So Little Time

by John P. Marquand

  “Yes sir,” the doorman said, “it’s a fine morning for a walk.”

  You could not tell what anyone was thinking. The windows of the stores were full of Christmas decorations; the dogs were being aired; the trucks were rumbling up the avenue. There was a familiar background of sound that pulsed through the air like heartbeats. There was the smell of spruce from the Christmas trees on the sidewalks. There was the clatter of ash cans from a truck, on which was written the admonition about keeping the city clean, and the signs were still on the green busses: “Welcome to New York.” It was astonishing to see everything move on as it had always moved—too much in the shops, too much traffic in the cross streets, too many people, too much of everything. But everyone must have known there would never be a day quite like that again. Everyone must have known that everything was changing. The trouble was you could not see it change.

  It was not yet noon, but the first editions of the papers were already out. He could see the headlines on a newsstand, where there were too many papers, too many magazines.

  “Jap Fleet on the Run,” he read, and he knew it made no sense, after what he imagined must have happened at Pearl Harbor. It made no sense, but Jeffrey was only half thinking of it, because the sights and the sounds were only half intruding on his thoughts.

  He was thinking of all sorts of things that were as disorganized as those sights and sounds. He was thinking of what was permanent, and he was thinking that very little was, except perhaps personal relationships, but even these kept changing. You clung to beliefs and people and yourself, but even these kept changing.

  A girl with yellow hair and with one of those small hats which women were wearing then was walking half a block ahead of him, and her figure and the way she walked made him think of Marianna Miller, but it was not Marianna Miller. You knew someone, you loved and laughed, and then it was all different. Nothing in the world ever stayed quite the same. He had not thought of Marianna for some time, but now all sorts of things that he had said and she had said were running through his mind. For a minute or two these filled him with poignant regret, and made him very sad. There had been something which he had tried to capture, something she had offered freely, that was a part of a half-formed desire, he supposed, to be something he might have been. Jeffrey knew now that he would never attain that desire, but the memory of having tried made him feel very kindly toward Marianna. He was wondering again why it had all come to nothing, and why he had not been able to go on with it, but it all eluded analysis. She had given more than he had, he was quite sure, when he heard again the things that she had said and he had said, but there was no way of telling exactly. You could think of it as a matter of too little and too late, and that might be the better way to think of it, since the truth was you only had a certain amount to give. The truth was that he had given most of what he had away already, and he had tried to tell her that. Yet there were some things that you could not make anyone understand, because, perhaps, you never knew enough about yourself. For a moment as he walked across town Marianna Miller seemed to be walking there beside him, and then she was gone and Jim was there.

  He had given more than he had ever thought he would to Jim, and more than Jim would ever know. Yet as he thought of Jim, he was already more of an abstraction than a person, simply a combination of Jeffrey Wilson’s own thoughts and emotions. Now that Jim was gone there was nothing but a chain of memories left.

  He had given, and now he knew that he had nothing more to give which Jim would need. There was no cause for regret, for this was exactly as it should have been. To Jeffrey Jim might always seem young, and often in need of help, but he knew that Jim had already received the independence which one really wanted for him. You grew fond of someone and then it all began to change. Perhaps the people you knew and those you were fondest of lived mainly in your mind. There was Jim, and then all sorts of other people whom he had known moved beside him in his thoughts. There were Minot Roberts and people in the old Squadron whom he thought he had forgotten. There were Alf and Jesse Fineman, and Walter Newcombe and Mrs. Newcombe. You saw them and you talked to them and then they went away. Then he was thinking of his father. He had not thought of his father for a long while. In that last war, Jeffrey was thinking, his father would have been his own age. He remembered his father’s speaking of the Liberty Loans, the gasless Sundays, the meatless days—his father had lived the life that Jeffrey was living now.

  They were all there with him, but there was nothing that was permanent until you thought of Madge. For some reason he was thinking of her as she had looked when he had first seen her there by the tennis court at her father’s house, years and years ago when they had been so young. Something had happened to her dress, he remembered. She had wanted a pin for her dress. She had always wanted something from him. He had thought at one time that he had nothing left to give her, but now he knew that there was always something he could give, without desiring to, perhaps, but always something, although he never told her anything. She had never said so, and perhaps she never would, or perhaps she had when she had held his hand that morning. He could always give her something, and she was the only one.

