So Little Time (48 page)

“My God,” the other man said, “what's the use of trying, if you close your mind to it?”

“I'm not closing my mind to it,” the first man said, “I'm just waiting for you to tell me. All right, go ahead and tell me.”

“I am telling you,” the other man said.

Jeffrey moved away. He suddenly realized that everyone except Priscilla Jenks, who was talking about her book, was talking about the war. He had listened, years ago, to the same phrases. No one wanted it, but there seemed to be a feeling that we ought to go to war.

“My, my,” he heard someone say, “imagine seeing
you
here.”

He turned and saw the white hair and the white jade cigarette holder of Mrs. Walter Newcombe.

“Why,” Jeffrey said, “hello, sweet.”

“Hi ho,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “hi ho to you, and isn't this a lovely, lovely, God-damn' lovely, lovely party?”

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

“Walt's back from Egypt,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “or wherever the hell it was Walt went, and now every afternoon we go to lovely, lovely parties, when Walt isn't talking to groups of lovely ladies. Hi ho to you. Hi ho.”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said. “Where's Walter now?”

It had been a long time since he had seen Mrs. Newcombe or had thought of Walter.

“Where do you think he is, big boy?” Mrs. Newcombe said. “He's over in the corner now, talking about the God-damn' war, and we mustn't stop him, must we—talking about the God-damn' war?”

“Has he really been to Africa?” Jeffrey asked.

“Rahlly, rahlly,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Just think of it, all by himself. He's rahlly been to Africa. And he knows what we're fighting for, rahlly. We don't know it here, but he does, rahlly.”

“Now,” Jeffrey said, “now, sweet.”

Mrs. Newcombe looked up at him.

“Sometime you ought to come up to the Waldorf Tower,” she said. “And you and Walt and I ought to all get fried. I can't take this all the time, big boy, rahlly, and it isn't good for Walt.”

There was that shine on Walter Newcombe's nose which Jeffrey remembered from the old telegraph room. Walter had a new suit of salt-and-pepper brown. His tie was working up from his waistcoat, but like Sinclair Merriwell, he had a handkerchief in his pocket just so, and he, too, was wearing a gardenia, which Ella must have given him.

“Not another drink, just now,” Walter said, “and don't—please don't get me started on that.”

Then he saw Mrs. Newcombe and Jeffrey and his eyes widened.

“Hello, sweet,” he said, “hello, Jeff.”

Walter spoke impersonally, not unkindly, but like someone engaged in a professional duty, and of course he was. Walter and all his colleagues were a little like the side-show barkers outside the tents at a county fair. They had to tell what was inside but they could not tell too much. They had to bring out the python and the man who chewed nails and the dog-faced boy, but only for just a moment, and then they had to whisk them back again because the big show was inside. Walter, and all the others who had come to grips with the realities of war, had to show that they knew everything, that they heard the low grindings of the mills of destiny, but that it was all there in their books, lucid and implicit, a lot more than they could tell right now.

“Hello, sweet,” Walter said again, “hello, Jeff.” It seemed to Jeffrey that there was a note of appeal in Walter's voice, as though he begged them privately not to spoil his pitch. Walter was gathering a crowd, and this was a little hard on Priscilla Jenks, since the occasion was a birthday party for The Book and not for Walter Newcombe. It occurred to Jeffrey that it was not quite fair of Walter, but then, perhaps Walter could not help it.

He simply stood with his hands in the pockets of that unattractive salt-and-pepper coat, with his thumbs jutting slightly upward, and swayed sideways with a pendulum motion from one foot to the other. Jeffrey felt the audience pressing about him. He was aware of muted breathings down his neck. Walter was speaking of Greece and Crete and of the African desert. You had to be on the desert to know the desert, and he had been very lucky. The Staff had sent him out in a staff car to see General Wavell. Archie was a simple fellow when you got to know him, and bookish. He and Archie had talked quietly about first editions, just as though men weren't dying in the desert. Imagine a man reading Byron as he flew across the Aegean—well, that was silent Archie for you … but Walter did not want to get started on that. He could not do better than sum the whole thing up in the words of a grubby little cockney tommy, whom he had met just outside the mine fields near Bardia, just one of countless other cockney tommies who were doing their bit out there. They had stopped and chatted for a moment—you had to be out there in the desert to understand the democracy of war, that great universal leveler—and this was what the tommy had said to Walter as he had rubbed the impalpable dust of the desert off his plain, sweating little face.

