So Little Time (27 page)

Jeffrey had clipped the coupon, largely out of shame because a year before that he had not bought a book about how to have big muscles. Yet, when the book arrived—and he still kept it hidden in his upper bureau drawer under his knitted muffler in case Tilly or his aunt should ask him about it—it had not been exactly what he had hoped, perhaps because he had not been up to it. Printed on absorbent and pulpy paper was a series of exercises for your will. When you had one perfectly, you could continue to the next. You first said to yourself—not aloud because you never had to say anything aloud—“I will to will. Attention.” Then you stood for a moment focusing your eyes on every object in your room, blotting out all extraneous thought. Then you turned your back and, upon a clean sheet of paper, you wrote down all the objects, and then you checked the list. And then you said again to yourself: “I will to will. Attention.” There were not many objects in Jeffrey's room on Lime Street except the bed and the hooked rug and the washstand and the bureau. He was able to accomplish the first lesson, but when he was finished with it he seemed to feel no stirrings of a new and unknown power. It was true that the book told him that he might be disappointed at first and exhorted him to continue with the next lesson, but somehow he never got to it, what with the pressure of his college work. He knew he was what the book called a “quitter,” but he never did do the second lesson.

He had often suspected that he had been becozened into buying that book, but now as he walked down Center Street, he had a revelation of what the author meant. The clouds and mists of illusion were rolling back. His step was firmer, his eye was clearer; he was in tune with everything, just as the book had told him that he should be; but it was not the book that had done it. It was Louella Barnes who had raised him beyond himself, out of the ruck of ordinary men.

When Jeffrey walked home that afternoon, the stores and the church and the brick block where his father had his office assumed a new aspect. Their lights and shadows made them like a part of a modern interpretive canvas. The door in the brick block, wedged between the drygoods store and the jewelry shop and giving access to the business rooms above, was open as he walked past, and he could see the stairs that led up to the second floor where his father's office was; and he could see the iron signs tacked on the risers so that a client could learn all that Jeffrey's father had to offer as he walked up the stairs. “Wilson, Real Estate—Insurance. Wilson, Insurance, Fire and Life. Wilson, Farms and Dwellings.” The sight of the stairs made him walk faster, and he discovered that he was saying to himself: “I will to will. Attention.”

The house on Lime Street looked shabby in that new light, more gray than white because of its chipping paint. The broken palings of the front fence and the yard and the large elm all looked as though they belonged to someone else. Long afterwards he had the same sensation when he found himself unexpectedly in an apartment which he had once rented in New York. He possessed only the memory of himself as he had been when he was living there. The part of him that was actual, the part of him to which philosophers gave Greek names and definitions and which went on living and thinking, was gone. He had the same sense of inevitable motion utterly beyond one's controlling power that he experienced when a ship was leaving dock, when the gangplank was pulled back and the hawsers were coiling in, when the first perceptible motion came, when it was too late to go ashore.

His father and Aunt Martha sat already at the supper table. His father was cutting a piece of cold lamb and helping himself to potato salad and his Aunt Martha was stirring her tea.

“Hello, Jeff,” his father said. “Where have you been?”

“I just stopped at the Barneses',” he told them. “I didn't realize it was so late.”

“My, my,” his father said, “that's a new place for you to stop.”

“Now, Howland,” Aunt Martha said. “I've always liked Louella. She's such a—” Aunt Martha paused, and Jeffrey found himself waiting with unexpected interest for her to finish. “She's such a homey girl.”

The clumsiness of that description was appalling and he wanted her to leave it there.

“Mrs. Barnes keeps everything so nice,” Aunt Martha said. “I was there at the Flower Committee tea.”

Jeffrey could hear the conversation, but he heard it from a distance because he did not belong there any more.

“I got a letter from Alf today,” his father said.

Aunt Martha stopped stirring her tea and she held the teaspoon over the cup.

“Well, you might have said so in the first place. What did Alf say?”

“Alf wanted twenty dollars.”

“What's he working at?” his Aunt Martha asked.

