So Little Time Read Online Free Page B

old, older than Mr. Jenks had ever looked. Mr. Fernald’s coat was off, his vest unbuttoned, and sprinkled as it had always been with cigar ash, and he still wore those pink garters around his arms. It was hard to find anything to talk about until the telegraph room came into the conversation.
    â€œJesus,” Mr. Fernald said, “do you remember Walter Newcombe? That was just before you went to New York.” And Walter’s face came back, with its shiny nose and the shock of yellow hair.
    â€œI wonder,” Mr. Fernald said, “what the hell ever happened. He was always a damned fool. How the hell did he ever do it?”
    If you had ever known anyone in his early budding years, living through those chapters which a biographer might entitle “Boyhood Portents,” it was hard to imagine that he ever could amount to much. Sitting there with Mr. Fernald seemed to Jeffrey a little like sitting in a projection room and running a picture backward just for fun. In both their minds, Walter Newcombe was running backward to the time that must have pleased him least; and after all, how had he ever done it? What hidden springs had there been within him that had pushed him out ahead? It was a little like those marathon runs, where some scrawny, hollow-chested boy, the last one who you would think could do it, would cough and wheeze his way out front.
    â€œWhy, hell,” Mr. Fernald said, “I had to fire him because he couldn’t write a twelve head—not to save his life he couldn’t. He used to cry when he tried to write one. Hell’s fire, all he could do right was to pull A.P. papers out of those leather tubes, and sometimes at that he used to tear them.”
    Jeffrey had almost forgotten about the type of headline on the old paper that was known in the composing room as “number twelve.” It was one column wide and went down about six lines, a line and a word, each word growing shorter. The result was as monumental and beautiful as an old bookkeeper’s penmanship, and you had to be versatile to have it fill the space and still make sense.
    â€œI don’t know,” Mr. Fernald said, “maybe it was luck.”
    Luck might have been a contributing factor, but you couldn’t get away with everything indefinitely just because you were lucky.
    â€œMaybe it’s because he never got married,” Mr. Fernald said, and perhaps Mr. Fernald was thinking of himself as he watched the picture go backwards. “He didn’t have to dress a lot of kids and buy them an education.”
    But this was not strictly true, because actually Walter had been married twice. His first wife was a trained nurse named Nancy something, who had taken care of him the time he had his tonsils and adenoids removed at the Presbyterian Hospital, shortly after Walter had also “got through” and had also arrived in New York. It may have been the removal of those obstructions which had changed Walter, but that was long ago, and Nancy had faded out of the picture during some European tour of duty. His second wife was Mildred Hughes—Mildred Hughes the writer—who used to do articles for Good Housekeeping and the Companion and the Journal , sometimes about factory conditions and sometimes about washed-out farmers’ wives and stump farms and sometimes about society figures. Mildred had white hair and used a jade cigarette holder, but there was no use telling Mr. Fernald about Mildred, or that Walter had a daughter named Edwina, who had gold bands on her teeth and went to one of the big boarding schools, tuition free, because she was her father’s daughter. There was no use telling Mr. Fernald that Walter had encumbrances.
    Mr. Fernald snorted through his nose and chewed the end of his cigar.
    â€œWhy, he wasn’t even a second-rate newspaper man,” Mr. Fernald said. “He never had the makings. Yes, how the hell did he do it?— World