“We haven't given them 'arf, yet,” the cockney had told Walter, “not a 'arf by a 'ole.”

Well, there you had it in a nutshell, or in a thumbnail sketch, if you wanted to put it that way. They hadn't given them 'arf yet, and the 'ole was coming. You could see the portents in the making, looming vaguely. It astonished Walter that Americans here were so blind to it. The main thing to remember in the broader implications was that Hitler's timetable had been upset, and time was the essence for the gangster nations. It was true that Hitler was mobilizing the Balkans, but this very mobilization was upsetting Hitler's timetable. It was off the record, just among friends, but Walter's own impression, not that anyone's impression had the least validity, was that there would be a German drive on Greece, and Greece would be a different nut to crack from France and the Low Countries. Walter had seen the mountains of Greece—he wished that everyone here had seen them. It would be a different cup of tea when the Panzer divisions found themselves in those mountains, but Walter did not want to get started on that. He was not a military expert, he had just been out there trying to glean an impression and he might best round out his picture by telling of an encounter with a little Greek soldier, which had occurred shortly after Walter's car had been mired in a mountain pass, and Walter had been eating a can of peaches while waiting for someone to pull it out. You people sitting here would never realize what a can of peaches meant in a mountain pass in Greece. Walter was eating those peaches when a little Evzone soldier plodded by, a Greek Tommy Atkins. The man was a little fellow with an olive-tinted face, who looked tired, carrying his rifle, and he was wearing a ballet skirt as those Evzones did. (But don't laugh at those skirts, please.) When this little Evzone saw Walter, he said something in Greek, and Walter did not know Greek and Walter's interpreter had gone to the P.C. to get someone to pull the car out of the mud, but you did not have to know Greek to get along with Evzones. Walter handed him a peach and Walter wished that everyone there could have seen that Evzone's smile as he took that peach in his grimy hands and gobbled it like a squirrel.

The group around Walter laughed softly—but Walter said they would not have laughed if they had been there with the drumming of artillery fire down the road ahead. When he had finished his peach that man made a gesture, which rounded out the whole picture and put it in a nutshell. That man's white teeth had flashed in a shy smile and he had shoved his grimy fists in front of him, right under Walter's nose—thumbs up, and then he had walked up that mountain pass toward the gunfire. That was the spirit of everything that Walter had seen—thumbs up.

Jeffrey had heard it all before. It was the old war books, the ones he had read when he was young. It was
Over the Top
. It was
The First Hundred Thousand
, and
The Silence of Colonel Bramble
—He was sure that Walter's words were true, but nevertheless they had a spurious and meretricious note. No doubt Walter had seen the tommy and the Evzone, for every other correspondent also had, but Jeffrey knew that the picture which Walter gave of war and soldiers was distorted. It was not artistically fair to select such simplicity to illustrate something that was immense and tragic. If it were not sad, it would have been ridiculous. Jeffrey knew that war was not like that. He seemed to be standing alone again, back in that patch of woods where the dead lay in the bushes. He could feel the disorder and the nausea and the waste and the fear. When Walter Newcombe said “thumbs up,” it was a silly travesty. It would have been better if people like Walter would stay at home where they belonged instead of trying to round out pictures in a nutshell.

Some of the listeners must have felt as Jeffrey did, but they all gave rapt attention to that tinseled, pathetic little story in a nutshell. He realized suddenly that wars were all the same and that he was living in history, and he wished to God that he were not. All at once, even Walter Newcombe had assumed a tragic shape, and Jeffrey knew that Walter Newcombe and his colleagues were the chorus of a tragedy too immense for exposition. All of them were a part of that chorus—all the Major George Fielding Eliots, the Raymond Gram Swings and Johannes Steels, the Gabriel Heatters, and the News and Views by John B. Hughes—chanting of an agony which would never fit into words.

