So Little Time

by John P. Marquand

  “Oh, Madge,” she said. “Oh, Jeff, you must see Priss. Priss is just dying to see you.”

  “Priss?” Jeffrey repeated.

  Ella slapped his shoulder playfully.

  “Don’t be so vague, dear,” Ella said. “Stop looking at everything through a lorgnette. Priscilla Jenks, or you can call her Miss Red Sky if you want to.”

  “Oh,” Jeffrey said, “that’s the name of the novel, is it?”

  “Madge, don’t let him be so vague,” Ella said. “Captain Bouchet, this is one of the cleverest men in New York. This is Captain Bouchet of the French Army.”

  Jeffrey and the stocky foreigner looked each other over with polite disinterest. Jeffrey wondered whether Captain Bouchet also would write a volume about how he saw France fall.

  “Captain Bouchet was saying this is just like France,” Ella said—“France before it happened. He says that we just don’t know—”

  Just now everyone was saying that we were like France, that if we did not wake up, we would end just like France. It made no sense, because America was not like France any more than Jeffrey was like Captain Bouchet.

  “Here comes Sam,” Ella said, “Sam knows what we want.”

  It was Sam from the Paxton Club with a wine steward’s chain around his neck.

  “Ella,” Jeffrey heard Madge say, “isn’t Henry Bernstein here? I thought I saw him in the elevator.”

  Jeffrey swallowed his cocktail quickly and took another. He wished he were like Madge, able to keep his mind on a single idea.

  “What’s that?” Ella cried. “Did you say Henry Bernstein’s here?”

  “Over there,” Madge said, “eating something.”

  “Oh,” Ella said, “no, that isn’t Henry. That’s Swinnerton Brown. You know, who runs the shop called ‘Books and Books.’”

  “Oh,” Madge said. “I thought he looked—”

  “But Henry’s coming if he possibly can,” Ella said, “and so are Kip Fadiman and Lew Gannett, if they possibly can. It’s a little businessy now, but it won’t be in a few minutes.”

  Now that Jeffrey had finished one drink and was starting on another, he discovered that there were all sorts of people in the room whom he did know, whom he had seen year after year at cocktail parties. He saw George Stanhope, the literary agent, who handled Walter Newcombe whenever Sinclair Merriwell was not handling him, and Leander Brickett, of Brickett’s Lectures, Inc., and some solitary dyspeptics who looked like unknown authors, and in the distance he saw Walter Newcombe and Mrs. Newcombe. One drink seemed to have made everyone there an old acquaintance. After a second he began moving confidently through the crowd. As soon as he had spoken to Sinclair Merriwell, it would be all right to leave, if he and Madge could find their coats. They could do it without saying good-by and Madge could call up Ella later and say there’d been such a crowd that they’d not been able to find her.

  He did not know what had become of Madge. Jeffrey was first in one group and then another, without knowing how he got there. He was shaking hands with Sinclair Merriwell, who was full of fun, as a host should be on such an occasion, but at the same time, just a little serious, too, exactly as a host should be—in a blue double-breasted coat with white stripes and a handkerchief jutting out of his pocket just so, and a gardenia in his lapel—Ella always gave Sinclair a gardenia before a cocktail party.

  “Jeff!” Sinclair called. “Come here to Papa. Here’s Priss. I don’t think you’ve ever met Priss, have you? Priscilla, this is Jeffrey Wilson who knows everything about plays.”

  Jeffrey felt a little sorry for Priscilla Jenks, since it wasn’t her fault that she was there and probably she didn’t want to be looked at. At any rate he hoped she did not want to be looked at, because it would have been better if she had not been. He never could understand why everyone wanted to see people who wrote books. In Jeffrey’s experience, writers, particularly novelists and more particularly women novelists, were, as a rule, not physically attractive. For one thing, novelists, particularly women novelists, were not as young as they used to be; and usually they had a look that made him think that even when they were young they would not have been much to look at; and the trouble with most novelists, particularly women novelists, was that they never seemed to know that they were not as young as they used to be. He was afraid that was the trouble with Priscilla Jenks. Something about writing a novel always went to the heads of novelists, particularly women novelists. Yet, it was not altogether their fault, when publishers’ advertisements said that they were the greatest artists of their time, filled with charm and humor and a subtle magnetic power. Naturally they thought they must be beautiful. That was why they so often dressed like High School girls at a graduation and wore orchids and strange fixed smiles, and Priscilla Jenks was doing just that right now.

