Youngblood hawke, p.102
Youngblood Hawke, page 102
I'm sorry about Frieda, Jeanie. If she hadn't been at the Prince party I think you and I would be a settled happily married pair with God knows how many children. My work would be further along, I'd have avoided most of the disasters that have befallen me—because you'd have stopped me—and generally I'd be a healthy author charging through the American Comedy, instead of the weary fleeing beast I am at the moment. But let me say that Karl, God rest his soul, was wrong about one thing. I have been my own worst pursuer, and nobody else is to blame. I have always sounded the horn for the hounds myself. I have made fearful mistakes. Frieda was the worst.
I can plead the old plea, I was a young yokel in the big city. I think maybe we can also fault Frieda a bit for being so totally devoted to her own pleasure, so utterly incapable of considering that you can't suck up five years of a young man's life without irreparably altering that life. But I was well over twenty-one! The choice was mine. I guess I wanted to eat my turkey and have it. Frieda was all too ready to serve the turkey with all the trimmings.
Nor can I blame you for marrying Karl, though in low moments I often have. You're not as compassionate and long-suffering as you might be; you're a bit deficient in charity, but that's the fault of your virtue, a strong backbone. Anyway, Jim Fry had to be born. He may turn out to be more important than all of us. The long and the short of it must be what our mutual nemesis Frieda once said—"some mistakes define a person's character." There's no going back and doing it over, but I want you to know that of all my mistakes I regret that one most, and would give much never to have laid eyes on Mrs. Winter.
I should apologize for the ink spurts and blotches that come from writing with a fountain pen at eighteen thousand feet, but on the whole I'm surprised by the clarity of the words I'm putting down. I'm really saying what I want to say to you. This must be the very last cough of the engine that produced Boone County. You know, Jeanne, a very curious thing has been happening to me in recent weeks. Some day I ought to write it up. It's really interesting. It's as though all my vital force, all my remaining brain energy has shrunk by some self-preserving instinct into my hours of writing. You'll see that these last scenes of Boone are excellent, perhaps the best stretch of sustained work I've ever done. Yet I can assure you that each day, from the moment I laid down the pen until the next time I took it up, I've been living in a baffling fog full of screechy noises and red flares, a whirling dizzy onrush through darkness something like a tunnel ride in an amusement park. The only saving thing about it has been the dreaminess of it. I stopped "believing" in The Lady from Letchworth and all its attendant foolishness long ago. It was all a scary Coney Island ride full of bobbing cardboard devils, and I'd emerge into daylight sooner or later, or at least into an ordinary night time of hot dog stands and lamplit carousels, all I had to do was grit my teeth and hang on.
Of course I knew it was real, another mistake of mine and one of the worst. It's no excuse that Feydal and Maas encouraged me to try to market this old trash of mine. Why did I agree to do it? Money pressure. I'm well served. I'm sorry to think of the play going on even for another few weeks, to think of people buying tickets because my name is on the playbill. I have never deceived my audience but this once. The sooner the show closes the better. I feel no guilt at leaving it to perish, or to be pulled to pieces by that poor jackanapes Maas. I sympathize with the actors, but all it comes to is that they, like me, unwisely gambled time on a bad venture. It's a risk of their profession.
Jeanie, darling, I'm sorry I blasted you and Gus. You must take my word for it that my reserves are gone. I can't trust myself to produce normal conduct any more. It's a hell of a horrible feeling. You find yourself struggling to say things that will fit accepted standards, all the time fearing that anything can come out of your mouth—a stream of obscenity, or even insane gabbling! I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply amazing degree of control!
The money pressure has eroded that control from my mind. What I'd give for the insouciance of Balzac, who let half the bill collectors in Paris search for him with bankruptcy judgments while he cheerfully ran up fresh bills in new shops under assumed names! I'm a goddamned Hovey boy, that's my trouble. To be beholden to any man on earth for anything, let alone a large sum of money, is an intolerable burden, a degradation like slavery, a poison that eats out the heart and soul. It must be gotten rid of at any cost.
