So Little Time Read online

  “Jesus,” Mr. Fernald said, “do you remember Walter Newcombe? That was just before you went to New York.” And Walter’s face came back, with its shiny nose and the shock of yellow hair.

  “I wonder,” Mr. Fernald said, “what the hell ever happened. He was always a damned fool. How the hell did he ever do it?”

  If you had ever known anyone in his early budding years, living through those chapters which a biographer might entitle “Boyhood Portents,” it was hard to imagine that he ever could amount to much. Sitting there with Mr. Fernald seemed to Jeffrey a little like sitting in a projection room and running a picture backward just for fun. In both their minds, Walter Newcombe was running backward to the time that must have pleased him least; and after all, how had he ever done it? What hidden springs had there been within him that had pushed him out ahead? It was a little like those marathon runs, where some scrawny, hollow-chested boy, the last one who you would think could do it, would cough and wheeze his way out front.

  “Why, hell,” Mr. Fernald said, “I had to fire him because he couldn’t write a twelve head—not to save his life he couldn’t. He used to cry when he tried to write one. Hell’s fire, all he could do right was to pull A.P. papers out of those leather tubes, and sometimes at that he used to tear them.”

  Jeffrey had almost forgotten about the type of headline on the old paper that was known in the composing room as “number twelve.” It was one column wide and went down about six lines, a line and a word, each word growing shorter. The result was as monumental and beautiful as an old bookkeeper’s penmanship, and you had to be versatile to have it fill the space and still make sense.

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Fernald said, “maybe it was luck.”

  Luck might have been a contributing factor, but you couldn’t get away with everything indefinitely just because you were lucky.

  “Maybe it’s because he never got married,” Mr. Fernald said, and perhaps Mr. Fernald was thinking of himself as he watched the picture go backwards. “He didn’t have to dress a lot of kids and buy them an education.”

  But this was not strictly true, because actually Walter had been married twice. His first wife was a trained nurse named Nancy something, who had taken care of him the time he had his tonsils and adenoids removed at the Presbyterian Hospital, shortly after Walter had also “got through” and had also arrived in New York. It may have been the removal of those obstructions which had changed Walter, but that was long ago, and Nancy had faded out of the picture during some European tour of duty. His second wife was Mildred Hughes—Mildred Hughes the writer—who used to do articles for Good Housekeeping and the Companion and the Journal, sometimes about factory conditions and sometimes about washed-out farmers’ wives and stump farms and sometimes about society figures. Mildred had white hair and used a jade cigarette holder, but there was no use telling Mr. Fernald about Mildred, or that Walter had a daughter named Edwina, who had gold bands on her teeth and went to one of the big boarding schools, tuition free, because she was her father’s daughter. There was no use telling Mr. Fernald that Walter had encumbrances.

  Mr. Fernald snorted through his nose and chewed the end of his cigar.

  “Why, he wasn’t even a second-rate newspaper man,” Mr. Fernald said. “He never had the makings. Yes, how the hell did he do it?—World Assignment—Beware Those Honeyed Words—I Call the Turn.”

  As Mr. Fernald mentioned those works of Walter Newcombe’s, the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club selections which fixed it so that Walter was good for five hundred dollars a night on any lecture platform, Mr. Fernald spat over the piazza rail.

  “I’m not sour,” he said. “I like to think of the boys in the old shop getting on, but Walter—how could he call the turn on anything? And every turn he’s ever called is wrong because he isn’t a newspaper man. Now you tell me, because I want to hear, how does he get away with it?”

  There was no answer. There was nothing you could say. Walter had never sent Mr. Fernald one of those books, but that may have been out of delicacy because he had been fired, yet the old man would have liked to have one very much indeed.

  “I wonder …” Mr. Fernald said. “Sometimes I think old Jenksy had something to do with it. ‘All about Europe’s Capitals.’ Say, do you remember ‘But she’s a statue, Mr. Jenks’?”

