So Little Time

by John P. Marquand

  “Jeff,” Beckie said, “you oaf, you, I was worried you weren’t coming.” Jeffrey started to answer, but there was no time.

  “We’ve been working all day,” Beckie said, “and you’ve missed it. We’ve had weeding teams, but now Adam is going to make us juleps.”

  “Maybe that’s why I was late,” Jeffrey said.

  “You oaf,” Beckie told him, “you’ll work tomorrow, even if it’s Sunday. You’ll be on my team tomorrow.”

  “Leave the car right here,” Fred called. “Adam will put it away, and he’ll rustle up the bags. Come and meet everybody. They’re great people.”

  “Fred, dear,” Beckie said, “perhaps they’d like to see their room, first, and wash up a little. You’re going to be in the Old House, in Uncle Joel’s room.”

  Jeffrey looked across the lawn. The old well was still there with a brand-new well sweep on it.

  “All day long,” Jeffrey said, “someone has been asking me if I don’t want to wash my hands.”

  “Jeff,” Madge said, and looked at him hard, “Jeff.” But Beckie had begun to laugh.

  “Don’t scold him, dear,” she said, and she linked her arm through his.

  “Come on,” Fred said, “stop necking, and meet the company.”

  “Fred,” Beckie said, “perhaps some of the others will begin to think you always talk this way—just like a local yokel.”

  “That’s what a farm’s for, ain’t it, by heck?” Fred said. “Come out and see my new turning lathe, Jeff. I’ve got a real woodworking shop here now.”

  “A woodworking shop,” Jeffrey said, “by heck!”

  “Jeff,” Madge said, “you don’t have to be a local yokel, too.”

  Then her voice dropped, and she raised her hand to brush a wisp of hair behind her ear, and Beckie and Fred, too, stopped being funny. Fred gave his light blue coat a little pull, because they were approaching all the rest of the company, and there was that familiar indecisive moment of wondering what may come of it, when you meet people at someone else’s house on a week end.

  The others had risen from the Joggle Board, and from iron chairs which surrounded two white round iron tables, each table shaded by a deep blue canvas umbrella on the top of a pole plunged through the table’s vitals. There were lots of other chairs on the terrace—those canvas sun-bathing chairs that were difficult to disentangle when they were folded, rattan chairs from China, and chairs with bunches of grapes on their backs, and long reclining chairs with small canopies over them and with wheels instead of legs. All the people standing up looked as if they belonged in those chairs. The women wore gingham dresses like Beckie’s and the men wore coats with large checks and squares on them. Everyone looked very sunburned and happy with the possible exception of Walter Newcombe. Walter was wearing white flannels and the same gabardine coat which had appeared on the dust jacket of I Call the Turn. Walter’s nose was peeling.

  “Everybody here knows everybody else, don’t they?” Beckie asked, and Jeffrey knew everyone vaguely, and if he did not, the faces were like others which he knew. There were Mr. and Mrs. Newcombe, Beckie was saying, right over there. It interested Jeffrey to learn that the Newcombes, who must have been there all day, had not achieved a first-name basis yet.

  “Hello, Walter,” Jeffrey said.

  “Why, I didn’t know you knew Mr. Newcombe,” Beckie said. Next there was a couple named Dorothy and Dick Sales, who came, Beckie said, from Scarsdale. The names seemed familiar to Jeffrey and then he remembered Sally Sales, of whom Jim had spoken, but he could not remember ever having seen either of them before. When Mr. Sales called him “Jeff,” Jeffrey must have assumed that vague look of incomprehension which you try to hide but never can.

  “It’s Dick Sales, Jeff,” he said, “Paris 1918. July. We were both on leave. Café de la Paix, and elsewhere.”

  “Oh,” Jeffrey said, “oh, yes.”

  “Do you remember how you put that girl on roller skates and pushed her out on the floor and ran away and left her?” Mr. Sales asked.

  “What girl?” Jeffrey asked. “Where was that?”

  And then he heard Madge saying, “Why, Jeff, you never told me about that,” but there was only a flutter of interest because Beckie was introducing them to a bald-headed youngish man, tall and hollow-chested, wearing a russet-brown tweed coat cut into squares by crimson lines.

