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  So Little Time

  A Novel

  John P. Marquand

  To

  ALFRED McINTYRE

  In memory of all the trips we have taken together over the rough roads of fiction

  Contents

  For the Reader Who Takes His Fiction Seriously

  1 Why Didn’t You Ever Tell Me?

  2 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  3 Really Simple Fellows, Just like You or Me

  4 Just a Report from London

  5 Don’t Get Me Started on That

  6 There’s Everything in New York

  7 It Completely Lacks Validity

  8 That Old Town by the Sea

  9 And Fred Too, of Course

  10 Just Don’t Say We’re Dead

  11 This—Is London

  12 I’ll Wait for You by Moonlight

  13 You Can’t Blame Those Little People

  14 Those Ways We Took from Old Bragg High

  15 Now You’ve Found Your Way

  16 Just the Day for Tea

  17 We’ll Show ’Em, Won’t We, Jeff?

  18 Never Twice in a Lifetime

  19 And All the Heart Desires

  20 Old Kaspar, and the Sun Was Low

  21 Careful How You Stir Them, George

  22 Where Everything Was Bright

  23 The Peach Crop’s Always Fine

  24 Well, Hardly That

  25 He Had to Call on Jim

  26 We Were Young Ourselves Once

  27 The World of Tomorrow

  28 Your Sister, Not Mine

  29 To the Publishers, God Bless Them

  30 But When It Comes to Living

  31 It Was Simpler for the Prince

  32 He Didn’t Have Much Time

  33 Where the Initials Are Marked in Pencil

  34 Dear Jim:…

  35 Mr. Mintz Was Very Tired

  36 You’re in the Army Now

  37 Don’t Speak Any Lines

  38 It’s Time to Take the Clipper

  39 By the Numbers

  40 Wonder Spelled Backwards

  41 Nothing Goes On Forever

  42 Author’s Reading

  43 You Can’t Do with Them—or without Them

  44 My Son as Much as Your Son

  45 Well, Here We Are

  46 Conversation in the Small Hours

  47 Just around the Corner

  48 The Little Men

  49 The Time for all Good Men

  50 Old Soldiers Never Die

  51 Forgive Us Our Debts

  About the Author

  For the Reader Who Takes His Fiction Seriously

  This novel is an attempt to depict certain phases of contemporary life, and it is hoped that these will be realistic enough to appear familiar to the reader. To create this illusion the names of certain widely known persons have been mentioned, particularly in the dialogue, although none of these persons actually appear in any scene. The active characters, and the backgrounds against which they move are drawn, as these always must be, from a reservoir of experience derived from what an author has seen, heard and read. If these characters are successful, they should exhibit traits which will arouse the reader’s own recollection and should seem like persons of his own acquaintance. This, it must be emphasized, is only a trick of illusion observable in all presentable fiction. The persons in these pages are known to the author only in his creative mind. He has never known a world correspondent, for example, like Walter Newcombe. Individuals who have worked for him have been honest and faithful and have in no wise resembled the transient couples in these pages, or the busy Mr. Gorman. If these characters bear the names of real persons, this is a purely unintentional and unavoidable coincidence, considering the large population of the world. In short, no one here is intended to represent, however remotely, either accurately or in caricature, any actual person, whether living or dead.

  A device, shopworn perhaps, but still effective, for evoking in a reader’s mind the spirit of some period in the recent past is the quoting of a snatch of some popular song representative of that time. The author is most grateful to the music publishers for permission to quote occasional lines from their copyrighted works, and detailed acknowledgment appears at the end of this foreword. In this connection, the careful reader will note that a song about “looking for a happy land where everything is bright” has been used frequently and is seldom quoted in exactly the same way, since it was a parody fashioned in the first World War and still, as far as can be discovered, is word-of-mouth. It was parodied from a song, “The Dying Hobo,” which appears in the anthology by Sigmund Spaeth, Weep Some More, My Lady.

  JOHN P. MARQUAND

  KENT’S ISLAND

  NEWBURY, MASSACHUSETTS

  1943

  1

  Why Didn’t You Ever Tell Me?

  In the mornings when they were in the city, they had breakfast on a card table in Jeffrey’s study. The table was placed in front of a window which looked south over the chimneys and skylights of old brownstone houses. The geometric bulk of apartment houses rose up among them and the pointed top of the Chrysler Building and hazy large buildings stood beyond. In the morning those buildings seemed to have an organic life of their own, and their texture changed with the changing light.

  Madge always had orange juice and Melba toast and black coffee without any sugar in it, although Jeffrey could not understand why. Madge had always been too thin and Jeffrey often told her that she would feel much better if she had a boiled egg or a little bacon in the morning, or perhaps oatmeal and cream. He could never understand why the mention of oatmeal and cream seemed to Madge revolting.

  “The only thing I have left is my figure,” Madge used to say. “And I’m not going to lose my figure.”

  Jeffrey always told her that she looked fine except when she looked tired, and how could she help looking tired if she didn’t eat anything?

  “I don’t want to look like a contented cow,” Madge used to say. “Besides you’d feel a great deal better if you just had orange juice and coffee. Breakfast always makes you lazy.”

