So Little Time (11 page)

“We'll have another drink,” Jeffrey said.

“Naturally,” Minot answered, “we'll have another drink, but first let's give Madge the old song, shall we?”

“What old song?” Jeffrey asked.

“Come on,” Minot said, “one, two, three—”

“Oh, I'm looking for a happy land where everything is bright, Where the hangouts grow on bushes and we stay out every night …”

While they were singing it Jeffrey forgot about the strange, chaotic day—Waldo Berg and the Bulldog Club and Walter Newcombe and Madge and Gwen and Jim and the apartment—and he forgot what he had been thinking about Minot because Minot gave him too that sense of security of which Madge had been speaking.

“You'll take care of him, won't you, Minot?” Madge asked. “And Jeff, dear, you'd better sleep in the study in case you fall over things.… Oh, Jim, here's Uncle Minot, dear.”

Jim came into the living room, ready to go out, too. His dinner coat made him stand up straighter.

“How about a lift,” he asked, “if you're going as far as Park Avenue and 52d Street?”

“We're going to a happy land where everything is bright,” Minot said, “and 52d Street is on the way. Well, well, look at him.”

“What about him?” Jeffrey asked.

Minot Roberts was smiling at Jim, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were deeper.

“Jeff,” Minot said, “he looks about ready to take a crack at the Boches.”

Somehow the term put them back to where they really were, two old men looking at a boy. It gave Jeffrey a curious twinge of something that was almost anger. Jim was his son, not Minot Roberts', and what had bothered him all day came nearer until it gripped him with cold fingers.

“We're not in this show,” he said, but Minot only laughed. His reactions were definite and undeviating, never changed by doubt.

“That's what they said in '16,” he answered. “Remember, Wilson kept us out of war? It's always an open season on the Boches. If I were Jim's age, I'd be over there right now. Let's go, Jeff.”

The doorman scurried out to the sidewalk and blew his whistle. “Mr. Roberts' car, Mr. Roberts' car, coming up.”

Minot's black town car rolled out of the dusk and stopped at the curb by the apartment awning. It was an addition to the picture that Jeffrey's mind was making—Minot Roberts, sportsman and man about town, master of hounds, member of the stock exchange, clubman, World War ace. It was everything that the writers of light fiction were always looking for. It was a paragraph in a gossip column or a bit of a true confession. It was not Henry James, but it was Robert W. Chambers, and Richard Harding Davis' Van Bibber, and Mr. Gray's Gallops I and Gallops II. The frustrations of the doorman vanished and his job achieved a dignity and a sublimation when Minot's car stopped at the curb.

Minot's chauffeur, trig and lean, with iron-gray hair, had sprung to the sidewalk. He was smiling because Pierre was an old friend of the family who knew all of Mr. Minot's friends and who understood their values. Pierre, too, fitted into the picture. He might have been the confidential servant who had grown gray as a rat in the service of the Robertses, who had been with his master through many a scrape, who had doubtless followed just behind him when he went over the top in the Great War. Actually, Pierre was none of those things. He was just a good chauffeur with good references, but he looked them, and perhaps he thought them, too.

“Good evening, sir,” he said to Jeffrey. “Good evening, Mr. Jim.”

The instant that the door was opened, the interior of the car glowed with a soft, warm light, showing the fawn-colored upholstery and the mirror and the ash tray and the neatly folded rug.

“I'm looking for a happy land,” Minot was humming, “where everything is bright.”

Jeffrey wished that Minot would stop humming that tune. It was one of Minot's worst habits; and now that he was started, that tune would keep on with him all the evening. When they had walked across the fields near Bar-le-Duc to the planes waiting on the line, Minot had always been humming. It may have been what was the matter with all of them—looking for a happy land where everything was bright. Jeffrey could imagine Minot looking for it in the sky when he dove at Richthofen's Circus, looking for it later when he rode point to point and when he got his Kodiak bear. That happy land must be somewhere, and you must search for it until you died, and the larger the gesture of the search, the better. Madge was looking for the happy land and now Jim was starting.

Jeffrey leaned back in the seat.

“I never get used to town cars,” he said.