  3

  Really Simple Fellows, Just like You or Me

  Readers of I Call the Turn may recall perusing, perhaps with dubious pleasure, the human and warm thumbnail biography of Walter Newcombe that appeared on the rear of what is known in the publishing trade as the “dust jacket.” This was prefaced by an informal snapshot of Walter taken when Walter was spending a week end at Happy Rocks, his publisher’s country home. Thus it gave a mistaken idea of the luxury of Walter’s surroundings, for only a few cynics realized that Walter was not comfortably at home. Walter was standing in front of the great fieldstone fireplace surrounded by shelves, ceiling high, of books which had been purchased from an English gentleman’s library. This gave the impression that Walter was versed in the classics, which was not true, because Walter had stopped with Dickens’ Dombey and Son, had let the Russians go with a hundred pages of Crime and Punishment, had read Julius Caesar and The Mill on the Floss in school English, and had done limited work on The House of the Seven Gables while at Dartmouth. In this photograph the camera had caught Walter swaying slightly, like the Tower of Pisa, a defect which was only partially corrected by the retouch artist of the Publicity Department. Walter was dressed informally in a gabardine coat, white flannels and tennis shoes. His eyes, without his glasses, looked innocent and startled, but his lips were compressed in a thin, determined line. The thumb of his right hand was thrust into the side pocket of his jacket and his other four fingers hung limply downward.

  When you saw the photograph, the opening sentence of the biography—“Walter Newcombe, no relation to Thackeray’s Colonel Newcombe, if you please”—seemed on the whole superfluous. It might be better if publishers did not assign bright boys and girls from Yale and Vassar to write about their authors with glowing human interest.

  In those all too rare moments [the sketch concluded] when Walter Newcombe is not on the plane to Lisbon, perchance on his way to see his old friend General Wavell in Cairo or may it be to hobnob for a while with some other world figure, say the Generalissimo or Madam Chiang Kai-shek in their bungalow at Chungking—he lives a quietly harassed life trying to finish another of his commentaries on this changing world. (The sooner the better, say his readers!) As this is written, Mr. and Mrs. Newcombe and their daughter Edwina are safely tucked away in the gardener’s cottage of his publisher’s country estate, where Mr. Newcombe complains that his portable typewriter is continually getting mixed up with two dachshund puppies and his daughter’s roller skates. Someday, Mr. Newcombe says, he is going to write a book about Edwina.

  Most of this was an imaginary half-truth, for Walter was never fond of dogs, and he did all his writing in an office in New York; but there was one bit of that “blurb” which was illuminating—a single sentence which must have come from something which Walter had said himself.

  Newcombe’s career as a journalist, which saw its inception in Boston, really began when he joined those distinguished ranks of young men—and young women too—who first spread their creative wings in New York’s old Newspaper Row, who hobnobbed with Heywood Broun and F.P.A. of the old Tribune, with Cobb of the World, and with Don Marquis of the Sun.…

  It is doubtful whether Walter ever hobnobbed, except in the vaguest sense, with any of these individuals, but this was only a detail. All that was interesting was that Walter had thrust behind him those awkward days and all that kindly environment of the old telegraph desk. He always said that he only began to find himself when he walked into the City Room one morning and got himself a job on what he ever afterwards loyally called “the Paper”—or “the Old Sheet,” in New York.

  Walter appeared there in one of those critical jou
rnalistic periods when many New York dailies could not adjust to the changing styles and tastes of the Twenties. The Paper was like a little country in the throes of a social revolution. There were the same frantic changes of policy and format. In desperation the owner of the Paper had moved to town, completely abandoning his previous pursuits, and appeared at his office every day. There was a continual transfusion of new blood. Correspondents were snapped back from Europe and put on the slot, or were set to running the Morgue or taking wrappers off exchanges. New cartoonists came and went with new managing editors, city editors, promotion experts, dramatic editors, and feature writers for the new women’s page. They all appeared like Kerenski as possible saviors of the Paper, but they were gone like a summer shower. Later, when people who worked there tried to remember Walter, it was very difficult, but then at this time you never knew who your boss would be the next morning, or whether you might be looking for a new job yourself in the afternoon. Besides, Walter had only been there for a little while before he was sent to the London Office.

