So Little Time Read Online Free

door for him. “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” the doorman said.
    â€œGood morning,” Jeffrey answered.
    â€œIt’s a fine morning, Mr. Wilson,” the doorman said.
    â€œYes,” Jeffrey said, “it’s a nice October morning.”
    â€œOctober, I always say,” the doorman told him, “is the best month of the year.”
    Jeffrey was out in the street in the best month of the year, but he was not thinking about it.
    â€œI wonder sometimes …” he heard Madge saying, but then, perhaps everyone occasionally wondered. He could hear her voice again. The background of sound made by the elevated and by the trucks and taxicabs had the same quality of rushing water which sometimes seems to reproduce a voice.
    â€œ Don’t worry about the war .”
    You had to admire that ability of hers to turn her back upon anything unpleasant.
    â€œLet’s not talk about it now,” she used to say.
    You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music. And she was right, there was nothing you could do about it.

2
    Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    If you had known someone well long ago, it was hard to break the habit of thinking of him as he looked and behaved in what we sometimes call “those days.” Back in those days Walter Newcombe had looked like a young clerk in a general store from the interior of Massachusetts. This was not peculiar because Walter did come from there and his uncle did keep a general store, although Walter’s father was a motorman. After graduating from High School Walter attended Dartmouth. It was too far away now for Jeffrey to recall exactly how Walter got a newspaper job. After all, how is anyone ever taken on a paper? At any rate, Walter used to sit at the telegraph desk and when the Associated Press dispatches popped out of the tube, falling like light explosive bombs into a wire basket, Walter would pull them out of their leather projectiles, unfold and smooth the sheets, and hand them over to Mr. Fernald.
    He was a thin blond boy with irregular teeth and incorrect posture. His nose always had a red, shiny look, and he wore steel-rimmed glasses. He also wore those elastic bands around his shirt sleeves—pink, crinkly elastic bands, to keep his cuffs from getting soiled. No one seemed to wear those things any more and even then they were a badge of crude unworldliness. Someone told Jeffrey later—because he had left the paper in Boston very shortly after Walter had been taken on—that Walter bought a pair because Mr. Fernald wore them. Old Mr. Jenks wore them too—Mr. Jenks who clipped the bits out of the foreign exchanges for Miscellany, and did the column called “What’s New in Europe’s Capitals” for the Saturday paper. His arm bands, however, were not conspicuous because Mr. Jenks always wore an old frock coat, except in midsummer, when he used to hang it up on the hook beside the water cooler. Mr. Jenks must have been close to seventy then, and he was a newspaper man of the old school. Years earlier, before he came to that safe port in the old telegraph room, Mr. Jenks had been the Paris correspondent for the old New York Herald —years earlier, and he brought with him a faint continental atmosphere and a bland sophistication that Jeffrey never forgot.
    When the page for the last edition closed at ten minutes to four each afternoon, Edgar, the office boy, would bring out the dominoes, and Mr. Jenks and Mr. Fernald would play for a while to see who would pay for the five-cent cigars. Walter was the one who went to buy them at the United Cigar Store on the corner of Washington Street, just as Jeffrey had when he had started there. On the occasions when Mr. Jenks won, he would lapse into gay reminiscence concerning those bright lands