So Little Time (19 page)

“What's the nice man doing over in the corner?” Mrs. Newcombe asked. “Why doesn't he eat his soup?”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “he's making you a nice salad.”

He glanced across the table and saw that Madge was watching him.

“Not rahally,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Shiver my timbers, precious, not a salad, rahally.”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “now, sweet.”

“Jeff,” Madge called across the table, “what are you two laughing about?”

Jeffrey pretended not to hear her, but he knew she would ask him about it later. He was relieved when Mrs. Sales turned to him. You knew that you would behave exactly as a guest should when you looked at Mrs. Sales. She looked the way a well-bred woman, a wife and mother, ought to look—clear brown eyes, dark hair with a silver threading of gray in it, not too much lipstick, not too much of anything—and not more than one old-fashioned.

“I just adore your son Jim,” Mrs. Sales said.

It startled Jeffrey. He had never thought of Jim's confession seriously before, but there was something uncomfortably possessive in this stranger's manner. She seemed to imply that they both had a common interest, that they were both dear old people, the course of whose lives was completely finished and who now could live again in the lives of others. It made him very uncomfortable, and it fitted perfectly with the onion-stuffed wild ducks. He was sure that Mrs. Sales was going to refer to Jim and her daughter as “the young people.”

“I hope Jim hasn't been making a nuisance of himself,” Jeffrey said.

“Oh dear, no,” Mrs. Sales answered, very quickly, “Dick and I both adore your Jim. Dick and I love young people. The house these days,” and she looked at him with arch meaning, “is full of young people.”

Jeffrey smiled mechanically.

“I've never met your daughter, Sally,” Jeffrey said. “But I've heard Jim speak of her. I don't seem to meet many of his friends.”

“I hope,” Mrs. Sales said, “you haven't got the idea that Sally doesn't like to talk to older people. We must arrange to meet sometime—the old folks and the young people all together. I feel I know you very well already, Jim has talked so much about you.”

The smile still lingered mechanically on Jeffrey's lips. He had never thought of Jim's mentioning him to anyone, and he wondered what Jim had said.

“You and he must have such a pleasant relationship,” she told him. “He admires you so. That's why I feel I know you.”

The balance of everything was shifting. Jeffrey had never thought that he would be grateful to his son for having said a kind word about him.

“Jim's a good boy,” he said.

He began to feel like a sweet old codger, but there was no way to prevent it.

“You must be very proud of him,” she said, “he's such a thoughtful boy. He's so helpful around the house.”

Jeffrey could not believe that she was talking about his Jim. From childhood Jim had always faded out when there was anything to do around the house.

“How do you mean he's helpful?” he asked.

“In all sorts of ways,” she answered. “When Dick was working on the rock garden on the lawn, Jim pitched right in and helped him, and he always helps Sally and me with the dishes on the maid's night out.”

It meant of course that Jim loved her; it was exactly what you would do if you loved a girl. You would be useful with the dishes. The mention of the maid's night out indicated quite accurately their social position and their financial bracket. Jeffrey was very much ashamed that he had noticed it, but then, perhaps, that was the way it was when you suddenly became an old codger and thought of your children. Madge's father must have thought of him with much the same doubts and reservations.

“You must be very proud of him,” Mrs. Sales said again. “Dick says he would have known he was your boy right away. Dick says he looks the way you did in France. Dick's told me so much about you.”

It was embarrassing, that he still could not remember anyone in France named Dick Sales, in spite of that episode in Paris which had been mentioned on the lawn. It must have been one of those times on leave when faces and scenes shifted too fast. The idea lingered in his mind that someone who remembered him in uniform had thought that his son looked like him.

Beckie had risen and everyone was standing up.

“We're not going to leave the boys alone,” she called. “We're all going together to the living room, and you can have your Armagnac in there and your cigars, too, if anybody wants them.”

Jeffrey knew that Beckie hoped that no one would want them because Beckie always said that one cigar made the whole house stale the next morning, and, as Jeffrey looked around the table, he knew that he would be the only man who would take one, with the possible exception of Dick Sales, and Madge would shake her head at him when Fred offered him the box.