  In the past twenty years, the United States has been most fickle in its selection of types for hero-worship. It is difficult to realize, in the light of the present, that Bankers and Business Executives once were heroes, in the Twenties. Jeffrey Wilson could remember when the circulation of periodicals such as the American Magazine was built largely on the heroic backlog of Big Business. Pages were filled with photographs of bankers at play, and with inspiring interviews with men like the late Messrs. Schwab and Vanderlip, telling the youth of America how they, too, could succeed. This, of course, was before Bankers and Executives were swept away into the Limbo of disrepute when the dam of the depression broke, and before some wag at the Senate hearing placed that midget on the knee of Mr. Morgan.

  After the Bankers came a new type of hero. He was the Man in White; he was that quiet, nerveless soldier fighting his lonely battle on the murky frontier of Science, strangling microbes, manufacturing artificial hearts, so that America might live. This era brought us The Microbe Hunters and The Hunger Fighters and young Dr. Kildare and hospital nurses and horse-and-buggy doctors and Arrowsmith and doctors’ Odysseys; but by the middle of the Thirties the Doctor too began to lose his dramatic punch. That was when the Foreign Correspondent at last came into his own.

  We discovered that the Foreign Correspondent was not a disreputable, disillusioned journalistic wastrel. The Foreign Correspondent, it all at once appeared, was not a stoop-shouldered man, bending over a typewriter or bickering with the cable office or living amid the smell of cabbage in some dingy apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The Correspondent, we suddenly realized, was a debonair man of the world, a streamlined troubadour who hobnobbed, as they said on Walter’s jacket, with nearly everyone. The doors of the Chancelleries were open to him. Brüning, Hitler, Mussolini, Dollfuss, Simon, Churchill, King George and Léon Blum, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, the Shah of Persia, the Duke of Windsor, Gandhi, the Old Marshal, the Young Marshal, Sun Yat-sen, Kemal Ataturk, Konoye, Beneš, Tojo, and Prince Chichibu—all these gentlemen were familiar and rather amusingly uncomplex figures to Your Foreign Correspondent. There seemed to be no barrier of language, no shyness, no secret repressions when Your Correspondent tapped upon their doors. They might be in their palaces or in a political dungeon or devoting their attention to an attack of gallstones or international anarchy, but they still had lots and lots of time to see Your Correspondent; and they were genial, ordinary fellows, too, not stand-offish or stuck up, but very much like you or me. It seemed that they enjoyed ping-pong, or cattle raising, or a good laugh, or some quaint American gadget like an automatic cigarette lighter, or the latest volume of Edgar Wallace, just like you or me. It seemed that they all had all sorts of personal habits, just like you or me. They picked their teeth and they put their bridgework in a glass of water every night. They smoked cigarettes or drank warm milk. They loved dogs and rolypoly children. They were tousle-headed, florid-faced, tranquil, clear-eyed, filmy-eyed, lethargic, dynamos of nervous energy, and they put you at ease at once, just like you or me.

  They were always in a disarming mood when they saw Your Correspondent, just a little tired, just a little wistful as they gazed back upon their achievements—when they saw Your Correspondent. Taken off their guard that way—something in Your Correspondent’s personality must have done it, although really he was an ordinary fellow, too, just like you or me—they were trapped into being amazingly revealing. It is true that they were tactful and only too aware of the weight of state secrets, so that often they told Your Correspondent confidences off the record which may be revealed fifty or sixty years from now, confidences a bit too heady for you or me at present. Yet even so, subconsciously they gave still more. They gave by a lift of the eyebrow, by a nervous tic of the larynx, by an involuntary fidgeting in their padded chairs, by a far-off look out of the window at the chimney pots of London, at the majesty of the Dolomites, at the minarets of Istanbul, at the miniature quaintness of the Nippon countryside—but Your Correspondent understood those hidden meanings. There was an invariable communion of souls between Your Correspondent and his subject which resulted in a mutual perfection of comprehension and a wholesome and mutual respect each for the other—Your Correspondent went away from there feeling that he had made another friend. Although he could never tell you or me quite all about it (because not the greatest writer in the world could wholly express the essence of that communion), still Your Correspondent brought away something that he would always remember—the sad lilt of a voice, the brave self-confidence of a laugh, the silence of that austere little room in the palace, or perchance the snap of a coal in the grate while outside yellow fog billowed through the streets of London. Your Correspondent saw it all. He felt, as he never had before, the gathering of great imponderable forces in the making, the tramp of peoples inexorably on the march, the gathering of the clouds signifying what?

