11

This—Is London

Fred was downstairs waiting for them, wearing a velvet dinner jacket the color of old Burgundy and a tie and cummerbund to match.

“Come on, everybody,” he called, “cocktails in the Rumpus Room.”

The Rumpus Room in the basement had been the summer kitchen. Its floors were paved with bricks and its walls were finished in old pine paneling which Beckie had picked up here and there, and Fred had found a bar in an antique store in New York—a real old tap bar such as had existed in taverns at the time of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. There was a ping-pong table in the Rumpus Room and all sorts of indoor games such as slot machines.

“Here,” Beckie called, “here are nickels for anyone who wants to play the slot machines.”

Fred was behind the bar taking ice cubes from a small electric refrigerator and arranging bottles and glasses and maraschino cherries and slices of orange and bitters.

“Anybody who doesn’t want an old-fashioned yell,” Fred said, but no one yelled.

“Dotty,” Beckie said to Mrs. Sales, “help Fred, will you dear? Before he drops something.”

Mr. Sales and Marianna were playing the slot machine. Marianna had a red-and-white-striped camellia in her gold hair. Her dress was white piqué, very simple, and Jeffrey wanted to tell her that he liked it, when she looked up at him and smiled, but there was no time. He watched the way she moved her hands. She was the best-looking woman in the room, but she was not trying to be—she had learned that she did not have to try. Buchanan Greene was lighting a cigarette for Mrs. Newcombe and Walter was talking to Madge.

“This must be an ideal place,” he heard Walter saying, “for a rainy day.”

“Jeffrey,” Beckie said to him softly, “you’re going to sit next to Mrs. Newcombe at dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?” Jeffrey said. “Why, no.” He would not mind anything as soon as he had a drink.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” Beckie said, “and after dinner I want you to help me draw out Mr. Newcombe, and I think perhaps—Fred’s going to try—perhaps Buchanan Greene will read us something.”

Everyone was speaking in careful, measured tones as you always did before the cocktails, but it was different later. A glow of good fellowship began to fill the Rumpus Room.

“I was afraid Mr. Newcombe wouldn’t mix,” Beckie said, “but it’s better now.”

It was better now; all the voices were mixing loudly and Adam was bringing in sausages impaled on little toothpicks stuck in an apple, and contorted anchovies curled on crackers, and red caviar, and hot olives wrapped in bacon. Walter had picked up an olive.

“Le Touquet,” he said to Madge, “have you really been to Le Touquet, Mrs. Wilson? Mrs. Newcombe and I went there for our honeymoon.” Then his expression changed. He had placed the olive and the bacon in his mouth.

“Oh, dear,” Madge said, “it’s awfully hot.”

Walter removed the olive.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Wilson,” he said, “I have never seen one of those before.”

“Why,” Madge said, and she laughed, “I thought you’d seen everything.” But nobody listened; everyone was talking.

“I’ll have to speak to Fred,” Beckie was saying. “If he takes another cocktail, he’ll go to sleep after dinner.”

The dining room upstairs had been enlarged from the old farm winter kitchen and Beckie had kept the general atmosphere carefully within the limits of what she called “old, farmy and kitcheny.” In taking your place at the seventeenth-century trestle table, which Fred had found on Madison Avenue, you had to be careful not to stumble over spits and pots and candle molds and pestles and mortars and other ancient implements which had been collected on the old kitchen hearth. An old pine dresser, very old and very battered, was filled with pewter. Candles burned in pewter candlesticks and the central table decoration was a great mound of small multicolored gourds, all varnished and heaped on an enormous pewter platter. Around the platter and among the candles were ears of red and yellow corn, and a few small pumpkins to show that it was autumn. The chairs were simple wooden kitchen chairs which Fred and Beckie had been collecting over a period of years, constantly discarding one when they found a better one, until all of them now had a fine patina. Fred had once said that he hated to think how many pants seats had been worn out, and how many spines had been curved, giving those chairs their present luster.