“Jeff,” Beckie called, “oh, Jeff, do you mind if I whisper to you just a minute?”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Jeff,” she whispered, “why didn't you or Madge tell me? It had to be Mr. Newcombe who told me that you and he came from the same little town.”

“I never thought of it, I guess,” Jeffrey said. “I haven't thought of Walter for quite a long while.”

“I can't get over it,” Beckie said, “it's like something in a novel, you and Walter Newcombe. You'll get him started, won't you, Jeff, and I'll get everyone to listen.”

There was no doubt that it was going to be what Beckie called a worthwhile evening.

In the living room they were all drawing chairs around the fireplace, and Fred was saying that just a little fire wouldn't do any harm, would it? He was explaining about the fireplace to Walter, saying he supposed everyone else had heard about it, and he did not want to bore anybody. First there had only been a hole for a stovepipe, and then a little fireplace behind it and believe it or not, when they were taking out the little fireplace …

“I guess they walled them up because they took too much wood,” Walter said.

“Oh, Fred,” Beckie called, “what do you think? Mr. Newcombe and Jeffrey both came from Bragg in Massachusetts, and Jeffrey's never told us.”

Jeffrey could not understand why he felt awkward, or why coming from a place like Bragg should have made him or Walter any the more interesting. For some reason he thought that Madge looked embarrassed too.

“Just two barefoot boys from Wall Street,” Jeffrey said; and then he added, “You have to come from somewhere.”

“Mr. Newcombe has been away,” Beckie said. “It's what Secretary Ickes called Wendell Willkie, Mr. Newcombe.”

There was a moment of constraint. Adam was passing the brandy.

“Willkie's building up,” Mr. Sales said, “he's building up all the time.”

“Fred and I have talked it all over,” Beckie said. “Haven't we, Fred, dear?”

“Yes, dear,” Fred said. He was still working with the fire.

“We've made up our minds,” Beckie said. “What we're going to do may seem a little queer, but it shows how strongly we feel, doesn't it, Fred dear?”

“Yes, dear,” Fred said.

“Which will it be,” Buchanan Greene asked, “Browder or Norman Thomas?”

“No, no,” Beckie said, “don't be silly, Buchanan.”

“Forgive it,” Buchanan Greene answered, “it's only a poor poet's whimsey.” But Beckie was standing very straight.

“Fred and I always think the same way at election time, don't we dear? We voted for Hoover in 1932. We voted for Landon in 1936. This year for the first time we're voting for Mr. Roosevelt, aren't we dear?”

“Yes, dear,” Fred said.

“We're voting for Mr. Roosevelt,” Beckie said, “because England wants us to have Mr. Roosevelt. That's the least we can do for England.”

“Yes, dear,” Fred said, “I suppose so.”

“You don't suppose so, Fred,” Beckie said, “you know so.”

There was a moment's silence.

“Well, I suppose all you bright people will hate us,” Mrs. Sales said, “but Dick and I are going to vote for Willkie. We think he can do more to keep us out of war.”

“Keep us
out
of it?” Beckie began, and then she stopped and sat down by the coffee table.

There was a moment's uncomfortable tension in the room. There was a parrotlike sort of repetition in those women's voices. They were obeying their emotions and not reason, as everybody did. Jeffrey took a cigar when Fred offered it to him. “It comes from the Racquet Club,” Fred said, “but I'm afraid it's a little dry, Jeff.”

Jeffrey looked at the end of his cigar. Their voices had all risen again. Roosevelt had promised that none of our boys would be involved in a European war, hadn't he? He had said it again and again, and again, and Willkie had said the same thing again and again. They should have known that no one man could keep a country out of war, and no small group could get a country into war. You drifted into it on the tide of destiny; and now he had his social duty to perform, and there was no need to be artistic about it.

“Walter,” Jeffrey said, “tell us, what's happening over there?”