Don't let this letter alarm you. I've been feeling better and better ever since I left Philadelphia. It's as though I've lanced a boil; but it'll be a long time draining, and I can't trust myself with you or Gus or anybody, and above all. I must stay beyond the reach of the Lady from Letchworth company in its last thrashing agonies. I know that if the cries for help got through to me I wouldn't be able to resist, I'd plunge back into that doomed picking and picking and picking at the witless empty play I wrote as an ignoramus of twenty-two. If there is any experience short of physical torture, or the death of someone you love, that is worse than trying to dredge jokes out of an exhausted and sick spirit, I can't imagine it.
To free you from the responsibility—because I know they must be hounding you for my whereabouts—I'll tell you nothing of where I'm going, what I'm doing, or when I'll be back. You'll hear from me again, I don't know just when or how. Gus Adam is a great guy and I know things will never get out of control as long as he's in charge. I may say I'm in a state of extreme confusion regarding certain things, including just where I stand with you. When I asked you the other night in Philadelphia to make the arrangements for our wedding on the fifteenth you said "All right" with a very peculiar slow caution. I don't know why, and I prefer not to dwell on it. Frankly I've been aware for some time that I haven't been quite well and I haven't trusted myself to start discussions I might not be able to endure. I don't know whether I'll be back by the fifteenth but anyway you and I obviously have a great deal of frank talking to do before we proceed further. Or maybe you have only a frank sentence or two to utter.
Anyway, everything can wait. Everything can wait. I finished my book. I did that, and here are the last pages.
Hawke appeared to have run out of ink, for the page was only half written on, and the next sheet was pencilled in a hurried and peculiarly cramped hand.
I never loved anybody but you. Even in all the years I was stewing in the bed of Frieda Winter, I loved you, Jeanne. I pictured you before I met you, I recognized you when we met, except that you were too short and smoked too much and had too sharp a tongue, but still I knew who you were. No matter what happens, whether this plane crashes (as I'm dead certain it will, in my present frame of mind) or I live to ninety and commit a thousand follies far worse than anything I've done yet, you will always be my one love, the arms that should have embraced me, the lips that should have kissed me, the body that should have joined with mine. Maybe it will still come to pass. Maybe I'll fly safely through this storm. I love you, and in my heart I'm not scared. It's just that I'm worn out.
ARTHUR.
Jeanne sobbed over the last scribbled blue page. But she pulled herself together and telephoned Adam. Within the hour she presented herself at his office, looking as woebegone, Adam thought, as she had after Fry's death. She had the airmail package with her. The lawyer carefully put aside the yellow manuscript, and read the letter, puffing at his pipe, and glancing at Jeanne now and then from under his eyebrows. She noticed that he suddenly stopped reading at the next to last page and put the sheets on his desk.
"Well!" he said. "That's not too good. But it's something. Is there any further information in those last personal lines?"
"Nothing about where he is. I have an idea," Jeanne said. "I don't know how to follow it up."
"Where do you think he is?"
Jeanne told him of the evening when Hawke had learned of the death of Manuel Hauptmann, and of his oblique suggestion that Mrs. Hauptmann might solve his money problem. "I called my travel agent to find out how you get to Peru. The flight goes via Miami. This is just a hunch, Gus, but I think it's possible he's gone to borrow money from Mrs. Hauptmann. It's the only way Miami in July makes any sense. His mental state is not normal and I think this may have suddenly seemed to him the simple solution to everything. The main thing was, it involved running away three or four thousand miles. Good God, I know all about that urge to run away!"
Adam nodded several times, half-shutting his eyes, canting his head far to one side, and dancing his spread fingers against each other. "It's something to explore, and we shouldn't lose any time. Let me talk to Abe Tulking, he's done a lot of work for the Cerro de Pasco companies."
"All right," he said, returning to the office in a few minutes, fastening his tie. "Let's go to the Peruvian consulate. It's up in Rockefeller Center. By the time we get there Abe will have cleared the way."