  “Sometime when there isn’t so much noise,” Sinclair said, “we must all get together about The Book. It’s just a funny idea of mine that there’s a play in it.”

  “I don’t think a novel is ever basically a play,” Priscilla Jenks said. “The conception of a novel and a play are so entirely different.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Jeffrey said, “that’s perfectly true, but I never thought of it in quite that way.”

  “Jeff,” Sinclair said hastily, “we can’t be serious about it now, Jeff.”

  “The novel,” Miss Jenks said, “that is, the novel as I see it, is more of an eventless stream of time than drama. A novelist’s problem is the creation of character through the medium of words, without having any thought for the purely visual. At least, that’s the way I see it; so I’m sure I don’t know whether The Book can make a play or not. Is that the way you see it, Mr. Wilson?”

  “I suppose,” Jeffrey said, “that’s the way I’ve always seen it, but no one has ever posed that problem quite so clearly.”

  “Jeff,” Sinclair said, “let’s not talk about it now. Priscilla was in Greece in 1939. Have you ever been to Greece?”

  “It isn’t,” Miss Jenks said, “that I haven’t a great respect for the problem of the dramatist—the net result of either medium is the same, of course—a picture of life and of our time as I tried to show it in The Book, but the tools used by the dramatist have a different cutting edge and a different bevel.”

  “That’s perfectly true,” Jeffrey said. “Sinclair, I never thought of that, did you?”

  “Jeff,” Sinclair said, “let’s not talk about it now. When Priscilla was in Greece she got to Thrace.”

  “There was one part of The Book,” Miss Jenks said, “that I did think of in terms of a play—I shut my eyes before I wrote that part and thought of the page on the typewriter as a curtain. I made the characters as static as the characters on a stage at the rising of the curtain. I wonder if you can guess what part of The Book that was.”

  “Jeff,” Sinclair said, “let’s not talk about it now. Priscilla, here’s someone who’s talked about you until he’s talked my right ear off. This is Swinnerton Brown who runs the shop called ‘Books and Books.’”

  Sinclair drew Jeff very gently to one side.

  “God damn you,” he said, “don’t pull her leg.”

  Jeffrey laughed.

  “Sinclair,” he said, “no one here is going to do that,” and then Sinclair began to laugh.

  Jeffrey moved away to a little semicircle and talked with two men he knew whose names he could not remember and to a redheaded girl who kept singing some sort of a song about money and babies.

  “They can’t come over here,” one man said. “It’s a matter of logistics. How many ships could bring a hundred thousand men over here?”

  “What about Brazil?” the other man said. “What’s to keep them from the big bulge of Brazil?”

  “You can’t have babies,” the girl said, “unless you have a definite cash reserve.”

  “Just how in hell, George,” the first man said, “can they get to any bulge in this hemisphere across the Atlantic Ocean? You tell me how they can
do it. I’m listening.”

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

  “Well, God damn it, George,” the first man said, “you tell me.”

  “What about Dakar?” the second man said. “Don’t shut your eyes to facts. What about Dakar?”

  “All right,” the first man said, “you tell me. What about Dakar?”

  “God damn it,” the second man said, “I am telling you.”

  “What are you telling me?” the first man said.

  “God damn it,” the second man said, “if you close your ears to reason, George, I can’t tell you. I’m telling you about Dakar.”

  “All right,” the first man said. “You don’t tell me anything I don’t know already. You’re hysterical, and you don’t tell anything.”

  “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.