“He didn't say,” his father answered. “Martha, that Harris girl—the one the boys call ‘Pinky'—she's left town. They tell me Alf used to go around with Pinky Harris quite a lot.”

“Well, I don't see,” Aunt Martha said, “when there are so many nice girls around, why a boy like Alf, that all the girls were always asking over, should see anything in a girl like Pinky Harris.”

His father glanced around the table.

“It's kind of lonesome,” he said, “without Alf and Ethel. It makes the house so quiet.”

“Now, Howland,” Aunt Martha said, “we've still got Jeff. Jeff isn't going anywhere. Jeff's what I call a ‘home boy.'”

When his father smiled at him, it gave Jeffrey an unexpected spasm of pain. He knew his father liked him, although he never said much, and now he knew that his father liked him better than the lot. His father was proud of him; he could see it in the Old Man's face.

“Yes,” his father said, “everyone keeps leaving town, but Jeff and I will keep things going. We'll show 'em, won't we, Jeff?”

18

Never Twice in a Lifetime

When Jeffrey took the train out to Woburn to call on Mr. Fernald who had been the telegraph editor a whole river of time seemed to sweep between them. It had been years and years since Jeffrey had left the paper and he was twenty pounds heavier and his suit, which had been made by a good tailor, had cost a hundred and fifty dollars. His attitude and methods of thought were so much altered that it was exceedingly difficult to project himself backwards. Mr. Fernald must have still thought of him as a boy, as his old boss began to tell him what he had looked like during his first weeks on the paper. They talked about it for quite a while because it made a bridge between them, and Jeffrey realized that Mr. Fernald's descriptions offered him the only objective picture he would ever have of himself at that stage of his career. Mr. Fernald said that he had hired him only because Elmer Gaines, who handled the domestic news, had been called out with the National Guard and had gone to the Texas border. Everyone had to move up and Mr. Grimes, the managing editor, had offered Mr. Fernald someone from the City Room, but Mr. Fernald had told Mr. Grimes that he would rather break in a mule than any reporter they would send him from there. Mr. Fernald said that he had been too damned busy with the war news to go out looking for anyone, and that was the reason he took Jeffrey when Jeffrey applied for a job. Actually, the last thing he wanted was a college boy and he had especially not wanted one who thought he was good at English. Mr. Fernald himself had not had the benefits of a college education and in his opinion, it didn't help newspaper men. College boys were fresh and knew too much, and the only people who were worse, in Mr. Fernald's opinion, were the graduates of these newfangled schools of journalism. He wanted to break his man in himself and not have some professor do it. He had hired Jeffrey because Jeffrey had looked scared and this made Mr. Fernald feel that it would be possible to break him in, and by God, Mr. Fernald had broken him in, and that was why Mr. Fernald had hired Walter Newcombe later—because Walter also looked scared.

“You were clumsy,” Mr. Fernald said, “but you were all right.”

Mr. Fernald looked at Jeffrey and rubbed his hand across his eyes. “It doesn't seem so long ago, either. God almighty, the whole show has speeded up. Here we're doing it again. Here we're at the start of another war.”

They sat for a moment, looking backward. Mr. Fernald was smoking the same five-cent cigar he had always smoked. He narrowed his eyes and squinted through the smoke.

“Do you think we'll get into it this time?” Jeffrey asked him.

Mr. Fernald removed his cigar and looked at it.

“Don't be a God-damned fool,” he said; “of course we will.” He frowned at Jeffrey. He had lapsed back into the old pattern of the telegraph room and perhaps he felt that it was bad manners now to call Jeffrey a “Goddamned fool.”

“The boys will go just the way you did,” he said. “Do you remember when you came in to say good-by? You weren't the same when you came back.”

Mr. Fernald went on talking. He said it was a nice shop and a nice crowd. It might have been slow. There might have been a lot of dead wood, but everybody was friendly and no one tried to knife you in the back. They didn't make newspaper men or newspapers like that any more.

Jeffrey could hear the old sounds. He could almost see the old faces and Mr. Fernald made it all incredibly ancient because of the quaver of age that had crept into his nasal voice.

