“Whatever you tell me, I suppose. What is it?”
“You’re going home in this cab to prepare your wife for a lot of visitors. Tell her there will be ten or maybe twenty. We sha’n’t want any food; we’ll bring that with us. All we shall want is coffee. Ask her if she’ll make gallons of coffee, Gerald. For the women, you know. There’ll be whisky for us, won’t there?” he added rather wistfully. “Now trot along. I sha’n’t be a quarter of an hour behind you.”
“But, Ivan——”
“But me not a single but,” he said, grinning, and turned away.
Half-an-hour later a taxi-cab full of strangers carrying parcels arrived at my flat. Heald was not with them. In answer to their ring, my wife and I went to open the door to welcome them.
“Come right in,” we said. And then they told us who they were and we told them who we were. A couple of [168] ]minutes later another taxi full of strangers arrived. Still no Ivan Heald. It was now about ten o’clock, and during the following hour Chelsea people still kept arriving, some in cabs, some on foot. It appeared that Heald had routed up half the people he knew in Chelsea and told them that he had found someone “new,” that we were just “it,” and that the sooner we all got to know each other the better.
This “surprise party”—so dear to Americans—turned out a complete success, though half the people had to sit on the floor. Norman Morrow, away in a corner behind a pile of books, sang Irish songs, Herbert Hughes played the piano in his brilliant way, and Harry Low and Eddie Morrow, with two clever girl-models, acted plays that they invented on the spur of the moment. Heald came in late, armed with loaves, butter, cakes and fruit. Not until dawn (the month was June) did we separate. I was to meet these delightful people many, many times later, but so casual yet intimate was our relationship that I never heard—or, if I heard, I soon forgot—the surnames of a few of them. We called each other by our Christian names or by nicknames.
Perhaps of all the Chelsea people Augustus John is the most interesting. We became acquainted at the Six Bells, the famous King’s Road hostelry, and he took me to his studio near at hand. It was a big barn-like place with a ridiculous little stove that burned fussily somewhere near the entrance and from which you never felt any heat unless, absent-mindedly, you sat on the stove itself. The studio was crowded with work of all kinds, the most conspicuous canvas being a huge crayon drawing of a group of gipsies. Augustus John planted me in a chair in front of this, seated himself on another chair and stared—not at the picture, but—at me! Now, I had been told that John does not suffer fools gladly, and I suspected from his inquisitorial glance that he was waiting to see if I [169] ]was of the detested brood. Sooner or later I should have to speak, and I groped despairingly in my mind for something sensible yet not obvious to say about his bold, vivid and arresting picture. Through sheer apprehensiveness I found nothing, so, after gazing at the canvas for a few minutes, I rose and passed on to the next picture. John’s large, luminous eyes followed me.
“You don’t like it,” he said, softly but decisively.
“Oh yes, I do,” I answered, “or, rather—what I mean is that ‘like’ is not the right word. It attracts me and repels me at the same time. It makes me curious—curious about the gipsies themselves, but more curious still about the man who has drawn them. But you didn’t make it for anyone to ‘like,’ did you?”