The dining room might be plain and farmy, which was the way Beckie wanted it, but it was different with the food, because both she and Fred were members of the Wine and Food Society, and if you gave cooking and food a little thought, it paid enormous dividends. For just one thing there was the matter of salad. It made all the difference in the world if someone who was sensitive mixed the dressing, and somehow, even the greatest “treasure” you could ever get in the kitchen—Adam’s wife, Cynthia, really was a “treasure,” a rolypoly old darling who should be wearing a red bandanna and gold earrings—somehow the greatest “treasure” could not get the ingredients right. But Fred was marvelous with French dressing. He liked to tell that story about the Chinese servant who was able to give just a suspicion of garlic to his salads without putting garlic in them. And how had Wong done it? He had done it by eating the garlic himself and then blowing on the lettuce. Personally, Fred always rubbed the inside of the bowl with just a little garlic, but it was something you had to do yourself, because no servant knew when to stop, and you had to stop with garlic, and even so, husbands and wives had to promise both to eat the salad or not to touch it. Fred always mixed the salad at the end of the room on a hunting board, no matter how many there were for dinner. He needed exactly the right number of pepper mills, each containing a slightly different condiment, and a salt grinder, because common salt spoiled it. The lettuce leaves must be cold and crisp and dry, and none of that iceberg lettuce, either. The dressing was only half the battle. The main art of making salad consisted in fatiguéing it properly, as the French so picturesquely put it. It was not a matter of taking your wooden fork and spoon and torturing the mixed greens into a pulp. It was rather a problem of being sure that every leaf had its just proportion of the dressing on both sides.

Fred was there at the hunting board working at the salad already and when they sat down, Beckie tapped on a glass because she wanted everyone to know that the recipe for the cream of leek soup that they were going to have had come from a very old English cookbook, and she hoped that everyone would excuse her about the wild ducks. They were mallards which a client of Fred’s had sent them from the Eastern Shore, but mallards or not, Beckie felt that ducks were ducks, not to be served raw, but cooked like any other ducks with bread stuffing and onions and applesauce.

They were all seated by the time Beckie had finished telling them about the ducks, and the soup was coming on. Jeffrey was seated between Mrs. Newcombe and Mrs. Sales.

“What’s the matter, dear old playmate?” Mrs. Newcombe said to him. “Does the soup taste bad, old chap?”

“It isn’t the soup,” Jeffrey said. “You ought not to kill a duck and do anything like that to it.” But Mrs. Newcombe was not interested.

“Not rahally,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “not rahally, dear old chap.”

“Where do you get the ‘dear old chap’ stuff?” Jeffrey said.

“From that rahally delightful poet,” Mrs. Newcombe said; “he’s a dear old chap, and whether he’s a friend of yours or not, he gives me a pain in the—”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “now, sweet.”

Mrs. Newcombe looked at him and smiled.

“Why hasn’t Walter ever told me about you?” she asked. “How did you ever get in here, precious?”

“By accident, like you, I guess,” Jeffrey said.

“What’s the nice man doing over in the corner?” Mrs. Newcombe asked. “Why doesn’t he eat his soup?”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “he’s making you a nice salad.”

He glanced across the table and saw that Madge was watching him.

“Not rahally,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Shiver my timbers, precious, not a salad, rahally.”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “now, sweet.”

“Jeff,” Madge called across the table, “what are you two laughing about?”

Jeffrey pretended not to hear her, but he knew she would ask him about it later. He was relieved when Mrs. Sales turned to him. You knew that you would behave exactly as a guest should when you looked at Mrs. Sales. She looked the way a well-bred woman, a wife and mother, ought to look—clear brown eyes, dark hair with a silver threading of gray in it, not too much lipstick, not too much of anything—and not more than one old-fashioned.

“I just adore your son Jim,” Mrs. Sales said.

It startled Jeffrey. He had never thought of Jim’s confession seriously before, but there was something uncomfortably possessive in this stranger’s manner. She seemed to imply that they both had a common interest, that they were both dear old people, the course of whose lives was completely finished and who now could live again in the lives of others. It made him very uncomfortable, and it fitted perfectly with the onion-stuffed wild ducks. He was sure that Mrs. Sales was going to refer to Jim and her daughter as “the young people.”

“I hope Jim hasn’t been making a nuisance of himself,” Jeffrey said.

