Writers are sad animals. This business of creating people and events out of thin air drains some vital fluid out of you and leaves you a prey to ridiculous and pitiful melancholia, if not worse. I think this entitles us scribblers to a certain—not moral latitude, I'll die without conceding that an artist is entitled to behave less decently or honorably than a plumber—but a certain forgiveness for our follies, our mistakes, and our extravagances.