  He had reached Fifth Avenue by then, and the bulk of Radio City stood in front of him, and he remembered what Jim had said: that you could stay there all day long just looking at the people. He could see the great Christmas tree and the bare branches of the trees along the sidewalk, while he was standing waiting for the lights to change before he crossed the Avenue. You could stand there if you wanted just looking at the people, provided always that you did not feel too much alone. And now suddenly, in spite of the noise of the motors, in spite of all that sea of sound, he felt entirely alone. He was not pleased with anything he had been thinking, but there he was. He seemed to be standing still with time and everything else moving past him. It was twelve o’clock and the chimes were ringing. It was time for him to cross the Avenue, but he stood still. The chimes made him look at the cathedral and the people moving up and down the steps.

  He had never particularly admired the architecture of Saint Patrick’s. He had only been inside it once years before when he and Madge had stopped there for a moment to hear the midnight mass at Christmas. He remembered the candles and the incense and the painted, plaster figures, and the faint lights in the chapels. He wondered what made him go inside there again at noon when the sun was out. It may have been simple curiosity, or it may have been that idea of his that everyone must have been thinking what he was thinking, but above all he felt an impulse to be where it was quiet. It seemed to him that there had been too much travel, too much talk, too much noise for a long while, too much of everything. Inside Saint Patrick’s he might be quiet for a few minutes, absolutely quiet.

  He was not a Catholic or a member of any church. Nevertheless he had always been moved by church architecture, particularly the Early Gothic. Whenever he had been in Paris he had often walked alone to Notre Dame for no other reason than to stand and to allow his eyes to rove upward along the columns to the shadow of the arches. He had always thought that Chartres was the greatest cathedral of them all, and he hoped that nothing had happened to Chartres after the fall of France. Once he had been there with Madge and they had paid the sacristan a substantial sum so that they might enter the church alone by moonlight. That light, he remembered, had come through the stained glass very dimly, but there had been enough light so that the nave and the transept were not wholly dark. When he and Madge had stood alone there in the shadows, it had all been so still that the faintest motion you might make would have sounded very loud. She had held his hand, and the best of it was that she had said nothing, not even in a whisper, because anything you might have said would have spoiled that ghostly peace. It was different when he entered Saint Patrick’s, because of course there would never be another religious edifice like Chartres, nothing as naïvely great, nothing as grandly simple. The trouble when he entered Saint Patrick’s was that he was thinking of too many things. Th
at was what always seemed to happen to Jeffrey when he went to church. While he stood there with his eyes still dazzled from the sunlight of the street, he was thinking about Jim. He was thinking that he must tell Madge about him, that he should have told her hours before, and now that he was inside Saint Patrick’s he was suddenly absolutely sure that Jim had gone. He was there alone, a stranger, standing awkwardly, looking at the candles on the high altar, listening to echoed footsteps and whispered prayers. It was not entirely for him because he was not of the Catholic faith. Some instinct, derived perhaps from his Protestant childhood at Bragg, made Jeffrey faintly suspicious of all the symbols; and yet, though his mind still dealt with his own thoughts, those thoughts were moving more slowly. There was something in that building which had also been in Chartres, and he remembered what it had been. There was no sense of time. Although the scent of incense and the burning wax from all the candles spoke of time, still time did not disturb him.

  He had not prayed for a long while and he was not used to prayer, and he was quite sure that he had not come there to pray. Yet he found himself repeating the Lord’s Prayer in his mind and he remembered how it had sounded spoken in unison on the occasions when he and Madge had attended an Episcopal service.

  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  Those words, he remembered, were always sibilant and awkward when the congregation murmured them; but now, as they ran through his mind, they were solemn and beautiful, although they were not the words he had been brought up on when he was a boy in Bragg—“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

  About the Author

  John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.

  By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1943 by John P. Marquand

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1571-4

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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