So Little Time (6 page)

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 Jeffrey'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.

The president of the Bulldog Club, a florid-faced man with gray temples, was pounding the table with a small black mallet and adjusting a microphone in front of him. First the microphone stuck; then it collapsed and his neighbors to right and left snatched for it and someone tipped over a glass of water. Then the speaker's voice sounded simultaneously through horns fixed at each corner of the banquet hall. The volume of sound, and the supernatural illusion that his voice came from everywhere at once, demanded a solemn and world-shaking pronouncement.

“Will the waiters kindly refrain from clearing off plates from the tables during the speaking period?”

That was all he said, and then he paused as though he expected some reaction. Then he picked up a card and adjusted his glasses.

Before the speaking, he continued, he would like to call attention to some distinguished guests who were with us this afternoon. When he read their names, would they please stand up and take a bow so that everyone could see them? First there was a lovely lady known to all of us, Goya Ayres, just in from Hollywood, and we're certainly glad to have you with us, Goya. After Miss Ayres, the celebrities began to fade. They were Leo Fish, editor of that well-known trade paper, the
Something World
, and Hal Ryan, ace Washington correspondent, and last but not least, an ace commentator, Will Sykes (everyone knows Will). And now, our fellow member, Mr. H. J. Jacoby, would say a few words about the speaker.

A chair fell over as Mr. Jacoby stepped to the microphone. Mr. Jacoby was lantern-jawed, and had plainly taken his assignment seriously, for he held a typewritten sheet before him, which quivered in his hand. First Mr. Jacoby cleared his throat. It sounded like tearing cloth over the public address system.

“Walter Duranty,” Mr. Jacoby said, “has defined a successful foreign correspondent as one who is under the bed when the assignation takes place. That, I believe, is where Walter Newcombe has been always. Born in the best newspaper tradition, indefatigable in his search for fact …”

Mr. Jacoby's face grew frozen. It was clear that he had not intended to be amusing and the President banged the table with his hammer, and the rest of Mr. Jacoby's address, neither in content nor in delivery, was amusing. It rolled out in awkward sentences: “An inveterate traveler, he … An artist in word pictures, he …” The words droned on, and no one listened until the conclusion came.

“But it is superfluous for me to continue, when Mr. Walter Newcombe can speak for himself better than I can for him.”

It was the first time in years that Jeffrey Wilson had seen him. Walter Newcombe stood in front of the microphone waiting while the applause died down. The pointed lapels of his coat and the pleated, high-waisted trousers showed that his clothes had come from across the ocean. Jeffrey respected Walter as he stood without fidgeting, not afraid to wait. Walter had developed a personality that now was gathering the room's attention. His hair, which had once been corn-colored, had grown darker and was more closely cut, but his nose was still thin and shiny, and his eyes had their same nearsighted intensity, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was nasal. All attributes which Jeffrey had remembered as awkward were now a part of character and stamped Walter with authenticity.

It was needless, Walter said, to tell the members of the Bulldog Club how glad he was to be there. It was like getting home to be with people who were all doing the same sort of work, and he hoped to see a lot of old friends afterwards, and he did not want to make a set speech. The Bulldog Club was no place for that. He just wanted to give a report of what he had seen and of what he had heard in London before he sailed. If any other members had been there in that early spring of 1940, they could give the report better than he could, and they would have to put up with his mistakes, because everyone made mistakes. Afterwards, he hoped that they would ask him questions because he needed their ideas, and their reactions. He wanted to feel that he was home again.

First, Walter said, he wanted to tell a story, and he told it. It was about a cockney cab driver in the blackout off Piccadilly. Even in the spring of 1940 the reporters from overseas were using the cockney as the mouthpiece for the British Empire. The cockney cab driver had talked to Walter about the “old woman.” The old woman had been grousing (indeed she 'ad, sir) about the shortage of various commodities, and that little ill-nourished cockney cab driver had told her off. (I gave the old woman wot-for, sir.) He had told her that she might be pinched a bit, but it was nothing to how old Chamberlain with his umbrella was pinching that monkey Hitler and his 'Uns. That, Walter said, was his report from England in a nutshell.

He wished that he might have a map to bring home his points more accurately. He wished to make it clear that these ideas were not his own. They were the result of conversations with persons who naturally could not be named or quoted. He could say in brief that Germany was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was ever being tightened by the dominance of sea power. It was what the General Staff of France called the
cordon sanitaire
, and Walter used the phrase carelessly, with a conscious accent. He pictured a harassed Germany, surrounded by the crushing economic forces of the French and British Empires, which were slowly being mobilized. The mills of the gods grind slowly, Walter said, but they grind exceeding small, and over in London you had the exciting, thrilling sense of grinding mills. As a man high in the British Government had told him: “To use one of your jolly American expressions, we have old Hitler in the bag.” Bag, Walter pointed out, was not quite the word for it. The grand strategy of England and France might better be compared to a tube of toothpaste or shaving cream. Walter paused, and the room was watchfully silent.

If they would permit him, Walter went on, he might take the liberty of mixing metaphors since no one on the desk was blue-penciling his copy. Walter paused and waited for the laugh, and sure enough, it came, but not too loud, because everyone was listening. If he might mix his metaphors, when France and Great Britain piped, Herr Hitler now must dance their tune. They could squeeze the German Reich as you might squeeze the shaving cream. As that cockney in the Piccadilly blackout had said in his simple way, they were squeezing Hitler. They only had to continue this process to make Hitler burst out where they wanted against that ring of steel. And why was this? It was because, for some unfathomable reason, during an entire winter Herr Hitler had not struck. Now he had thrown away his one chance. Now it was too late. There had been gaps in the line, but those gaps had been repaired during those dull months of the “sitzkrieg,” the months that the cynics had called the phony war. The noose was drawing tighter. It was significant, he thought, that the British were mining the Norwegian coast. It was all part of the plan. That was Walter's report from England. But before he finished, he would like to tell one more story, which in some way rounded it off, because it showed the spirit of democracy. It was about the simple old charlady who used to do his hotel room in London. He fell to talking with her one morning.…

Jeffrey Wilson never heard the story of the charlady for he was thinking that if things had been a little different, if the chains of circumstances had changed, he too might have been like Walter Newcombe, picking up ideas.