Mr. Fernald was right—they didn't make newspapers like that any more, and maybe it was just as well. Jeffrey's acquaintance with modern New York dailies housed in modern buildings made it difficult to realize that he had ever worked on such a paper. His own memory gave it a quality that was more like a steel engraving than a photograph, and perhaps the days before the last war were all like that. Despite all that he remembered to the contrary, those days had an orderly quiet quality. The office buildings on Milk and Congress and State Streets gave forth an impregnable feeling of confidence in the indestructibility of a definite order. The food in all the restaurants was better then. He was certain that the turkeys were fatter in the market district, that the fruits were rarer, that the flowers and vegetables were larger. Everything was in the hands of an older generation who must have felt that everything had been done and that there was nothing else to do. Mr. Fernald was chanting of an epoch which would never come back again, and once you were possessed with that certainty, you saw in it the essence of the Yale song which stated that bright college years were rife with pleasure and that they were the shortest, gladdest years in life. The old days on the paper seemed just like that.

Jeffrey could hear the sound of the linotype machines. He could feel the gentle tremor of the building when the presses began to move. There was that sweetish smell of ink on the freshly pulled proofs that you impaled on sharp hooks upon the wall. He could remember the stacks and stacks of clippings in the morgue, which Mr. Sawyer examined daily as he worked on the page for recent deaths. He could remember the smell of the stairs as you climbed to the telegraph room, and the crowd around the blackboards on the street reading the news about the shifts on the Western Front, but he could conjure up no recollection of what he must have been like himself.

“I must have been young for my age,” he said.

“You were all right,” Mr. Fernald said, “as soon as you got to taking a drink. I never had a better man do the war summary. You could make the pieces fit.”

A perfectly good word has been worked to death in the last few years—the adjective “nostalgic.” It has been applied to ladies' dresses, perfume, porch furniture, and even to saddle horses. Yet it is the only adjective which seems adequate to describe a certain wistful sort of feeling that a newspaper man has about the old shop and the old crowd, and even about a great many unpleasant individuals whom he may have encountered at City Hall and at Police Headquarters. The City Editor in those days might very well have been one of the worst stinkers on Newspaper Row, but as the years went on, one thought of him as a nostalgic stinker. His very persecutions, and his highhanded acts of injustice, grew monumental, given time, so that finally when one or two of the old crowd met together, they could all agree a little sadly that there never was such an old so-and-so as old So-and-so back there on the City Desk. They don't make so-and-so's like that any more.

Take almost any group of middle-aged gentlemen in the men's washroom of a Pullman car. When the talk wanders aimlessly on the affairs of the nation in the dark hours between Chicago and Kansas City, sooner or later someone unbuttons another button in his vest and glances at the black landscape out of the window and says:—

“I was a newspaper man once myself.”

At such a time, a spirit of brotherhood pervades that smoky retreat, unless he says:—

“I was once in the newspaper game.”

There is something wrong about almost anyone who has been in “the newspaper game.” In some way he has surely been tried and found wanting. His experience has not enriched him as it has those who have been newspaper men once themselves.

It had been Mr. Fernald's custom in those days to run a lead of several hundred words under the war headlines, giving a picture of the general situation before the reader became involved with the actual dispatches. One day old Mr. Jenks, who customarily wrote this lead and sent it up to the composing room by five minutes of three so that it would catch the last edition, had gone out to lunch and had not come back. Jeffrey was too new then to realize that this sometimes happened to Mr. Jenks after payday. On these occasions, Jeffrey learned later, Mr. Jenks often became mellow and expansive, and when his mood was exactly right he would develop the desire to call upon the Governor at the State House. It was a harmless enough desire and one which could easily enough be prevented if anyone were watching, but this time it seemed that no one in the group that had gone out to lunch had watched Mr. Jenks, not even Mr. Fernald. In fact when Mr. Fernald returned from lunch to give the last directions for the page in the next to last edition, he was smoking a ten-cent instead of a five-cent cigar, and in finding his way to his swivel chair he stepped directly into a cuspidor.