  “This is Buchanan Greene,” Beckie said, and there was a change in her voice, indicating that this time she had produced something. Jeffrey thought that she was going to add, “the poet, and of course you have read him,” but she did not.

  “And here,” Beckie went on, “I didn’t mean to leave you until last, darling, but you know them both.”

  It was Marianna Miller with a Quaker girl’s sunbonnet pushed back from her bright gold hair, and with a dress that reminded him of one of those nice little girls in Pride and Prejudice or Barchester Towers—and obviously Marianna was trying to be a nice little girl who loved dogs and cows and flowers and possibly croquet.

  “Darling,” Marianna said to Madge, “how windswept you look.” Then she turned to Jeffrey and kissed him. It was one of those swift embraces which was partly Broadway and partly Hollywood, and Jeffrey had often explained to Madge that it was perfectly all right. It was just the way stage people behaved.

  “Hello, darling,” Marianna said, and she smelled of Cuir de Russie, the way she always did.

  “Hello,” Jeffrey said, “you look like an Anthony Trollope this afternoon.”

  The line struck Marianna as funny and she laughed and Jeffrey was sorry that he had said it, because he saw Madge looking at him. Madge always told him that she could not understand how it was, when he had such good manners everywhere else, that he was always a little bawdy and off-color whenever they went to Fred’s and Beckie’s, but Beckie was laughing too.

  “Naughty,” she said, “naughty Jeff. And here, I nearly forgot—here’s Godfrey.”

  She was referring to her oldest son. Godfrey must have been about twenty. The shoulders of his coat were padded so that his head looked too small, and yet though his head was too small, his features looked too large for his head.

  “Hi ya, Aunt Madge. Hi ya, Uncle Jeffrey,” Godfrey said.

  Everyone was looking at Godfrey politely, for of course there was nothing you could do about your friends’ children. Jeffrey had never asked the boy to call him “Uncle Jeffrey” and it was the last thing he wanted, but Beckie always wanted her children to be perfectly at home with her friends.

  “Jeffrey, dear,” Beckie said, “I hope you and Godfrey can have a good long talk together tomorrow, and perhaps with Miss Miller too, if Marianna doesn’t mind. What do you think? Godfrey is thinking of going on the stage.”

  There was another pause, but it was broken by Buchanan Greene, who spoke in the sonorous voice he used when he read from his own works.

  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player—”

  Jeffrey looked up at the pointed Norman dovecote and wriggled his toes inside his shoes.

  “Oh, darling,” Marianna said, “go on, I love it so.”

  It looked for a moment as though Buchanan might go on, and he would have if it had not been for Fred.

  “Never mind it now,” Fred said. “Here comes Adam with the drinks.”

  “Fred,” Jeffrey heard Beckie whisper, “Fred.” The front door with the fanlight above it had opened and Adam, the Negro houseman from Harlem, appeared in his white coat carrying a tray of frosted glasses.

  “Buchanan wants a drink, too,” Fred said. “His tongue is hanging out.”

  “Parched,” Buchanan answered, “swollen and blackened by the desert heat.”

  “Jeffrey,” Beckie whispered, “it’s an experience.”

  Jeffrey’s eye was on Adam with the glasses. It seemed to him that Adam was moving more slowly than was necessary.

  “Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it always is to be here, Beckie.”

  “To have a poet,” Beckie s
aid, “and no mean poet.”

  Holding his glass and occasionally sipping his drink through the little silver tube that went with it, Jeffrey crossed the grass toward Walter Newcombe. Walter and his wife were standing a little distance away from the rest, wearing the set smiles of people in a gathering where everyone knows everyone else well except themselves. Walter’s clothes were not quite right, and he looked tired, and that wife of his looked about the way Jeffrey thought she would. She wore a white knitted dress and her hair was prematurely white and her eyebrows made a straight and rather bushy line across her forehead. She was older than Walter, and Jeffrey wondered what whim of natural selection had brought those two together.

  “Hello, Walter,” Jeffrey said.

  Walter blinked and cleared his throat.

