So Little Time Read online

  His reactions to the great figures in his world gallery of portraits were equally unexciting. If it had not been for the background of the Quirinal Palace, Mussolini would have reminded him of a friend of his who had been in the engineering company which had built the George Washington Bridge. When Herr Hitler lost his self-consciousness, as he did after the first few moments of their meeting, Walter observed that he was “quite a lot of fun.” (This remark was deleted from the annotated and revised war edition of World Assignment.) If Stalin’s hair had been a little shorter and he had been minus a mustache, Walter would have thought that he was entering the room of his old High School principal.

  Jeffrey thought it was hardly fair to take these extreme examples from World Assignment and set them all together, as they gave an exaggerated impression of stupidity and gaucheness. The truth was that there was a dullness in Walter’s work which lent it the authenticity of Daniel Defoe. An innocence about his paragraphs and periods, a completely gullible acceptance of everything he saw, were exasperating until they became almost subtle. Walter saw everything, and he put down everything. This may have been the “plus quality” of Walter’s work. Every reader of World Assignment felt that he knew exactly what Walter meant, and yet each reader closed the book with a different impression. If you did not like Mr. Léon Blum, you were sure that Walter did not. If you did like Léon Blum, you could grasp the conviction of Walter’s enthusiasm.

  In his later works his world stood a little more breathless, waiting for the turn of fate, its drama moving forward with the inexorable sweep of Greek tragedy. He began to write of shepherd’s pipes ushering in the spring above the anemone-incrusted hills of Greece, their brave notes rising above the rumble of approaching forces. Yet even through these picturesque periods, Walter still remained simple. And that perhaps was the whole answer to Walter Newcombe—the guileless simplicity that had made him say, “But she’s a statue, Mr. Jenks.” He was still walking down the path of life saying that she was only a statue, in a great many different ways.

  4

  Just a Report from London

  Sometimes it seemed tragic to Jeffrey Wilson that his past, and perhaps the past of anyone else, divided itself into compartments each completely separate from the other and without communicating doors. He would live for a while in one of those compartments among familiar faces, familiar scenes, and then, without ever knowing quite the basic reason for it, some inner force of growth or of decay would move him out of there. Once, at one of those week end parties out in Connecticut, when it had been raining and when some people named the Hoadleys had come in with some of their guests, and when the Jessups had come in with some more guests, and when everybody began putting ice cubes into glasses, trying to think of something to say when there was nothing to talk about at all, Jeffrey had brought up the subject of compartments. He had not intended for a single minute to hold the whole room spellbound; he had simply found himself sitting in a corner with a pale blond girl, who wore a canary-yellow sweater and whose name he had not caught. They had talked first about the rising price of gin, and then for no particular reason about electric refrigerators, and then about the use of bone meal as a fertilizer for suburban gardens. At this point Jeffrey found it simpler to do what he had done before, to carry on a monologue, rather than cope with an extraneous personality who would never mean anything to him in the present or the future. After the bone meal, he began to talk about compartments. It did not matter to him that the blond girl looked confused—it was easier to do the talking all himself. It occurred to him that the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes had once presented a similar idea in his familiar schoolroom poem “The Chambered Nautilus.” The shellfish of Dr. Holmes—and Jeffrey had never seen one—kept building pearly rooms and then moving out of them.

  “In other words,” Jeffrey said, “it was a Victorian shellfish, rather Late than Middle.”

  “I don’t see how a shellfish can be Victorian,” the blond girl said, and she tittered. “What are we talking about, and why is it Victorian?”

  Jeffrey had not intended to speak loudly. He would have stopped if he had known that other people were listening.

  “Because the compartments were lined with pearl,” he said. “Now, most of my compartments aren’t lined with pearl, and I don’t believe yours are either.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the blond girl said, but it did not bother Jeffrey.

  “It’s about the phases through which you pass in living,” Jeffrey told her. “You know a lot of people, and then you meet a lot of other people and forget the first people, and then you meet a lot more and forget again. I only mean you can’t keep them all together.”