He thought a slight shadow crossed Minot's face, and he realized that his remark had the quality of a small boy's derisive whistle.

“It's a temporary luxury,” Minot answered. “I won't have it long, come the Revolution.”

That was what they always said, “come the Revolution,” and you were meant to laugh, come the Revolution. But come hell or high water, Minot must have believed that he would always have his car.

“Not that I'm conservative,” Minot said. “It's been a great show. This is a great time to live. Jim here's the boy who's going to see the fun.” Minot picked up a mechanism that looked like a miniature broadcasting instrument, which came out of a little pocket on the side of the seat. “Pierre, stop on the corner of Park and 52d. Mr. Jim is leaving us.”

Then Minot thought of something else. He pulled a wallet from his pocket.

“How's the money situation, Jim?” he asked. “Jeff, you'll let me do this, won't you?” He pulled a bill from his wallet. “Take this, and go to Twenty-One, Jim. Tell Jack or Charlie that I sent you, and spend it all tonight. Don't save it. Spend it all tonight.”

Jeffrey glanced at the bill. It was fifty dollars.

“Jim,” Jeffrey said, “say thank you to the nice gentleman.”

“Gosh,” Jim said, “well, gosh, Uncle Minot, thanks a lot.”

Minot laughed. The car was stopping at the corner of 52d and Park.

“I'm your godfather, you know,” he said. “Have a good time while you can, and spend it all tonight.”

“Gosh, Uncle Minot,” Jim said again. “Well, gosh, thanks a lot.”

Then the door closed and Jim was gone.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Jeffrey said. “Fifty dollars is a lot of money.” And Minot laughed again.

“That's what money's for.” And he slapped Jeffrey's knee. “It's great to see you, boy. You're looking fine.”

“It's great to see you, Minot,” Jeffrey said. “You're always looking fine.” Then they did not speak for a minute, and the lights of Park Avenue moved past them.

It was inconceivable to Jeffrey to think of Minot Roberts in a patronizing way, but now all at once it came over him that Minot had been everywhere, but he had never been around. As he sat beside him, Jeffrey felt older and wearier than Minot Roberts. He had seen too many worlds; he had been around too much.

“Jeff,” Minot said, “have you heard about the solicitor for the Crown from Bermuda who met the little streetwalker in the London blackout? Stop me if you've heard it.”

Jeffrey did not stop him. There was Minot Roberts in the London blackout just like Walter Newcombe.

“Well it seems,” Minot said, “as his Majesty's solicitor was crossing Piccadilly—” There it was, the blackout stories were always in Piccadilly—“he was accosted by a little streetwalker. ‘My dear girl, you don't know who I am,' he said. ‘I'm a solicitor for the Crown.' And what do you think the little girl said?”

“What?” Jeffrey asked.

“She said, ‘Then you must come along with me, sir, for we 'ave a great deal in common, though I only solicit for 'alf a crown.'”

Jeffrey laughed—he wanted to do his best to make Minot think he hadn't heard it.

“Jeff,” Minot said, “you didn't think that I was too impulsive giving Jim that cash—that I stepped on your toes, or anything?”

“No,” Jeffrey answered. “I was thinking of what I'd have done if anybody had given me fifty dollars when I was Jim's age.”

“It just came over me,” Minot said. “It's just possible that Jim won't have much time.”

“What?” Jeffrey asked him. “What do you mean, ‘much time'?”

“You know what I mean,” Minot answered. His accent was clipped and precise, but his tone was gentle and casual. “Now there was Stan—he always knew his number was up. He didn't have much time.”

Jeffrey looked out of the window. He did not want to answer, and when he did, every word hurt him.

“Yes,” he said, “that's so.”

“Jeff,” Minot went on. “You know how a moment strikes you, sometimes, as being more valuable than another moment. Now up there in the apartment when I saw you and Madge and then when Jim came in, I thought it was particularly swell. You all looked so darned happy. There isn't any trouble any more. Madge has everything she wants.”

Jeffrey did not answer. He saw that Minot was watching him through the dark of the car.

“Jeff,” Minot asked him, “you've got what you want, haven't you?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey answered, “yes, I guess so.” And Minot Roberts laughed.