  “Hi, old man,” he said, “let’s see, you met Mildred didn’t you?”

  Jeffrey looked at Mrs. Newcombe, and Mrs. Newcombe stared at him hard.

  “Walt,” she said, “my cigarettes and my holder, please.” Walter plunged his right hand quickly into the side pocket of his gabardine coat.

  “Yes, sweet,” Walter said, “coming right up.”

  “Here,” Jeffrey said, and reached for his own cigarette case. “Let me, please.”

  Mrs. Newcombe still looked at him searchingly.

  “Thank you,” she said slowly, “I only smoke those London fags. Walt brought me some over.” She paused a moment. “On the Clipper. Thank you, Walt.” Walter had handed her a white jade cigarette holder with a cigarette inserted in it, and whipped out his lighter. She exhaled a cloud of smoke gracefully and deliberately.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice had grown more gracious, “Mr. Wilson and I might as well have met. I’ve heard so much about him.”

  Jeffrey understood her. She was not having a happy time and she wanted to make it plain that she was Mildred Hughes who wrote for the Pictorial and the Cosmopolitan and it didn’t matter if her husband had written World Assignment. She was Mildred Hughes.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Jeffrey said, “I’ve seen your name so often.”

  “Oh,” she said, “have you read my stuff? I hate to write. It’s like childbirth, do you feel so?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jeffrey said, “the barrier of sex intervenes.”

  Walter began to laugh. He raised his right leg and slapped his thigh.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, “oh, baby.”

  Mrs. Newcombe exhaled another cloud of smoke from the British fag.

  “Walter,” she said, “don’t make a God-damned monkey of yourself.”

  “Well,” Jeffrey said, “how’s everything? It was last April I saw you, wasn’t it? When did you get back, Walter?”

  Walter’s features smoothed out quickly.

  “Ten days ago on the Clipper,” he said, “or was it eleven, sweet?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Mrs. Newcombe said. “You just came batting at my bedroom one morning at the Waldorf.” She looked again at Jeffrey. “What is your first name, Mr. Wilson?”

  “It’s ‘Jeff,’ sweet,” Walter said. “You remember, I told you how Jeff came to the Waldorf and was so sweet to Edwina, sweet.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “I’ll call you ‘Jeff’ and you call me ‘Mildred’! Artists should call each other by their first names.”

  “I’d love it,” Jeffrey said, “but I’m not an artist.”

  “Neither am I,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “and by God, neither is Walter.”

  “But sweet,” Walter said, and he cleared his throat again, “I never said I was.”

  Mrs. Newcombe glanced quickly across the lawn and back at them.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Jeff?” she asked. “I wish we three could get off somewhere under a bush with a bottle.”

  “Now sweet,” Walter said, “it’s almost dinnertime. Jeff, I never expected to see you here. They’re very lovely people, aren’t they, and they have a very lovely home.”

  “They certainly have,” Jeffrey said. “When did you meet them, Walter?”

  “It was after a lecture at the Colony Club last March,” Walter said. “She came up to me afterwards—”

  “They all come up to him afterwards,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “these brittle—”

  “Now, sweet,” Walter said, “it’s very lovely to be here. I’ve never been in an American—galère like this. I’ve been to châteaux near Tours and I’ve been entertained in English country homes, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this, and Mildred hasn’t either.”

  “The hell I haven’t,” Mildred said, “I’ve been in lots and lots of homes, and in lots and lots of beds, and now don’t start saying how you knew the Duke of Windsor at Cannes. God knows why I married you over there except that I was lonely.”

  “Now, sweet,” Walter said, “I only meant it’s new to me—this whole sort of home.” He looked at the trees along the driveway and sighed, and then he said just what Jeffrey thought he would. “Someday,” Walter said, “when I settle down, I should like a home like this.”

  Jeffrey knew it was not the time or the place to ask a question, but still he asked it. It was growing cooler and darker. The figures of the others sitting in the chairs were growing dim.

  “Walter,” he asked, “what did you see over there this time? I tried to call you up when they jumped Norway, and you’d gone.”

  Walter Newcombe sighed.

  “Jeff,” he said, “don’t get me started on that. I’ve been across Belgium with the British. I was in Gorty’s headquarters.”

