“Just two barefoot boys from Wall Street,” Jeffrey said; and then he added, “You have to come from somewhere.”
“Mr. Newcombe has been away,” Beckie said. “It’s what Secretary Ickes called Wendell Willkie, Mr. Newcombe.”
There was a moment of constraint. Adam was passing the brandy.
“Willkie’s building up,” Mr. Sales said, “he’s building up all the time.”
“Fred and I have talked it all over,” Beckie said. “Haven’t we, Fred, dear?”
“Yes, dear,” Fred said. He was still working with the fire.
“We’ve made up our minds,” Beckie said. “What we’re going to do may seem a little queer, but it shows how strongly we feel, doesn’t it, Fred dear?”
“Yes, dear,” Fred said.
“Which will it be,” Buchanan Greene asked, “Browder or Norman Thomas?”
“No, no,” Beckie said, “don’t be silly, Buchanan.”
“Forgive it,” Buchanan Greene answered, “it’s only a poor poet’s whimsey.” But Beckie was standing very straight.
“Fred and I always think the same way at election time, don’t we dear? We voted for Hoover in 1932. We voted for Landon in 1936. This year for the first time we’re voting for Mr. Roosevelt, aren’t we dear?”
“Yes, dear,” Fred said.
“We’re voting for Mr. Roosevelt,” Beckie said, “because England wants us to have Mr. Roosevelt. That’s the least we can do for England.”
“Yes, dear,” Fred said, “I suppose so.”
“You don’t suppose so, Fred,” Beckie said, “you know so.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Well, I suppose all you bright people will hate us,” Mrs. Sales said, “but Dick and I are going to vote for Willkie. We think he can do more to keep us out of war.”
“Keep us out of it?” Beckie began, and then she stopped and sat down by the coffee table.
There was a moment’s uncomfortable tension in the room. There was a parrotlike sort of repetition in those women’s voices. They were obeying their emotions and not reason, as everybody did. Jeffrey took a cigar when Fred offered it to him. “It comes from the Racquet Club,” Fred said, “but I’m afraid it’s a little dry, Jeff.”
Jeffrey looked at the end of his cigar. Their voices had all risen again. Roosevelt had promised that none of our boys would be involved in a European war, hadn’t he? He had said it again and again, and again, and Willkie had said the same thing again and again. They should have known that no one man could keep a country out of war, and no small group could get a country into war. You drifted into it on the tide of destiny; and now he had his social duty to perform, and there was no need to be artistic about it.
“Walter,” Jeffrey said, “tell us, what’s happening over there?”
The plain fact was, as everybody must have realized who gave it thought, that England would be whipped if we didn’t help her; but Jeffrey knew that Walter wouldn’t put it just that way. Walter stood in front of the fire with his hands still carefully tucked into the side pockets of his dinner coat.
“You mustn’t think of me as knowing much,” Walter said. “No one does in a situation that teems with imponderables.”
That was the way it always was—no one knew much, but everyone was pathetically expecting something.
“Everyone always asks me,” Walter said, “definite questions. But no answer can be definite, not on a broad world canvas obscured by the fog of war.”
That was a new expression, and it covered everything, “the fog of war.”
“To put it another way,” Walter said, “it reminds me of a story about a Navvy by the East End docks in London in the blackout …”
Jeffrey only half listened to the adventures of the Navvy. He had heard about the doorman at the Savoy, and the man who used to wheel in the beef at Simpson’s, and the little old woman who sold lucifers near Trafalgar Square. He wondered if all the people who must still be dining at Claridge’s or the Savoy, or wherever it was they dined in London now, repeated those stories endlessly to each other with a sort of thankful wonder that those who had so little to lose or gain were standing with the rest of them. London had always seemed to him a city where poverty assumed a more sinister aspect than it did in any other city in the world, and yet where poverty was orderly and quiet. Everyone else was listening to the story of the Navvy, and like all those other anecdotes, it elicited applause and understanding laughter.
“That was beautiful,” Beckie said, “I can see him as you tell it.”
Then Buchanan Greene spoke, but Jeffrey found it hard to listen. Buchanan’s words sounded like all the pages one read daily, words which had been squeezed dry of any particular meaning. He was saying something about the little people, and about our way of life.
“Naturally, I can’t describe it all,” Walter said, “but if you could see their faces you would see that it has the inevitable sweep of a Greek tragedy.”
Walter put his hands firmly in his pockets, and swayed slightly backwards on his heels. It was obvious that Walter had used this phrase many times before. He paused and swayed from his heels to his toes, and then there was the sound of the front door opening.
“Just a minute,” Beckie said, “I don’t want to miss a word of it.”
They were visitors whom she must have asked to come in after dinner. Men and women in evening clothes filed into the room, fresh from the autumn night, like the people who stumbled over your feet just as the first act was beginning. Walter could hear Fred and Beckie whispering to them in low undertones that they were just in time, that Mr. Newcombe was just beginning to tell them about the war. There were discreet scrapes of chairs and the sound of ice and glasses while Walter stood in front of the fire, self-conscious but obliging like a lecturer at a Women’s Club.