  Then Madge heard him across the room.

  “Don’t mind Jeff,” she called, “think nothing of it. Jeff’s only sounding off again.”

  “You frightened her,” Madge told him afterwards. “She didn’t know what you were leading up to, and now she will tell everyone you were drunk.”

  “I was only trying to talk to her,” Jeffrey said. “I had to, didn’t I?”

  “You know you were doing it on purpose,” Madge said. “You know just as well as I do that most people don’t like ideas. They don’t expect them from you—only from a celebrity, and you’re not a celebrity.”

  Jeffrey told Madge that he did not have the slightest desire to be a celebrity—but it was true about compartments.

  Jeffrey could divide his life into them, and there were some about which Madge knew nothing, and he could not explain them to her clearly any more than she could explain to him what had happened to her the year she had come out.

  “I wish you would tell me more about that,” Madge had asked him sometimes, but he was never able to tell her, because the walls were sealed.

  “Why don’t you ever bring any of those people around?” Madge would say sometimes, but it never worked—bringing those people around—any more than explaining them ever worked. They were the shadowy dwellers in the forgotten mansions of the soul.

  It was hard even for Jeffrey to recall what he had ever seen in some of those acquaintances or how they had ever fitted into the pattern of his life. Occasionally it shocked him to hear his name called and to see someone suddenly who remembered all sorts of things which he had forgotten, someone in whose mind he still lived vividly—younger, gayer, still moving about in performances which he had left forever. Waldo Berg was just like that.

  Back in the days when Jeffrey had first come to New York, Waldo Berg was one of the Sports Writers on the paper where Jeffrey had worked down on Park Row. Waldo Berg could not have been more than three or four years older than Jeffrey, but he seemed to Jeffrey a man of the world—a leader in his profession. He had a two-room apartment in the Village off Sheridan Square. He knew bartenders and policemen by their first names, and he had been generous to Jeffrey.

  When Jeffrey was standing on the corner of 43d Street and Fifth Avenue waiting for the lights to change, someone called to him, and there was Waldo Berg. It was early April, in the spring of 1940, six months before Jeffrey and Madge had sat that morning discussing Fred and Beckie, and the crowd on Fifth Avenue looked shabby, and Waldo Berg looked shabby, too. The ends of the sleeves of his black overcoat were shiny, the band of his gray felt hat, perched on the back of his round bald head, was greasy. Waldo himself appeared pale and bloated, a weary projection of the way he used to look. He made Jeffrey conscious of his own custom-tailored suit, of the shine on his brown low shoes and of the crease in his trousers.

  “Why don’t you ever ask him around?” Madge would have said. “You know I love to see your old friends.”

  Madge would not have loved to see Waldo Berg, and Waldo would surely not have loved to see Madge, but Madge would have been nice about it.

  “He was interesting,” Madge would have said, “if he hadn’t kept dropping ashes on the rug. And I was perfectly cordial to him, wasn’t I? I didn’t high-hat him at all, did I? I always like your old fr
iends, and I always get on very well with them, but you never bring them around.”

  That was what Madge would have said, and there would not have been a word to answer. There would only have been inadequacy and embarrassment. There was nothing so dangerous or so impossible as to try to mix divergent worlds.

  “Hey,” Waldo called. “Hey there, Jeffie. How are you, you big bastard?”

  Jeffrey recalled that no one had called him “Jeffie” except back in the past.

  “Why,” Jeffrey said, “hello, Waldo.” He was thinking that they had been great friends once. Waldo had been kind to Jeffrey back there, and now it was all gone. It was the sort of kindness you could never repay, the sort of friendship that could only last back there.

  “Cripes,” Waldo said. “Where are you eating? Come on to the Bulldog meeting, or can’t you stand the food?”

  There was something elaborate about it, and something sad. Waldo was asking him to lunch, and at the same time he was telling him to go to hell if he did not want to come. There were plenty of things Jeffrey should have done, but Waldo had fixed it so that he had to go to lunch.

