So Little Time (28 page)

“Every year,” Mr. Fernald said, “there seem to be more spittoons in here. Every year there is more and more of everything, and that makes progress: more of everything.”

Then Mr. Fernald sat down and asked if President Wilson's message to Congress were coming in, but he did not wait for the answer because he wanted to know where Mr. Jenks was, and when no one knew, Mr. Fernald became alarmed because he and Mr. Jenks had been right there having lunch. Then they began ringing from the composing room for the war lead, and Mr. Fernald began to swear and search through the copy for it, and Edgar, the office boy, told him that Mr. Jenks had not put it anywhere, because Mr. Jenks had not written it.

That was all there was to it—a slightly sordid affair, and anyone could see that Mr. Fernald was not quite in the right condition to do the lead himself. In fact, he had forgotten it already, and had fallen sound asleep.

That was all there was to it. Jeffrey picked up a piece of yellow copy paper and a pencil. He remembered that he started it, “The situation today on the Western Front …” and then, just in time, he recollected that it was a rule of the paper never to start a lead with “The.”

Mr. Fernald had awakened and was beginning to sing “Where the River Shannon Flows.” The melody interrupted Jeffrey's train of thought and he wished that Mr. Fernald would stop.

“Heavy fighting on the Somme sector,” Jeffrey wrote, “and an artillery duel in the neighborhood of Lille stand out as the main action on the Western Front today.”

Mr. Sims, the foreman of the composing room, was wearing a green eye-shade and was cutting copy into sections with a long pair of shears. The machines made such a noise that Jeffrey had to shout at him.

“There it is, sir,” Jeffrey shouted.

“What?” Mr. Sims shouted.

“The war lead,” Jeffrey shouted.

Mr. Sims took the first sheet and slashed it into three parts.

“What's going on?” he asked. “Is Fernald drunk again?”

Jeffrey remembered that Mr. Sims, in all the excitement of the closing pages, had time to smile at him as though they, as men, both understood the weakness of the world.

“Tell him next time,” Mr. Sims shouted, “to save some of it for me.”

Mr. Fernald had stopped singing when Jeffrey came downstairs.

“Where have you been,” Mr. Fernald asked him, “to the toilet?”

“No, sir,” Jeffrey said, “I wrote the war lead.”

Mr. Fernald started and looked at the clock. The room was vibrating softly. The paper had gone to press.

“Well, laddie boy,” he said, “laddie boy.”

It was customary for Edgar to go downstairs and bring up the last edition and to pass a copy of the paper to everyone in the room. It was the first time that Jeffrey had ever seen words of his in print, and they were in the right column and on the front page in brevier. He would remember them until he died: “Heavy fighting on the Somme sector …”

Mr. Fernald folded his paper, pushed back his chair and reached for his hat. “All right,” he said. “How about a drink?”

“What, sir?” Jeffrey asked him.

“I said,” Mr. Fernald told him, “how about a drink?”

He knew it was not polite to refuse Mr. Fernald.

When Jeffrey reached the five o'clock train at the North Station, he still grasped the paper firmly. He also held a cigar which Mr. Fernald had given him. Although he did not mean to smoke it, he went into the smoking car. He had only taken one drink, although Mr. Fernald had offered him two, but he took two pieces of mint candy from his pocket, and chewed them carefully. He could feel no ill effects. His only sensation was one of relaxation after nervous exertion. The train was pulling out of the station. A man in the seat in front of him had unfolded his paper and was reading the very words which Jeffrey had written. Half the people on the train were reading them, little realizing that the man who had written the war lead made one of their number in the smoking car.

He kept hoping that Louella might be at home, and there she was, sitting in the Cape Cod hammock, looking fresh and rested, and she had on a new blue silk dress.

“Hello,” Jeffrey said, “hello, Louella.” He felt that he should give some reason for being there, but she spoke before he could give a reason.

“What happened to you yesterday?” Louella said. “I was looking for you.”

“Well,” Jeffrey said, “I thought I'd sort of be bothering you if I stopped in all the time.”

“Why, silly,” Louella said, “it doesn't bother me.”