In the cab he said after a long silence, with a keen look and the foxy smile that he tended to show in tight moments, "You know, if that's what Arthur's done he may not be so crazy. This woman is immensely wealthy. The amount of money Arthur needs is insignificant to her, especially as there's no question whatever of her being repaid in time. She's a long-standing admirer of his work. It may be a way out."
Jeanne said, "Oh hell, Gus, you know that the richer anybody is the more significant any sum of money is to them. I spend money more freely than Ross Hodge does. I doubt that he'll get it from her, and if he does he'll be damned sorry."
Adam grunted and said no more.
They had to wait a few minutes on the hard bench in the main room of the consulate, staring at the handsome posters of titanic Inca ruins and rugged snow-capped Andes peaks, while typewriters clattered at the many desks and half a dozen Spanish conversations went on among the staff. The consul appeared in the doorway of his inner office, shaking hands with a departing visitor.
"Meester Adam? Meesus Fry? Come in, please." The consul's little inviting gesture was full of grace. He was a fat-cheeked short man of fifty or so, with clever brown eyes, and thick black hair laced with gray. "So," he said, following them in, and motioning them to armchairs. "It is most interesting! Meester Youngblood Hawke's books are popular in Peru. Will Horne is my favorite. Politics in Kentucky, politics in Peru—not too much different!" He sat in his swivel chair, clasping his hands on his desk, displaying a heavy gold ring. "Well. I have spoken to Mr. Tulking, whom I know well, and I am at your service." He glanced from Adam to Jeanne, with the narrowed eyes and kind smile of a man whose main task was to size people up at short notice.
Adam said, "Have you found out yet whether Mr. Hawke got a visa in this office recently?"
"Tourist card. A visa is not necessary." The consul slipped on heavy black-rimmed glasses, picked up a paper on his desk, and looked it up and down in a practiced way. "Yes. The card was issued ten days ago. Mr. Hawke wrote that the purpose of his visit was business." The consul pointed with his glasses at the paper, and sank back in his chair, waiting, his eyes shifting from Jeanne to the lawyer and back, his ringed hand drumming the desk.
Adam said after a little silence, "We're going to have to speak to you in confidence. Youngblood Hawke has been under a severe mental strain lately. He went off on a trip suddenly, day before yesterday, without notifying Mrs. Fry, to whom he is engaged, or any of his associates. We believe he's not quite well. He may need medical care when he reaches Peru, if that's where he's gone."
The consul nodded, his expression not changing. "It isn't hard to find out whether he came through the Limatambo Airport in the past few days, or if he's booked to arrive there soon. And we could check the main tourist hotels, and trace him. Have you no idea of his possible destination in my country? None at all?"
Adam looked at Jeanne, who sat impassively on the edge of her seat, hands clasped in her lap. He said, "Are you acquainted with the Hauptmann family?"
The consul's control slipped; he was not equal to this surprise, and his face became alive with the zest for news. "Very well, of course. All three brothers are my close friends. I mean, of course—you know, Manuel recently died. The oldest one, Bernard, and I went to school in Switzerland together."
Adam said, "Manuel and Honor Hauptmann were good friends of Mr. Hawke. There's a chance that he may be visiting Mrs. Hauptmann."
The consul nodded slowly three times, his face coming back under control, a faint smile lingering around his eyes. In the three nods was a world of Latin appreciation of the picture in all its luscious possibilities, the famous novelist, the rich American widow of the dead Hauptmann brother . . . He said with exaggerated calm, "It might be an idea to telephone or cable Mrs. Hauptmann, then."
Adam said, "I've thought of that, and that's probably the next step."
"Do you know her? I'll be glad to put the call through and explain what the situation is, if you prefer," the consul said briskly.
Adam said, "Mrs. Fry and I have both met Mrs. Hauptmann. You might have better luck than we would, though, trying to telephone Peru."