“What's the matter, big boy?” he heard Mrs. Newcombe ask.

“Nothing,” Jeffrey answered, “nothing, sweet.”

“Take it easy, big boy,” he heard Mrs. Newcombe say. “You don't like it, do you?”

“It's a picture,” Jeffrey said, “a picture in a nutshell.”

“Not rahlly,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “not rahlly, Mr. Bones.”

The group had broken up. The voices were rising again, joining the other voices in the room. They sounded like those of an audience leaving a very worth-while lecture, and Jeffrey knew that the party was what Sinclair Merriwell would call a party that had meat in it and one you would not forget. Any gaiety Jeffrey had felt previously was entirely gone. He was taking another cocktail, although he knew he had had enough of them.

“Buchanan Greene?” he heard someone say. “Yes, the tall one with the bald head and glasses—Buchanan Greene, the poet.” And sure enough, Jeffrey was in another little group, and Buchanan Greene was talking to a middle-aged lady who kept nodding.

“That's what I meant to say,” the middle-aged lady kept saying; “why couldn't I have said it? Why?”

And Buchanan Greene also was speaking of the war. It was not like other wars, Buchanan Greene was saying. This was a war of revolution, a war of absolutism against democracy. They were fighting our fight—they were fighting for our beliefs. It was for our writers to define those beliefs of ours, and why could they not define them?

Once more Jeffrey seemed to have heard it before. It was another part of that chorus chanting the chant of democracy. Buchanan Greene was saying democracy was not easy to define, for it was less of a fact than an essence.

“Why couldn't I say that?” the lady said. “Why couldn't I?”

“We all say it,” Buchanan said, “again, and again, and again. Franklin Roosevelt says it, and the little man on the subway says it. It's in the shuffling of a thousand feet. It's in the motor horns.”

“In the motor horns?” the lady said.

“It's Greene,” Jeffrey heard someone say. “Buchanan Greene, the poet.”

“It's everywhere implicit in our way of life,” Buchanan Greene was saying. “It's the dust from the highway. It's the tractor, plowing out its furrow. It's the motor tire being pressed out in Akron. It's what we live for and what we die for. It's the little funeral winding to the graveyard.”

Jeffrey moved away slowly. He felt cold sober, and he had heard that all before too. Buchanan Greene had written it for the radio, and he was simply reciting it all again—the First Voice, and the Second Voice—meaningless, but all the more tragic for its very lack of meaning. Walter, Buchanan Greene and the rest of them were trying to explain why people killed each other, and to endow hideousness with some sort of rational beauty. You always tried to in war, that is, if you weren't in the front line, and God knows, perhaps you tried it then.

The people in that room were another page of history. They were the polite people, the intelligentsia on the verge of crisis, drifting toward it with the sensitive awareness of intelligentsia but without the power to change their course one whit. They were the
salon
group in
War and Peace
, they were Thackeray's dancers before Waterloo; they were the dinner guests of Petronius in
Quo Vadis
. When Jeffrey thought of them in that light, it no longer mattered what they said. All the catchwords of the time, Fascist, Communist, Trotskyist, New Dealer, Conservative, Right Wing, Left Wing, Interventionist, Isolationist, Defeatist, Appeaser, Anglophile, America First, Defend America by Aiding the Allies, Lend-Lease, Lend Your Neighbor a Hose When His House Is Burning, Way of Life, the Yanks Aren't Coming, Keep America Out of War—all these smooth phrases failed to change the basic outline of the picture. They were the intelligentsia, drifting inevitably toward an unknown fact, and their awareness filled them with a dread which they did not admit. They made half-articulate the mass realization growing up about him that nothing would be the same again—no matter what might happen, nothing. They were in a barrel, going over Niagara Falls, and they could not help it, because they were a page of history.…

Jeffrey did not want to be on that page. He wanted to be himself again, managing as best he could in the limits of the social system he had known. He wanted to get out of there, and to find Madge, and to get his coat and hat, and to get into the elevator, and into the open air.

“Where are you going, big boy?” Mrs. Newcombe asked.