The Old Man and Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

I was looking at wasn’t the terrible-tempered ogre I’d expected from the photographs and descriptions: was it merely my own fearful imagination that had misled me to the false image of precise attire and a sneer instead of the reality of a crumpled collar and a delightful leer?
    The man looking at me was in his late fifties. Stout and rumpled. Comfortably cushioned. Grey-haired, with a lock that fell across his forehead. A fleshy sensual mouth and a podgy mobile nose. A good coarse face full of robust health and a lustiness one could tell at a glance owed nothing to outdoor life. And those blue eyes—but they were exactly the colour of mine! Not taking his love-glance off me he began talking to his companion. I saw his plump well-padded paws, the fingers lying quietly together like mittens, move forward and sort of hug himself while he sat there still smiling at me as if I were the best thing he’d ever seen in his life. He looked so—what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so
accessible
. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability. How had I ever thought otherwise?
    “Who is that—just across from us?” My voice sounded funny, as if I hadn’t used it for a long time.
    “Well I’ll be damned,” said one of them. “There’s C. D. McKee.”
    I felt myself calm, almost passive now that it had happened, watching objectively the others shifting around into position to get a good look. C. D. and the man he was with looked back. And then everyone fell to recognizing everyone else. Especially McKee. First, very pointedly, he took his eyes away from mine and bestowed upon each of us a special attention that registered like a rating: a kindly, tolerant, somewhat reminiscent smile for Bollie; a softer, more courtly one for Dody; and then—something I’d never seen before—his face unchanging, still wearing the same expression, the leftover one from Dody—he let his eyes flicker past Smitty so that, while the impression remained friendly, the impact was that of a direct cut. Finally, as if to underline it all, he came back to me again, allowing his face to break into a series of dazzling and worshipful glances. The whole performance was masterly. I smiled back my applause. Well done. Got it. Every nuance.
    We resumed our foursome. The meal got ordered. God knows what I ate or what it tasted like. Bollie and Smitty picked up the conversation with redoubled energy, McKee’s presence in the room stimulating them to even dizzier heights of anecdote. Dody renewed her attack on her husband. The man with C. D. was someone Scotty had forbidden her to like because he was a snob and a member of White’s or something, but as a matter of fact why shouldn’t she and she was deciding right now to like him anyway. He was giving a party next week and they’d been invited and Scotty had said he wouldn’t be seen dead at it. So she was going. Then, with Bollie’s Stately Homes still tumbling down around us, Smitty turned quite serious and professional and
confided to me that he’d been trying to approach C. D. for the past year to interview him for a series of articles for his magazine.
    “Oh and I want to meet him,” I declared passionately, “I simply must!”
    “Whatever for?” Dody looked at me in amazement. “I mean apart from the thrill of pure terror that runs through me at the sight of him I don’t get his point. I mean he doesn’t do anything, does he? What did he do anyway? I always forget.”
    “He’s had many lives,” said Bollie. “He’s what’s known as a Significant Figure. He was a poet once, did you know? Several distinguished vols of verse long ago. Then there was the madly revered Oxford-don-of-staggering-intellect period. Philosophy I think. Of course. He was the School of Philosophy. Fellow of Christ Church and all that. And following upon its heels a Brigadier General if you please during the last war. A disastrous scuffle with big