  “I can take it if you can,” Jeffrey said. “Where are they eating now?”

  “Up on top of the Hotchkiss,” Waldo said, “over by Lexington Avenue. Poops is talking to us—off the record, just to his old pals. Poops was in the newspaper game once himself.”

  “Who’s Poops?” Jeffrey asked, and Waldo was silent for a moment while they both tried to turn the clock back.

  “He may be Walter Newcombe, the news ace, to you,” Waldo said, “but we used to call him ‘Poops’ in the sports department, and he’s Poops to me—Poops.” And Waldo made a vulgar noise.

  Jeffrey had never been a member of the Bulldog Club, a name connected, of course, with the early edition of a morning newspaper, but in the past he had occasionally been present at the luncheon meetings. The Bulldog Club was one of those organizations of reporters and editors and its beginnings were shrouded in doubt, because successive careless secretaries had lost the early records, just as its treasurers were apt to lose the account books. There was no documentary way of disputing the rumor that the Bulldog Club had been founded either by Horace Greeley of the Tribune or by Bennett of the Herald. It was even said that it was older than the Gridiron Club at Washington, which meant that its members thought highly of it. It was important enough to cause those national figures known to the trade as “big names” genuine pleasure when they were asked to speak for fifteen or twenty minutes on any subject they pleased, entirely off the record, at the Club’s bimonthly luncheons. Certain hotels were happy to receive the Club, even though many of its members spilled, broke glasses, tried to run up bills for the Martinis at the bar, and drew diagrams on the tablecloths. The Club had a definite publicity value, what with the radio commentators and the guests of honor who appeared in the hotel lobby, and besides, it was always well to be in right with those people whom hotel managers affectionately called “newspaper boys and girls.” Siegfried Carter, who wrote a column called “Gotham’s Snacks and Napery,” was a member, and so was Ellen Burton Kinsley, whose “Mr. Doakes Surveys the Menu” had a wide popular following. At any moment they might write some laudatory line:—

  By-the-by, if you and Someone Else are starved both for swing and for canapés, glide down the red velvet carpet to the air-conditioned Bijou Room at the Hotchkiss and bask in the gracious magic of André, who rules that tiny but uncrowded bit of Shangri-la.

  The Hotchkiss told you that it was “your New York home, small enough to find your way around in, tucked away from the wear and tear of the metropolis, yet a mere stone’s throw from shop, train or theater.” Also, every room had been redecorated and it had a sun deck and a big bar and a “Bijou Bar.” The bellboys wore white duck trousers and horizon-blue mess jackets.

  “Bulldog Club on the fifteenth floor,” they were calling in the lobby. “Fifteenth floor, please. Bulldog Club, please, on the fifteenth floor, please.”

  The elevator was jammed with loud-voiced members of the Bulldog Club. Up on the fifteenth floor the corridor and the cocktail lounge were jammed with more members, many of whom were furtively hiding their coats and hats in odd corners where they could get them in a hurry.

  “Put it behind the palm pot,” Waldo said. “Why stand in line and pay a dime?”

  The formality of the Hotchkiss lobby had evaporated on the fifteenth floor. The Hotchkiss staff, although used to handling conventions, had a harassed and hunted look. The mess jackets of the bar boys were moist from mixed drinks and perspiration, but they still said “please.”

  “Watch it, please,” they said, as they carried the trays. “Gangway, please.”

  They were being treated with an undue familiarity by the Bulldog Club. The members were addressing them by the names of motion picture stars and pugilists.

  “Snap into it, Chaplin,” the members were calling to them. “Six more Martinis, Ronald. I said old-fashioneds, Banjo-Eyes.”

  The members blew clouds of cigarette smoke into each other’s eyes. They were all ages, through youth to middle age, but their mouths looked alike, and their eyes. They all had the same good-natured cynicism, the same tinge of disillusioned bitterness. They had been everywhere and seen everything. They had seen charity dinners at the Waldorf and Spanish street-fighting and executions at Sing Sing, and they still were ready for more. Even if they hadn’t seen all this, they could look as though they had. They were neither proud of themselves nor sorry for themselves. They all knew each other, and they didn’t care how they looked, and they were not going to throw their cigarette butts into those Chinese vases filled with white sand—they were going to throw them anywhere they damn pleased.

