Hemmingway was standing just behind the officer, craning his head to catch the first glimpse of Lavina as she scrambled out of the van. The arc-lamps suddenly glinted upon golden hair. It was a natural blonde, but a second later, he saw the blue-eyed, haggard face beneath it; and his heart seemed to sink into his boots. It was not Lavina.
The Great Evacuation
Although at times Hemmingway felt things very deeply, he was not given to showing his emotions freely. He had learned in adversity that it is only waste of time to lose control of one's feelings, for, like many successful people, he had had a hard struggle in his early days.
His father had been one of those old-fashioned professors who coupled a brilliant brain with a congenital disability to make or keep money. Even when the Professor had left his native city of Cardiff to take up the Chair in Mathematics which he had been offered at a minor American University, and so passed to what was for him comparative affluence, he had consistently fallen a prey to every rogue in the matter of his small investments; and he had an incurable habit of lending money to people who never paid him back. In addition, instead of marrying one of America's ten thousand heiresses, he had married one of America's ten million nice girls who have no money at all.
That she, too, had brains and could write interesting little monographs upon such subjects as Ming porcelain and the use of cosmetics in Ancient Egypt did not materially help the family budget.
In one respect Hemmingway's inheritance was remarkably rich; as he had not only derived a remarkable flair for figures from his father but also a wide knowledge and love of all things beautiful from his mother. But in the material sense they had been able to do practically nothing for him at all.
His parents had been vague, kindly, untidy people, living in a world of ideas that far transcended any sort of social round or even the calls of their own kitchen. They had lived mostly on tinned foods, grudgingly served by a succession of hired helps who despised them for their lack of practicability and robbed them unmercifully, although they never knew it. No one ever came to the house except visiting intellectuals, and when money ran short they just sacked the hired help, barely noticing the difference, and pigged it on their own until they could afford to engage a new one.
In consequence, Hemmingway's childhood had been an exceptionally lonely one. He never went to parties or played with the neighbours' children, so by the time he went to school he had not acquired the common basis upon which most youthful friendships are formed and was already something of a mystic. Added to which, he was mentally so far in advance of the other children of his age that they either disliked or were vaguely frightened of him. Only the fact that he was physically strong saved him from serious bullying, and after a time his schoolfellows were content to leave him to himself.
On the other hand, this isolation had its advantages; since, if his parents neglected him in other respects, they watched and tended the development of his brain with all the loving care that any horticulturist ever lavished on a black tulip.
Fortunately for all concerned, he loved reading and took to learning like a duck to water; so that during those countless hours when he should have been playing Redskins or Robbers with his contemporaries he was mastering subjects which few boys study until they have reached the University. He took scholarship examinations as a joke, so his education was little strain upon his thriftless parents; but it was after he had passed out of the University that his real troubles began.
It is one thing to have brains and quite another to convert them into money. He was a lanky, untidy youth in ill-fitting clothes. He lacked every social grace and had not even attempted to master the simplest sports. Moreover, he had not a single friend in the world who could be counted on to assist his advancement, except those connected with the scholastic profession; and that, with the example of his father before him, he was determined not to enter.
Although his reading had covered a multitude of subjects by no means all of them had been of a learned nature. Through autobiographies and magazines he was just as familiar with the social functions of a London Season as he was with the quantum theory; and, quite definitely, he wanted to qualify by means of money, personality and achievement for a place among the ruling classes of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, how
to set about it he had not the faintest idea.
Having no money, he decided to travel; which may sound a paradox, but is certainly not so in the case of a young man brought up in the United States. For two terms he slaved as a junior usher—a job he hated—at a local day school; but it enabled him to save enough to pay his fare to Europe, and during the next eighteen months he hiked through a dozen countries.
He found it intensely interesting to see the historic places of which he had read. Contact with people of various nationalities broadened his views immensely, and it enabled him to get into true perspective the political theories that he had formulated. But at the end of that time he suddenly woke up to the fact that, although tramping from city to city and doing odd jobs for a week or two here and there in order to earn his keep provided an excellent appendix to his magnificent education, it simply was not getting him anywhere at all. He was just as far from a seat in the Houses of Parliament or on the Board of the Bank of England as he had been two years before on leaving his University, and certainly no nearer to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
After a spell of work as translator for a German publisher in Bremen he had made enough to pay his passage home, and he settled in New York with the determination to carve out a career for himself just as millions of young men had done before him.
Yet that was far easier determined than accomplished. Apart from physical labour, teaching and translating seemed to be his only marketable assets. He wrote some short stories and a novel, but no one would take them. It seemed that he had not that kind of mind. He made few friends, although he gradually bettered his appearance and was quick to pick up social mannerisms on the rare occasions when he was able to mix with moneyed people of culture.
For three years he maintained a bitter struggle, taking job after job to keep himself alive, but he chucked one after the other directly he realised that each was nothing but a blind alley and had saved a few weeks' rent.
Towards the end of that time he took a job as a professional guide to a New York tourist agency. He knew the city well by then, and few people could have done better justice to the Art collections and antiques in its museums. In taking the job he had hoped that he would at least come into contact with a number of interesting people and, perhaps, improve himself by going about with them; but he was bitterly disappointed.
Nine out of ten of the visitors whom he had to take round were idle, stupid people with more money than sense. The magnificent Egyptian collection in the Metropolitan Museum bored them to tears. Most of them did not know a Van Dyck from a Reubens, and when he took them to the Indian Museum, where treasures can be seen from the whole American continent which have no counterpart in any European collection, they grumbled bitterly because it was six miles from the centre of the city and they considered the time involved in a visit practically wasted.
All that most of them wanted to see was the view from the top of the Empire State Building, the great cinemas and stores, and, particularly, the night haunts. Both women and men kept him up taking them to places until the small hours of the morning, so that he found himself jaded and exhausted when he had to report to the office to take on another sightseer at 10 o'clock the following morning.