The plain fact was, as everybody must have realized who gave it thought, that England would be whipped if we didn't help her; but Jeffrey knew that Walter wouldn't put it just that way. Walter stood in front of the fire with his hands still carefully tucked into the side pockets of his dinner coat.

“You mustn't think of me as knowing much,” Walter said. “No one does in a situation that teems with imponderables.”

That was the way it always was—no one knew much, but everyone was pathetically expecting something.

“Everyone always asks me,” Walter said, “definite questions. But no answer can be definite, not on a broad world canvas obscured by the fog of war.”

That was a new expression, and it covered everything, “the fog of war.”

“To put it another way,” Walter said, “it reminds me of a story about a Navvy by the East End docks in London in the blackout …”

Jeffrey only half listened to the adventures of the Navvy. He had heard about the doorman at the Savoy, and the man who used to wheel in the beef at Simpson's, and the little old woman who sold lucifers near Trafalgar Square. He wondered if all the people who must still be dining at Claridge's or the Savoy, or wherever it was they dined in London now, repeated those stories endlessly to each other with a sort of thankful wonder that those who had so little to lose or gain were standing with the rest of them. London had always seemed to him a city where poverty assumed a more sinister aspect than it did in any other city in the world, and yet where poverty was orderly and quiet. Everyone else was listening to the story of the Navvy, and like all those other anecdotes, it elicited applause and understanding laughter.

“That was beautiful,” Beckie said, “I can see him as you tell it.”

Then Buchanan Greene spoke, but Jeffrey found it hard to listen. Buchanan's words sounded like all the pages one read daily, words which had been squeezed dry of any particular meaning. He was saying something about the little people, and about our way of life.

“Naturally, I can't describe it all,” Walter said, “but if you could see their faces you would see that it has the inevitable sweep of a Greek tragedy.”

Walter put his hands firmly in his pockets, and swayed slightly backwards on his heels. It was obvious that Walter had used this phrase many times before. He paused and swayed from his heels to his toes, and then there was the sound of the front door opening.

“Just a minute,” Beckie said, “I don't want to miss a word of it.”

They were visitors whom she must have asked to come in after dinner. Men and women in evening clothes filed into the room, fresh from the autumn night, like the people who stumbled over your feet just as the first act was beginning. Walter could hear Fred and Beckie whispering to them in low undertones that they were just in time, that Mr. Newcombe was just beginning to tell them about the war. There were discreet scrapes of chairs and the sound of ice and glasses while Walter stood in front of the fire, self-conscious but obliging like a lecturer at a Women's Club.

“I hope you don't mind—” Beckie began.

“Oh, no,” Walter said, “let me see, where was I?”

Mrs. Newcombe was the one who answered him.

“You were saying it was like a Greek tragedy.”

“Oh, yes,” Walter said, “thank you, sweet.”

Jeffrey was reasonably sure that Walter had never read a Greek tragedy, but Walter was repeating the same endless sort of chant as a chorus from Euripides. He had no background of scholarship to help him and no knowledge of history or language. He was only telling what he saw, drawing conclusions from interviews and reading. It made Jeffrey wonder whether he himself could have done any better. Walter was speaking of the breakthrough in the Ardennes and the way the hinge of the line had broken, but he could not explain why it was not stopped. It reminded Jeffrey that Walter had never seen another war. His descriptions of bombings and of refugees all made this obvious. It was part of an old familiar story; everything had smashed, but there were units which had been magnificent. Now all the equipment was lost and the British Expeditionary Force was crowding the beaches of Dunkirk and the small craft were coming across the channel, taking out loads of soldiers. It was just what he had read, and Walter Newcombe added nothing new. It seemed to Jeffrey that this experience had conveyed nothing to Walter himself. It was like the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that told about the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air, but you could not see the rockets or hear the bombs.

Yet everyone was listening, and Jeffrey was sorry for himself and sorry for everybody there. It all had something to do with the Rumpus Room and with Fred's wine-colored velvet coat. He remembered what he had said to Madge—that they all were dead and didn't know it.