  “Hey, Toots,” Waldo said, “Jeffie, here’s Toots Flannigan, you know Toots Flannigan.” Jeffrey did not know her, but it did not matter. He was glad to be there, and to watch all the faces and listen to the noise. He was no longer a part of it, but he had been once.

  “Hey, big boy,” Waldo called to the waiter.

  “Let me order,” Jeffrey said, “this is on me.” But Waldo would not let him.

  There was no social effort, no make-believe. It seemed that a lot of them had been in the reporters’ car on the train which had carried King George and Queen Elizabeth across Canada and back, and one of them named Shorty was telling how he had asked the King to sit in on a crap game.

  There was a sound of a gong booming through the cocktail lounge, the same sort of gong that used to tell visitors to leave the ship and go ashore.

  “Please take your seats in the dining room, please. Table numbers on the tickets, please.”

  “Say it in French,” someone called.

  “Jeffrey here knows Newcombe,” Waldo said.

  Everybody looked at Jeffrey.

  “Yes,” Jeffrey said, “I used to know him. We worked in the same telegraph room in Boston, and we came to New York about the same time.”

  “Jeffrey used to be a newspaper man once himself,” Waldo said.

  Everyone looked at him suspiciously. It had been a long while ago. Jeffrey had never felt so lonely.

  The food and the Sky View Dining Room of the Hotchkiss added a poignant sort of disappointment to Jeffrey’s loneliness. It did not help him to realize that perhaps he would have enjoyed it ten years before. It did no good to tell himself that he was in a group of exceptional and interesting people. They were stamped with the same bourgeois sort of unreality as the Hotchkiss Sky View Dining Room itself.

  The pillars of the dining room and the beams along the ceiling were festooned with artificial ivy, and from the ivy were suspended paper New Year’s bells, although it was the seventh day of April. The food had the flat unwholesome flavor of a standardized caterer’s selection. The clear and lukewarm consommé, the pallid and heavily creamed chicken, the tough-skinned green peas and the accompanying plate of vegetable salad, and then the half-melted brick of green, white and orange ice cream, sat heavily on Jeff
rey’s stomach. Everyone that he could see consumed it happily, and why? They were the actors in an endlessly repeated national gastronomic drama. He thought of all the other festooned dining rooms that stretched in belts across the continent, tended by other waiters in other mess jackets. At that very moment, thousands of other groups were in those other dining rooms eating their creamed chicken and green peas. Rotary Clubs were in that bond of fellowship, and Lions, and Elks, and Brotherhoods of Redmen, and American Legion Posts, and Daughters of the Revolution, and Daughters of Rebecca. They were all eating their creamed chicken at that moment, and there was not much time, because speakers everywhere were among them, waiting to say a few words.

  It gave Jeffrey a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach. Why were they all together? Was there comfort in doing the same thing? There must have been some comfort. They must have felt vaguely what he was feeling, a need for companionship, because they were moving into a grim, uncharted future without their own volition, and because together there was some futile hope that they might find some solution. They would not find it, but they would meet and try again.

  The air was smoky and stuffy. The waiters were bringing small cups of coffee.

  “Sugar, please,” they were saying.

  “Hey,” Waldo asked him, “what’s on your mind?”

  Waldo had lighted a cigar; he had chewed the end of it; he had dipped the end of it into his coffee.

  “I was just wondering what it’s all about,” Jeffrey said.

  There was a flicker in Waldo’s eyes, a momentary glimmer of interest. Waldo’s face was fat and impassive, but Waldo understood him. It brought them closer together, just as though he had said something profound.

  “Yeh,” Waldo said, and his voice was gentle. “I know—I know.” And he pushed back his chair to get a better view of the long speakers’ table, and folded his hands across his stomach.