“Oh dear, no,” Mrs. Sales answered, very quickly, “Dick and I both adore your Jim. Dick and I love young people. The house these days,” and she looked at him with arch meaning, “is full of young people.”

Jeffrey smiled mechanically.

“I’ve never met your daughter, Sally,” Jeffrey said. “But I’ve heard Jim speak of her. I don’t seem to meet many of his friends.”

“I hope,” Mrs. Sales said, “you haven’t got the idea that Sally doesn’t like to talk to older people. We must arrange to meet sometime—the old folks and the young people all together. I feel I know you very well already, Jim has talked so much about you.”

The smile still lingered mechanically on Jeffrey’s lips. He had never thought of Jim’s mentioning him to anyone, and he wondered what Jim had said.

“You and he must have such a pleasant relationship,” she told him. “He admires you so. That’s why I feel I know you.”

The balance of everything was shifting. Jeffrey had never thought that he would be grateful to his son for having said a kind word about him.

“Jim’s a good boy,” he said.

He began to feel like a sweet old codger, but there was no way to prevent it.

“You must be very proud of him,” she said, “he’s such a thoughtful boy. He’s so helpful around the house.”

Jeffrey could not believe that she was talking about his Jim. From childhood Jim had always faded out when there was anything to do around the house.

“How do you mean he’s helpful?” he asked.

“In all sorts of ways,” she answered. “When Dick was working on the rock garden on the lawn, Jim pitched right in and helped him, and he always helps Sally and me with the dishes on the maid’s night out.”

It meant of course that Jim loved her; it was exactly what you would do if you loved a girl. You would be useful with the dishes. The mention of the maid’s night out indicated quite accurately their social position and their financial bracket. Jeffrey was very much ashamed that he had noticed it, but then, perhaps, that was the way it was when you suddenly became an old codger and thought of your children. Madge’s father must have thought of him with much the same doubts and reservations.

“You must be very proud of him,” Mrs. Sales said again. “Dick says he would have known he was your boy right away. Dick says he looks the way you did in France. Dick’s told me so much about you.”

It was embarrassing, that he still could not remember anyone in France named Dick Sales, in spite of that episode in Paris which had been mentioned on the lawn. It must have been one of those times on leave when faces and scenes shifted too fast. The idea lingered in his mind that someone who remembered him in uniform had thought that his son looked like him.

Beckie had risen and everyone was standing up.

“We’re not going to leave the boys alone,” she called. “We’re all going together to the living room, and you can have your Armagnac in there and your cigars, too, if anybody wants them.”

Jeffrey knew that Beckie hoped that no one would want them because Beckie always said that one cigar made the whole house stale the next morning, and, as Jeffrey looked around the table, he knew that he would be the only man who would take one, with the possible exception of Dick Sales, and Madge would shake her head at him when Fred offered him the box.

“Jeff,” Beckie called, “oh, Jeff, do you mind if I whisper to you just a minute?”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Jeff,” she whispered, “why didn’t you or Madge tell me? It had to be Mr. Newcombe who told me that you and he came from the same little town.”

“I never thought of it, I guess,” Jeffrey said. “I haven’t thought of Walter for quite a long while.”

“I can’t get over it,” Beckie said, “it’s like something in a novel, you and Walter Newcombe. You’ll get him started, won’t you, Jeff, and I’ll get everyone to listen.”

There was no doubt that it was going to be what Beckie called a worthwhile evening.

In the living room they were all drawing chairs around the fireplace, and Fred was saying that just a little fire wouldn’t do any harm, would it? He was explaining about the fireplace to Walter, saying he supposed everyone else had heard about it, and he did not want to bore anybody. First there had only been a hole for a stovepipe, and then a little fireplace behind it and believe it or not, when they were taking out the little fireplace …

“I guess they walled them up because they took too much wood,” Walter said.

“Oh, Fred,” Beckie called, “what do you think? Mr. Newcombe and Jeffrey both came from Bragg in Massachusetts, and Jeffrey’s never told us.”

Jeffrey could not understand why he felt awkward, or why coming from a place like Bragg should have made him or Walter any the more interesting. For some reason he thought that Madge looked embarrassed too.

“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.