“I hope you don’t mind—” Beckie began.
“Oh, no,” Walter said, “let me see, where was I?”
Mrs. Newcombe was the one who answered him.
“You were saying it was like a Greek tragedy.”
“Oh, yes,” Walter said, “thank you, sweet.”
Jeffrey was reasonably sure that Walter had never read a Greek tragedy, but Walter was repeating the same endless sort of chant as a chorus from Euripides. He had no background of scholarship to help him and no knowledge of history or language. He was only telling what he saw, drawing conclusions from interviews and reading. It made Jeffrey wonder whether he himself could have done any better. Walter was speaking of the breakthrough in the Ardennes and the way the hinge of the line had broken, but he could not explain why it was not stopped. It reminded Jeffrey that Walter had never seen another war. His descriptions of bombings and of refugees all made this obvious. It was part of an old familiar story; everything had smashed, but there were units which had been magnificent. Now all the equipment was lost and the British Expeditionary Force was crowding the beaches of Dunkirk and the small craft were coming across the channel, taking out loads of soldiers. It was just what he had read, and Walter Newcombe added nothing new. It seemed to Jeffrey that this experience had conveyed nothing to Walter himself. It was like the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that told about the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, but you could not see the rockets or hear the bombs.
Yet everyone was listening, and Jeffrey was sorry for himself and sorry for everybody there. It all had something to do with the Rumpus Room and with Fred’s wine-colored velvet coat. He remembered what he had said to Madge—that they all were dead and didn’t know it.
“And now,” he heard Walter say, “I’ll be awfully glad to answer any questions.”
Then there was the usual silence and the usual question about what England could do next and about the bombing of the British Isles. Walter was saying something which he must also have read—that a military defeat could not conquer the spirit of a people; and then everyone was talking, and Fred was asking him if he would like a Scotch-and-soda.
> “That was a great talk, wasn’t it?” Fred said. “It’s better than all the newspapers put together to hear someone who’s been there.”
“Yes,” Jeffrey answered.
“It makes me feel as if I’d been there myself,” Fred said.
Jeffrey wondered whether Fred meant it, or whether he only wanted to feel that way because it was the proper thing to say. He was thinking of the other war and of British officers with their belts and French officers in their horizon blue who had talked in the town hall at home. All the guests’ voices now were raised in a futile sort of clamor; everyone was trying to express some idea of his own, although not a single idea had any value. Then there was a slight drop in the voices. There was a thumping, grating sound in the corner of the room where Fred had turned on the radio. He was saying that here was the eleven o’clock news, if anyone wanted it, and then Jeffrey heard a phrase which had already grown familiar.
“To get the news direct, we now take you to London.”
“That will be Ed,” he heard Walter say. “I wonder how Ed’s doing.”
It was a casual remark enough, and yet it seemed to Jeffrey that it was the first remark of Walter’s that was not repeating what someone else had told him. The voice came across clearly, with a slight dramatic pause.
“This—is London.”
Walter Newcombe nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s Ed,” and he stood there listening.
“It is two o’clock in the morning. The bombers are overhead again. They have been coming in fives and tens ever since midnight. It seems that they are flying higher, due, we hope, to more accurate antiaircraft fire. Just as I entered the studio, demolition bombs and incendiaries had fallen on a section of the city known to every American tourist. During the day, the air battle has continued …”
Jeffrey did not want to hear any more of it; he wanted to be out of that room and out of the house and by himself. He was acutely conscious of everyone sitting there, of the dinner coats and the evening dresses, of the fireplace with its crane and of the cobbler’s bench, holding bottles and glasses, and of the overheated air, full of cigarette smoke and the faint, sticky fragrance of talcum. Nothing fitted with that simple statement that this was London. He walked slowly to the door which led to the little paneled hall filled with antique colored prints and walking sticks and canes that opened into seats, and golf bags.
“I return you now …”
He could still hear the voice. “I return you now …” It was as simple as “Now I lay me down to sleep.” You could turn the speaker off the way you turned a water tap. He did not want to have any part in that scene any longer. He did not feel that he was any better than those other people, or more intelligent or more sensitive. It was simply that he did not belong with them at the moment. He did not seem to belong to anything. In leaving the room, he knew that he was trying to leave himself and a large part of his experience behind him, but it was not possible to turn the clock back, or possible to be younger. He could not even tell what he wanted to get away from unless it were a sort of insincerity, an insulation there which shut off all genuine expression. If you wanted to you could call it the way of life that everyone was leading—a way of life which had no more depth than a painting on a screen, but that was because you tried to get away from depth. You tried to live graciously and easily. You tried to get as far away as possible from fear or want or death.