  Jeffrey would tell her that breakfast was the only meal that ever pulled him together—that he had never been accustomed to working before eleven in the morning. And then Madge always said that it was because he was Bohemian—a word which always annoyed Jeffrey. She used to tell him that if he would get up at a quarter to eight in the morning like other people’s husbands, he would get his work done with and not have it hanging over him until the last minute. Other people’s husbands were out of the house and on their way downtown by eight-thirty, but Jeffrey was deliberately different because he wanted to be Bohemian. Jeffrey never could tell exactly what she meant by the term except that it embraced all those traits of his against which Madge never could stop struggling.

  “Try to find another word for it,” he used to tell her. “Call me a congenital loafer if you want, but whatever else we are, you’ve fixed it so we aren’t Bohemian.”

  Sometimes Madge would laugh, because time had made it one of those controversies which had no rancor left in it.

  “Darling,” she would say, “you might get to be Bohemian almost any time.”

  Breakfast was always like that, but still it was a pleasant meal at which you could talk about plans without anything’s worrying you too much. Madge wore her blue satin slippers that morning, and she wore her blue kimono with the white bamboo design on it. Jeffrey liked to see her in it because it seemed to add to the tilt of her nose and to the curve of her lips. She never loo
ked serious in the morning. Jeffrey wore a Burgundy silk dressing gown and slippers that pinched his feet. He had to wear both the dressing gown and the slippers because the children had given them to him for Christmas and because Madge had picked them out herself.

  “What’s in the paper?” Madge asked.

  “Just about the same as yesterday,” he said. “Here, do you want to read it?”

  She always asked him what was in the paper, but she never wanted to read it.

  “I can’t,” she said. “You always leave it all twisted-up. When you get through with it all I can find is the obituaries.”

  Jeffrey picked up the paper again. In all the thousands of mornings they had spent together, she had always hated to have him read.

  “Darling,” Madge said, “if you want me to pay the bills, you’ll have to put some more money in the account.”

  “All right,” Jeffrey said.

  “I can’t pay the bills,” Madge said, “until you put some more in the account.”

  “Where’s Jim?” Jeffrey asked.

  “He’s still asleep,” Madge said. “Don’t wake him up, please don’t, Jeffrey.”

  “It’s time he got up,” Jeffrey said, “all he does is sleep whenever he comes home. Where’s Gwen?”

  “Where she is every weekday,” Madge said, “at school, of course. Other people’s families get up in the morning.…” She began to open letters from the pile beside her plate. “Jeffrey, they want us to be patrons for the Finnish Relief Dinner. It’s on the twenty-third.”

  Jeffrey lighted a cigarette and sipped his coffee. It was like every other morning. He always felt better when he drank his coffee. Madge picked up her silver pencil and a block of paper.

  “Twenty-five dollars for the Finnish Relief,” she said. “You’ll have to have lunch on a tray today. Some of the girls are coming to lunch.”

  “That’s all right,” Jeffrey told her, “I’m going out.”

  “Where?” Madge asked.

  “You can get me at the Astor,” Jeff said, “and after the Astor I’ll be at the theater. They’re going to start rehearsing right after lunch. They may be going all night.” Jeffrey was feeling better now that he was drinking his coffee. “This show is very lousy, darling.”

  “Can’t you ever tell me your plans sooner, dear?” Madge asked. “They won’t want you tomorrow, will they? Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “What’s happening Saturday?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Darling,” Madge said, “I wrote it down myself on your engagement pad. What good does it do if you don’t ever read it? We’re going to Fred’s and Beckie’s for a nice October week end, and you know what happened last time. You can’t keep putting it off. Fred and Beckie don’t understand it, and I can’t keep explaining to them.”

  “Oh God,” Jeffrey said. “All right, all right.”

  “I know the way you feel about them, dear,” Madge said, “but you know the way I feel about Beckie. Other people don’t let old friends down.”

  “All right,” Jeffrey said, “don’t try to explain it. There’s nothing to explain.”

  “Beckie keeps being afraid you don’t like them,” Madge said, “and I have to keep telling her that it’s only the way you are. You know how hard they try to get people for you to talk to.”

  “I can talk to anybody,” Jeffrey said, “as long as they don’t play pencil and paper games.”

  “Darling,” Madge said, “it’s only because she wants you to do something you’re used to and they don’t play bridge.”

  “All right, all right,” Jeffrey said, “as long as it isn’t the names of rivers, and as long as I don’t have to be tongue-tied and go out somewhere into the hall.”

  Madge reached across the table and patted the back of his hand.

  “When you go anywhere,” she said, “if you ever do go, you know you really do have a good time when you get there. Why, I can’t ever get you to go home to bed.” Madge frowned, and then she smiled. “It’s just your act. Who do you think they’re having for the week end?”

  “Who?” Jeffrey asked.

  “They’re having Walter Newcombe,” Madge said, “the foreign correspondent who wrote World Assignment. He’s just back. He was at the evacuation of Dunkirk.”

  “What?” Jeffrey said.

  “It’s true,” Madge told him. “You may think Fred and Beckie are dull, but interesting people like to come to their house. We never have anyone around like Walter Newcombe.”