  “Gorty?” Jeffrey asked. “Who’s Gorty?”

  “Lord Gort, you know, the Commanding General,” Walter said. “And then there was the Dunkirk show, and then London, but don’t get me started on that.”

  “No, don’t,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Wait till after supper.” She lowered her voice into a horrid parody. “Do pulease tell us, Mr. Newcombe. We’re all so dying to know. Do please tell us what you’ve been through, and a little of what has happened to the dear old lovely things in London. Don’t draw him out now on an empty stomach.”

  “Now, sweet,” Walter began, “it isn’t that way at all.”

  “What the hell do you think they asked you for?” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Your face?”

  “It must be great to be back,” Jeffrey said.

  “Wait,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “don’t ask Walt. I know the answer to that one, and all the other answers. ‘Don’t quote me, but, yes, it is great to be back. I don’t think that any of you over here know quite how great it is to be back—how lucky you are to have an abundance of food and clothing and roofs over your heads. I don’t think that any of you quite realize the suffering over there. If I could take you there for five minutes—’”

  Walter’s face had grown brick-red.

  “Sweet,” he said, and his voice had changed. “Please. It isn’t funny.”

  And all at once there was a dull sort of soundproof silence—and Walter cleared his throat.

  “Because it’s true,” he said. “My God, it’s true.”

  Jeffrey looked over at the parasols and the chairs with wheels and the house, and Fred and his tailored dungarees and the bell and the Joggle Board.

  “Yes,” he said, “of course it is.”

  Mrs. Newcombe stood dead still.

  “All right, Walt, you win,” she said. And then they heard Fred calling.

  “One more drink,” he called, “and dress for dinner.”

  The lights of Higgins Farm had been turned on and shafts of light from the small-paned windows cut across the dusky lawn.

  “Jeff,” Walter asked, “does that mean we just wash, or do we dress?”

  “You dress,” Jeffrey said, “but you wear a soft shirt because we’re in the country.”

  “You know damn well we dress,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Don’t act as though you haven’t been to houses.”

  “I was only asking, sweet,” Walter said, “sometimes the
y do and sometimes they don’t.”

  “Afterwards,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “let’s go up to our room and get fried. Walter has a bottle.”

  “Now, sweet,” Walter said, “Jeffrey’s wife is here. We’ll see you later, Jeff. It’s like old times.”

  He understood what Walter meant, but it wasn’t like old times.

  The stairway of the old Higgins house, built around the old chimney, was steep and narrow, but Beckie had left it just that way. The paint had been scraped off the old pine railing and risers and one of the old pine doors still had an original butterfly hinge on it which had been carefully copied so that now all the doors had them. Uncle Joel’s room was done in blue-and-pink-checked glazed chintz. The only new things in it, Beckie always said, were the box spring mattresses on the twin beds. The beds themselves were old spool bedsteads cut down and waxed and oiled. The room had a fireplace with Hessian andirons and a tavern table with a mirror over it decorated with a picture of a tombstone and a weeping willow. There was also an old maple chest of drawers which Beckie and Fred had scraped down themselves and there were some of those comical old framed mottoes on the wall, such as “God Bless Our Home,” and several more tombstone memorials of weeping willows with the names of the deceased written in with pen and ink. On the mantel was an arrangement of wax flowers under glass. There were also two very early bannister-back chairs and a Boston rocker with an embroidered picture of a cat on its cushion. Then there were the rugs. Beckie and Fred had been everywhere to find them. There was an old braided rug in front of the fireplace made by a little old country woman whom Beckie had found, and several hooked rugs with cats and horses on them. The plumbing connected with Uncle Joel’s room was modern, of course. It had been installed in a closet, called by connoisseurs of old houses the “prayer room,” and perhaps it had been better for prayers than bathing. The checked chintz spreads were still over the beds, and Madge’s suitcase rested on one baggage rack, and Jeffrey’s on another. There were some autumn leaves on the bedside table and a copy of Peter Amo’s Stag at Eve, and two copies of House and Garden. Jeffrey took off his coat and opened his suitcase. It was empty.