The consul laughed. "We have our troubles, too." He took the telephone and spoke in commanding tones in Spanish, mentioning the Hauptmann name and the word "Miraflores" several times. He said to Adam and Jeanne with a smile, "Manuel built a charming place, rather palatial, in Miraflores, it's a beautiful district just south of Lima proper, and I don't think he ever slept half a dozen nights in it, poor fellow. I imagine Mrs. Hauptmann will be there. She prefers Lima to the country. Everybody does. Of course the hacienda up north is magnificent, but—" he shrugged eloquently. "Sugar cane as far as the eye can see, hm?"
He answered the ringing telephone, and after a short exchange in Spanish said to Adam and Jeanne, "The circuits are busy. We can talk to Lima at a quarter past two. Would you care to have your lunch and return here? I shall not be leaving."
Adam and Jeanne made their way to the French restaurant of Rockefeller Plaza through the underground tunnels, because a cloudburst was showering the streets in a dark gray slanting curtain. It was still raining when they had both glumly consumed their brook trouts with a glass or two of wine, so back through the tunnels they went and up to the Peruvian consulate—which, when they re-entered it, seemed as familiar to Jeanne, posters and all, as though she had been working there for a year. A girl showed them at once into the inner office.
The consul greeted them like an old friend, his first wariness quite gone. He was smiling and excited. "Ah, what a pity. They put us through to Mrs. Hauptmann not fifteen minutes ago. She was up at the hacienda, after all, which is near Trujillo, about three hundred miles to the north. Getting another connection with her would have been very chancy. I took the liberty of discussing the matter. I don't think it's five minutes since I hung up. I did try to prolong it. I'm so sorry."
Jeanne said, "Is Arthur there?"
"No, he isn't, Mrs. Fry, but—Sit down, please. Sit down, Mr. Adam." The consul savored the pause as they sat looking at him anxiously. Runaway novelists were not the usual fare in his repetitious days. He clasped his hands, pursed his lips, and at last spoke. "I would say I have very good news. Your famous Mr. Hawke is located. He is indeed on his way to visit Mrs. Hauptmann. He would be in Peru now except that his flight was held up in Miami by bad weather. He should be en route now, and should be landing at Limatambo Airport this evening."
Adam glanced at Jeanne. "Good hunch."
Jeanne said to the consul, "Has she talked to him by telephone? Does she know anything about his condition?"
The consul suppressed a small masculine smile. "Mrs. Honor Hauptmann has talked to Mr. Youngblood Hawke by telephone twice in the past three days, Mrs. Fry—once from Philadelphia, once from Miami. She was astounded when I mentioned, as delicately as I could, that Mr. Hawke's attorney was somewhat concerned about his—mental serenity. She says he has sounded in good spirits, full of jokes and energy, his old self in every way. Mr. Hawke has just opened a play in Philadelphia, and he has purposely told nobody where he was going—this is what he said to Mrs. Hauptmann—because he wanted to be sure of an uninterrupted vacation. She was quite surprised that anyone had found out he was on his way there, and very relieved when I said the inquiry came from Mr. Adam."
Jeanne said, "Did she mention how long he plans to stay?"
The consul said with the same faint smile, "Apparently for a little while, Mrs. Fry, because she spoke of taking him sight-seeing, and if he goes to see all the places she mentioned it will take a couple of weeks." He grinned at Adam. "There is much to see in my country. I made it clear to Mrs. Hauptmann that the belief here was that he might need some medical attention. She is quite incredulous, but we left it this way. She will telephone or cable you, Mr. Adam, without his knowledge, as soon as she has seen him and formed an impression of his—his well-being."
"Very good." Adam glanced at Jeanne, who made a despairing little gesture with both hands. Adam stood, shook hands with the consul, and thanked him. The consul said he only regretted that Mr. Hawke had chosen July to make a trip to Peru, because it was winter there now and the weather tended to be gloomy. He had perhaps been presumptuous in suggesting to Mrs. Hauptmann that Mr. Hawke might be induced to honor the San Marcos University by giving a little lecture there. "It isn't every day that we have a person like Youngblood Hawke in our country," said the consul. "It might give him pleasure to lecture at the oldest university in the Western Hemisphere. Goodbye, Mrs. Fry. I feel that there is very little to worry about."