“I don't want you to get tired of me,” Jeffrey said, “because I come around too much.”

“Why, silly,” Louella said, “sit down.” And she patted the place beside her on the Cape Cod hammock.

“Oh, no,” he said, “it's sort of crowded, isn't it?”

“Why, silly,” Louella said, “there's room for three in the hammock. Last night Milt Rolfe and Summers Harris and I all sat in it.”

“You ought to be careful doing things like that,” Jeffrey said, “it might have broken down. I can only stay a minute.”

He put the paper under his arm and gave his trousers a little pull so as not to spoil the crease in them and sat down beside Louella. There was a gentle swinging motion, hardly perceptible, but intoxicating. Louella, with her little brown shoes, was pushing the hammock softly back and forth.

“It's nicer,” she said, “than the rocking chairs, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it doesn't throw you backwards.”

Louella laughed.

“We were pretty busy today,” Jeffrey said. “Have you seen the paper?”

Louella said she hadn't seen it, because it hadn't come yet, and Jeffrey took his own copy from beneath his arm and pointed to the right-hand column.

“The man who usually does it didn't come back from lunch,” he said. “I wrote that.”

She leaned closer toward him to see. Her shoulder touched his and then she drew away.

“Why Jeffrey Wilson,” Louella said, “you didn't write all of that.”

He felt a surge of disappointment. If he had written all the column she might have leaned longer against his shoulder.

“No,” he said, “just that much.”

“Oh,” Louella said, “why, Jeffrey Wilson!”

“You can keep it,” he said, “don't bother to read it now. It isn't anything, really.” And then he wanted to change the subject. There was a piece of knitting between them on the hammock.

“What's that?” he asked. “Something you're making?” And then he thought it might have been something which Louella would not want to speak about, something that girls wore.

“Why,” Louella said, “it's a washcloth. I knit them for Father and Mother, and I'll give this one to you.”

Jeffrey swallowed, and for an instant he sat mute.

“But maybe your father needs it,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Louella said, “Father has lots and lots. Not that I don't think you're clean—” Louella giggled and Jeffrey laughed too. He had never lived through such a day as that. He had written a war lead in the paper, and Louella was going to give him a washcloth if he stopped to see her tomorrow—a durable article which he could keep always, which he could keep until he died.

19

And All the Heart Desires

In the afternoon the evening war communiqués would come over the A.P., and Mr. Jenks would get out his maps and Mr. Eldridge and Mr. Nichols would come in from the editorial rooms out front and all of them would chat agreeably and perhaps intelligently about the war. They had all read the critiques of Mr. Frank Simonds and other military experts and they had read the London
Times
and the Paris
Matin
and the
Spectator
and the
London Evening Post
and the
Chronicle
. They were also familiar with more permanent works on the art of war, so that their conversation was sprinkled with such expressions as “camouflage” and “aerial observation” and “no man's land” and “creeping barrages” and “box barrages” and “primary and secondary objectives.” It was like being in a conference of generals when those elderly men were talking, dispassionately removed from actuality, striving to put order into a confusion that was a very long way off. They talked of the submarine blockade and of attacks without warning on our merchant shipping. The German soldiers were sheep being driven to slaughter, but at the same time they possessed barbarous vindictiveness. They cut the hands off little Belgian children and they had crucified British prisoners. It was Mr. Eldridge's opinion that they were inhuman swine. There was even a story that they had rendering plants in which they manufactured soap out of their own dead. There were lots of rumors which you could not set down in print. At such times Mr. Nichols wished fervently that we had a
man
in the White House and not a Presbyterian college professor. Even that smile of Woodrow Wilson's was anathema to Mr. Nichols. There was such a thing, Mr. Wilson had said, as being too proud to fight, which simply meant, according to Mr. Nichols, that we were afraid to fight. We were a soft nation of yellow-bellied cowards, particularly those people in the Middle West. They did not know, by God they didn't, that there was such a thing as national honor. They did not care if we were insulted and it was no wonder the Germans laughed at us in Berlin. After sinking the
Lusitania
, they knew we wouldn't fight. There had only been a cringing sort of note penned by William Jennings Bryan. We would go on playing the part of poltroons and cowards, making money out of war contracts until we had someone else besides a college professor in the White House. It was a good thing that election was coming, for there might be a few men left in the country who were not glad that Woodrow Wilson had kept us out of war. He wished that Theodore Roosevelt were in there; that man might interfere with business, but he was not afraid to fight. Mr. Nichols wished to heaven that he were ten or twenty years younger. He wished that he were Jeffrey Wilson's age and he would not be wearing out the seat of his pants in any office.