  It didn’t matter what. Your Correspondent saw it; he sensed it; he vibrated with it. It turned out that Correspondents were not the humdrum lads whom we used to know. The apéritifs of Europe’s capitals, the rice wine of Japan, had done a lot to change them in the middle 1930’s. The world knew it when suddenly they broke away from their newspaper columns and began to give a jaded, worried nation the benefit of their personal confessions. There were Personal History and The Way of a Transgressor and I Write as I Please; but there is no need to call the roll of those volumes—Inside Europe—Assignment in Utopia—Inside Asia—those men had seen everything.

  When World Assignment by Walter Newcombe was published it is said that his publisher, Sinclair Merriwell, was somewhat dubious. In fact, Mr. Merriwell admitted as much himself with rueful humor that made the tables rock with sympathetic laughter at one of those Book and Author Luncheons at the Hotel Astor. He actually thought—publishers, you know, never do know a good thing, even when it is right under their noses—that Mr. Newcombe’s manuscript, which he had brought timidly to the office himself, believe it or not, all done up in a cardboard hot-water bottle carton, was just another of those books. But the Book-of-the-Month Club had taught him better and so also had the public, the most intelligent public in the world. Mr. Merriwell wanted right here and now to apologize to the public, and to tell them that they knew more about books than he did. They had given World Assignment the accolade. They had seen its inner quality, that literary essence which raised it above mere adventure, mere personal chronology, mere journalistic analysis.

  Yet, what was that quality? Once, in a confidential mood and very much off the record, Walter’s publisher had said that he was everlastingly damned if he could say.

  “Don’t quote me,” he said, “but I took it to balance the list. There was too much whimsy-whamsy and we needed something heavy, but who ever heard of Newcombe? But that’s the beauty of publishing. I had never heard of him, and now he’s a great friend of mine—one of my best friends, and we have him tied up for his next two books as long as they aren’t fiction.”


  It was easy enough to say that the works of Walter Newcombe possessed a plus quality of literary essence, as his publisher put it in that speech at the Astor, but it was more difficult to define what that essence was. When the Stanhope Agency added Walter to its literary stable, George Stanhope expressed it differently.

  “Walter Newcombe,” Stanhope said, “certainly has a whole lot on the ball.”

  Yet, when pressed to be more specific, George Stanhope could not tell what it was that Walter had on the ball. World Assignment was on the whole quiet and unoriginal compared with the efforts of his competitors. To Walter, Paris was not “a jewel encircled by the loving but avaricious arms of the silver Seine.” What impressed him more than the width of the boulevards was the stone buildings. “They have a spaciousness,” Walter wrote, “which somehow always reminds me of the steps of the New York Public Library.” He did not react like Napoleon when he beheld the pyramids. He was mainly amazed that you could walk right up the sides. Rome, Walter observed, had been disfigured by Mussolini, much more than by King Victor Emmanuel, because Mussolini had uncovered a great many more pagan ruins than were necessary. Teheran, in Persia, Walter found, was a conglomeration of French-looking villas, hardly worth a visitor’s time. What had interested him most was the sight of some crabs by a drain in one of the Shah’s palace gardens—crabs, although Teheran was exactly so-many miles away from the Caspian Sea. Somehow Peking was not what he had thought it would be in the least. All the buildings were the same height except the Pekin and the Wagon Lits Hotels. And China did not smell as badly as he had expected it to. In Tokyo he had trouble with the sunken bathtubs made of mosaic blocks in Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright’s earthquake-proof hotel. Walter confided to his readers that he had scraped himself severely in one an hour previous to his being received by Prince Chichibu.