  “My God,” Jeffrey said, “Walter Newcombe? Is he back again? Why, he was here in April.” And he saw that Madge was looking at him.

  “You don’t know him, do you?”

  “Yes,” Jeffrey said, “of course I know him.”

  The little perpendicular lines above her nose grew deeper. She was looking at him curiously as she still did sometimes.

  “Jeff,” she asked, “why do you keep things from me, as though you led a double life, as though I were your mistress? Where did you ever know him?”

  Jeffrey began to laugh. “Why, he was one of the Newcombes who lived on West Street. The old man ran the trolley to Holden, and Walter was on the paper in Boston. He started out in the telegraph room just before I left, and he used to be on the old sheet down here too.”

  “Darling,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me—why is it you never bring friends like that around here?”

  “He isn’t a friend,” Jeffrey said. “I just know him. Besides you wouldn’t like him much.”

  She lighted a cigarette, still looking at him, and the lines above her nose were deeper.

  “It’s like a wall,” she said, “a wall.”

  “What’s like a wall?” he asked.

  “You never tell me things,” she said, and she put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on the palms of her hands. “Even now, these little things come out. It makes you like a stranger; it’s like waking up and finding a strange man in the bedroom; it isn’t fair. I’ve told you again and again I want to know everything about you.”

  “When I try to tell you, you’re always thinking about something else,” Jeffrey said, and then he began to laugh again.

  “What is it,” she asked, “that’s so funny?”

  “I was thinking,” Jeffrey said, “about a man I met once on the train when I was going into Boston to the old telegraph room. I used to commute, you know. That was the day Walter got his job there. He was a prize fighter.”

  “Who was a prize fighter?” Madge asked.

  “Not Walter,” Jeffrey told her, “the man on the train. It’s funny—I haven’t thought about it for years. It was in the smoking car of the old 8:12 and it hasn’t got anything to do with anything at all, but it’s just the sort of thing I don’t tell you because you’d be bored. You ought to get dressed and order the meals, but I’ll tell you.”

  When he told her things like that it always amused him to watch her, because she never understood—neither she nor anybody like her. It was in the summer of 1919, just after he got back from the war, and the smoking car of the old 8:12 hadn’t changed. Just as many cinders blew through the open windows in the summertime and the seats had the same black leather and the same crowd got on at Norton and the same group turned the seats back to play pitch, when old Mr. Fownes, the conductor, brought out the pitchboard. They all took their coats off and sat in their shirt sleeves. It must have been at one of those stations before you got to Lynn that a stranger slumped into the seat beside him.

  “Is this seat taken, Bud?” the stranger asked. It was obvious from the new occupant’s breath that he had been drinking. He was a small wiry young man with a short nose and a red face and light blue eyes. He wore a purple suit with padded shoulders and a silk shirt with green stripes on it and a celluloid collar with a bright red necktie.

  “Bud,” the stranger said, “do you take anything?”

  “Take any what?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Any whisky, for Christ’s sake,” the stranger said, and he pull
ed a black pint bottle from his back hip pocket, extracted the cork and wiped the neck with his sleeve. “Here,” he said, “for Christ’s sake.”

  There was something appealing in the other’s bid for friendship.

  “Why, thanks,” Jeffrey said. It was very bad whisky.

  “Bud,” the other asked him, “was you overseas?”

  Jeffrey said he had been and he asked if the other had been there too, and he wiped the neck of the bottle and handed it back.

  “They t’rew me out,” the other said, and he beat his chest with his fist. “T.b.; they t’rew me out.”

  Jeffrey told himself that whisky was antiseptic.

  “I’m in the game,” the stranger said, and he looked proud and took another drink.

  “What game?” Jeffrey asked him.

  “The fight game,” the stranger said, and his voice was louder.

  “Oh,” Jeffrey said, “you’re a fighter, are you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Bud,” the stranger said. “They t’rew me out because I have t.b., and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch my weight.”

  The man’s voice rose higher. He was disturbing the concentration of the pitch players.

  “It must be nice to know you can,” Jeffrey told him.

  The stranger scowled at him. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you, Bud?” he said. “You don’t think I’m a fighter, do you, Bud?” and suddenly he thrust his fist under Jeffrey’s nose. “All right, bite my thumb.”

  “Why should biting your thumb prove anything?” Jeffrey asked.

  The stranger’s voice grew belligerent.

  “Go on,” he shouted, “I tol’ you, didn’t I? Bite my thumb.”

  The little man had risen and was holding his thumb under Jeffrey’s nose. The scene had caused a flurry, and nearly everyone else in the car was standing up.

  “Sit down,” Jeffrey said, “and have a drink.”

  “Go on,” the stranger shouted, “like I tol’ you, and bite my thumb.”

  There was a novelty in the invitation which appealed to the smoking car.

  “Go ahead and bite it, fella,” someone called, “if he wants you to.”

  There was only one thing to do under the circumstances. Jeffrey took the stranger’s thumb and placed it between his back teeth and bit it hard. The little man did not wince. On the contrary, he seemed pleased.