Those conversations never reached any conclusion. Nevertheless it began to be plain, and Jeffrey felt it vaguely, that those nations known as “the Allies,” on the other side of an ocean which Jeffrey had never crossed, were not going to defeat the Germans by themselves. There was a dread which lay behind nearly everyone's thoughts and words—a mass emotion—and perhaps this was all that ever caused a war—a mass contagious thought shared by all the people, which the poets, the writers and the artists of the generation would never bring to full expression.

Later Jeffrey realized that he had been witnessing the phenomenon of a people drifting into war, and that it had been a collective impulse beyond the power of any group to stop. The formation of his own convictions was as imperceptible as the rotation of a planet. You were told on impeccable authority that the world made a complete revolution in space each day, which meant that half the time you must have been walking upside down, like a fly upon the ceiling; but there was nothing you could do about it—everyone else was walking upside down.

None of it impressed him much—the autumn election, the campaign speeches, the German note on unrestricted submarine warfare—none of these had anything to do with what had happened between him and Louella Barnes; and that itself, when he thought of it later, was something like the war, for it had the same inescapable quality.

Once that winter he had actually held Louella's hand. They had been sitting alone in the little parlor and Louella had made a plate of fudge. Jeffrey had been careful not to eat more than two pieces of it, but when he had told her that it was very good fudge, she must have thought that he was going to reach up to the little table and take a third piece because she laughed, and placed her hand over his to restrain him.

“Don't be such a greedy pig,” Louella said, “and eat up all my fudge.”

On thinking it over later, he knew that Louella must have regretted that playful gesture, because, without intending to in the least, he had taken advantage of it. She had put her hand over the back of his and somehow the next moment he was holding it and then all time seemed to stop. He could not even remember whether she had tried to draw her hand away. It lay there for a moment, and he believed that it was better to pass it over without mentioning it specifically.

“It's pretty late,” he said, “I guess I'd better be going.”

“You always think it's getting late,” Louella said. “You're not mad, are you?”

“Why,” he asked her, “why should I be mad?”

“Because you said you had to be going home.”

He smiled at her, blankly, but he knew that she had forgiven him, and that they would say no more about it.

“Silly,” Louella said, “open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I'll give you something to make you wise.” It was infinitely sweet of her, but he knew that he must be more careful after that. It would not do to frighten a girl like Louella by trying to hold her hand.

Toward the end of March, when Jeffrey had stopped by on his way from the train, Louella asked him if he wouldn't come back after supper—that is if he didn't have something better to do. Her father and mother were going to a whist party at the Thompsons and she was going to be alone. It had pleased him very much, because lately he had been afraid that he was taking up too much of Louella's time. It must have meant that Mr. and Mrs. Barnes did not think that he was paying Louella too much attention.

There was a soggy blanket of snow over everything and it was raining.

“My,” Louella said, when she opened the front door, “you haven't got a muffler on—you'll get your death of cold.” And then when he was taking his overshoes off she told him to hurry and come in by the fire, and she asked him to help her pull the sofa near the fire so that she could see that he got thawed out. Louella said she was awfully glad that he had come because she knew it was silly, but it was spooky just sitting in the house all alone and hearing the rain on the windows. The rain sounded just like ghosts trying to get in, and she asked Jeffrey to sit still and not say anything. Jeffrey said it always was lonely in a house alone, and Louella said but now it was company—two made company and three made a crowd, but the ghosts knocking on the window didn't make a crowd, because she knew that Jeffrey would see that they didn't get in.