So Little Time (5 page)

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.

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 friends, 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:—