12
I’ll Wait for You by Moonlight
Jeffrey felt better when he had closed the front door behind him, but even then he could hear the measured words. “This—is London.” They were artificial in themselves; the man who had spoken them must have consciously timed that pause for dramatic effect, just as an actor timed his lines. “This—is heaven. This—is war. This—is murder.” It was an old trick which you could use in all sorts of ways. “This—is London.” It had been London for just a moment. Jeffrey had been conscious of the planes and the antiaircraft, although there had not been a sound. He could feel his own utter insignificance and the imminence of danger all around him, although the night was clear October moonlight, beautiful, and very still. He could see the house behind him in that cold light. In spite of the warm glow from its windows, the mocking clarity of the moonlight made it look deserted as it certainly would be some time. It made it look as lonely as the houses along the Post Road which he had seen that afternoon. There was no kindliness or tolerance in that moonlight or in the shadows which the landscaped trees cast on the lawn. He knew why the goddess of the moon had been a frigid beauty in all the amorous mythology of Greece. There was something hostile in that moonlight, which raised a question in his mind.
“How in hell did I ever get here?”
The barn in the moonlight was black and white and it was much more motionless than it had been in the sunset. For some reason, it made him think of ghost stories that his brother Alf used to tell him when they were children. When he faced the blackness of the gaping open door, he remembered his grandfather’s barn at night with its welcome restless stirrings of animals inside, but in here there was nothing. A sort of curiosity about its silence made him walk into the shadows, and then he heard footsteps on the gravel of the driveway, and someone called his name.
“Oh, Jeff.” It was Marianna Miller. “Jeff. Where are you? I can’t see.”
But he could see her white dress plainly enough in the moonlight.
“Didn’t you hear me calling?” she asked, and he was certain that he had not. He had not heard a sound, but now that she was there the unbearable quality of his loneliness was broken.
“Why,” he said, “Marianna,” and then he added one of those obvious questions which had always annoyed him in play dialogue, “What brought you out here?”
He was smiling at her through the dark exactly as though she could see him, although she was only a white shape walking toward him through the shadows of the barn.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, and she gave a quick little laugh and rested her hand on his arm. That laugh of hers that came at exactly the right moment reminded him for a second of the theater, until she was closer to him, and then he put his arm around her and she clung to him in the dark.
“Marianna,” he began, and then he forgot what he was going to say.
It was never possible to explain impulses in the light of any sort of wisdom or experience. It must have been that voice from London more than her nearness. He had always been very careful in all the time he had known her to keep their relationship impersonal, and now she was in his arms and that other sort of friendship was entirely over.
“Oh, Jeff,” she whispered, “darling, why didn’t you ever do that before?”
“Why,” he told her, “I don’t exactly know.” But, of course, he did know. He had never been as defenseless or unstable in all the times they had been together, and now she represented security and release. When he kissed her he forgot the voice saying “This is London.”
“I’m a little sorry,” he said, “but I hope you’re not.”
“Darling,” she said, “don’t be such a fool.”
Still there was an element of regret because it was the end of a rational friendship which had always made him happy and the beginning of something else which he could see would lead to endless complications.
“Don’t—” she said—“don’t say you’re sorry.”
“Well,” he began, “that’s not exactly what I meant.”
“Darling,” she said, “we should have done this long ago.”
He did not answer. It was too dark to see her face, but he could tell from her voice that her eyes would be half-closed and she would be smiling very faintly.
“It mixes everything up,” he said, “that’s all I mean.”
“Darling,” she said, “it had to happen to us tonight.”
“Why tonight?” he asked.
“You and I,” she answered. “We’re the only ones alive here.”
“What?” he said. It
surprised him very much that her thoughts should have been so much like his.
“All those dreadful people,” Marianna said, “in that room. You and I may not amount to much, but we’re alive.”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” she said. “Oh God, Jeff, this—is London.”
But he was still disturbed by the realization that they would never meet in quite the same way again, because he was more aware of consequences than she.
“Marianna,” he said, “there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
“Oh, Jeff,” she answered, “don’t you know I’ve always loved you?”
“You shouldn’t have,” he said. “I’m not what you really want, dear. You’ve wasted a lot of time.”
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, “I wish—” and then she stopped, and he was very glad she had.
“So do I,” he answered, “at the moment, but you know—”
There was no need to say any more, and it was better to leave it there in silence.
“Jeff,” she said, “she—” And she stopped a second. “She’s never been right for you, has she?”
“Madge?” he said. “Why, no one is exactly right for anyone else, not ever.”
“I would be,” she answered, “I’d make you—”
“Make me what?” he asked.
“I’d make you know how good you are. I’d make you write a play.”
“Marianna,” he said, “it’s a little late for that.” It hurt him when he said it, and he was glad that it was dark.
“Jeff,” she said, “don’t laugh.”
“I’m not,” he said; “it’s kind of you, but just the same—”
“Don’t,” she said, “don’t say it’s kind.”
“Not kind, exactly,” he answered, “but this idea you have about me, it’s a little corny, dear. You see, I’m only good for what I am. It’s late to go on with something else.”
It was no good blaming other people for anything that happened to you. You could only blame yourself.
So Little Time Page 15