“Well, that's swell,” he said. “Well, here we are.” And he began to sing that tune again.

“We're looking for a happy land, where everything is bright.”

“Minot,” Jeffrey told him, “if it's all the same to you, would you get your mind on something else?”

“Why, Jeff, you old sourpuss,” Minot said.

His own waspishness gave Jeffrey a twinge of shame. He could not explain that he had seen too many people in too many happy lands.

“Besides,” Jeffrey said, “you haven't got the words right. We're not ‘looking for' it—you're ‘going to' it.”

Minot put a firm hand on his shoulder. Pierre had opened the door and the little overhead light was glowing so that Jeffrey could see every line of Minot's face. His lips were curved and his eyes were hard and merry.

“Boy,” Minot answered, “we're both of us right. We've been looking for it and now we've found it. Here we are, let's go.”

That was what Jeffrey used to hear them call.

“All right, let's go,” a second lieutenant was calling.

“Come on, you,” he could hear a sergeant calling, “take a reef in your pants. Let's go.”

“All right, fellows.” It was what Captain Strike used to say when he pushed back his chair before they went to the line, when everything was cold in the dusk of early morning. “Let's go.”

7

It Completely Lacks Validity

Jeffrey took a cold shower and a glass of Bromo-Seltzer. Madge was in the study when he got there and breakfast was already on the table, and Madge smiled at him as though he had been a naughty little boy.

“What time did you get in?” Madge asked, but there was no sharpness in the question. It was approving because he had been to the right sort of dinner. She was intimating that boys had to be boys sometimes and that anything practised by the boys he was with last night was absolutely all right.

“Did you have a good time, dear? Who was there?”

“Everybody was there,” Jeffrey said.

“What did you do?”

“What they always do,” Jeffrey said, “made speeches and sang songs.”

“You needn't pretend you didn't like it,” Madge said. “Every year you say you're not going to go, and then you always do.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “I know.” And he picked up the paper.

As he stood there, staring incredulously at the headlines, he could not entirely absorb their meaning. The Nazis had already overrun Denmark. They were in Norway. Their transports already were crowding into the harbors. They were landing troops on the airfields, and they were in Trondheim and even in Narvik.

“What is it, dear?” Madge asked. “Is there something new in the paper?”

He thought of Walter Newcombe at the Bulldog Club only yesterday, giving his report from England, speaking of squeezing Hitler and of the
cordon sanitaire
. He could see Walter in his coat with its sharp lapels and his pleated trousers, talking about the ring of steel and the tube of toothpaste. As he heard himself reading Madge snatches from the paper, he recalled every inflection of Walter's voice.

“Well,” he said, “there it is. I've got to be going, Madge.”

In a way it was like going to the Bulldog Club again for Jeffrey was moving into another of those worlds of his which had nothing much to do with the apartment or with Madge, yet it was surely as important, for he earned his living in it. He had to be at the theater that morning at half past ten o'clock to attend a rehearsal and there was one good thing about the theater—no matter what happened, whether it was personal grief or war or disaster, once he was involved with all its personalities, he and everyone else would have to put their minds on work. He would forget the shock of the war news, once he was there, but as he rode across town in a taxicab he still was deeply concerned with it.

The audacity and perfection of that German move still bewildered him. All the plans must surely have been known for some time by the intelligence of the French and British staffs. There would be a reaction by afternoon, very definite and violent, now that a new blow had been struck in the European War. It might even be that Walter Newcombe was right and that it was a part of grand French and British strategy to force Germany into Norway to a field of battle already selected by the Allied staff. The Germans were shooting the works now, and now the show was on. The British Navy would be in the game already. There would be light stuff in the Skagerrak, already, shooting up the German transports and cutting off the supply lines. The carriers and the heavy ships would be charging down on the Norwegian coast bombarding Oslo and Trondheim, and the transports would be with them and the French and British shock troops would be landing on the coast. He could feel the same sort of excitement which he had felt years ago when a big push was starting on the western front. Trondheim would be the place to hit. He wished that he were there, or at any rate in some place where the news was coming in, but he was not. Norway and the war were leaving him already, because the taxi was stopping before the theater west of Broadway.