Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (177 page)

“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.

“What do they expect for a hundred a week — perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.

“What’s the trouble? Marcia?”

“Guy I don’t like down in front.”

During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him — had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking — as she had so often in the last month — of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish fore, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.

And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry — as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.

“Infant prodigy!” she said aloud.

“What?” demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.

“Nothing — just talking about myself.”

On the stage she felt better. This was her dance — and she always felt that the way she did it wasn’t suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.

“Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon,
After sundown shiver by the moon.”

He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her — he was criticising her.

“That’s the vibration that thrills me,
Funny how affection fi-lls me
Uptown, downtown —  — “

Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl’s mouth? These shoulders of hers — these shoulders shaking — were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren’t made for this!

“Then — you’ll see at a glance
I’ll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance
At the end of the world I’ll —  — “

The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called “such a curious, puzzled look,” and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.

Her apartment was very warm — small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling and O. Henry which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of other stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it — nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offspring of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad — altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.

Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.

“I followed you this time,” he said.

“Oh!”

“I want you to marry me,” he said.

Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness.

“There!”

“I love you,” he said.

She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.

“Why, you infant prodigy!” she cried.

“Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you — I am.”

She laughed again.

“I don’t like to be disapproved of.”

“No one’s ever going to disapprove of you again.”

“Omar,” she asked, “why do you want to marry me?”

The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.

“Because I love you, Marcia Meadow.”

And then she stopped calling him Omar.

“Dear boy,” she said, “you know I sort of love you. There’s something about you — I can’t tell what — that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I’m round you. But honey — “ She paused.

“But what?”

“But lots of things. But you’re only just eighteen, and I’m nearly twenty.”

“Nonsense!” he interrupted. “Put it this way — that I’m in my nineteenth year and you’re nineteen. That makes us pretty close — without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned.”

Marcia laughed.

“But there are some more ‘buts.’ Your people —  —

“My people!” exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. “My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me.” His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. “My people can go way back and sit down!”

“My heavens!” cried Marcia in alarm. “All that? On tacks, I suppose.”

“Tacks — yes,” he agreed wildly — “on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy —  — “

“What makes you thank you’re that?” asked Marcia quietly — “me?”

“Yes. Every person I’ve met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the ‘sex impulse.’ Heavens!”

“There’s more ‘buts,’“ said Marcia

“What are they?”

“How could we live?”

“I’ll make a living.”

“You’re in college.”

“Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts degree?”

“You want to be Master of Me, hey?”

“Yes! What? I mean, no!”

Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over sat in his lap. He put his arm round her wildly and implanted the vestige of a kiss somewhere near her neck.

“There’s something white about you,” mused Marcia “but it doesn’t sound very logical.”

“Oh, don’t be so darned reasonable!”

“I can’t help it,” said Marcia.

“I hate these slot-machine people!”

“But we —  — “

“Oh, shut up!”

And as Marcia couldn’t talk through her ears she had to.

IV

Horace and Marcia were married early in February. The sensation in academic circles both at Yale and Princeton was tremendous. Horace Tarbox, who at fourteen had been played up in the Sunday magazines sections of metropolitan newspapers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority on American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl — they made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories it was a four-and-a-half-day wonder.

They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks’ search, during which his idea of the value of academic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as clerk with a South American export company — some one had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months — anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earning double that, Marcia refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.

“We’ll call ourselves Head and Shoulders, dear,” she said softly, “and the shoulders’ll have to keep shaking a little longer until the old head gets started.”

“I hate it,” he objected gloomily.

“Well,” she replied emphatically, “Your salary wouldn’t keep us in a tenement. Don’t think I want to be public — I don’t. I want to be yours. But I’d be a half-wit to sit in one room and count the sunflowers on the wall-paper while I waited for you. When you pull down three hundred a month I’ll quit.”

And much as it hurt his pride, Horace had to admit that hers was the wiser course.

March mellowed into April. May read a gorgeous riot act to the parks and waters of Manhatten, and they were very happy. Horace, who had no habits whatsoever — he had never had time to form any — proved the most adaptable of husbands, and as Marcia entirely lacked opinions on the subjects that engrossed him there were very few jottings and bumping. Their minds moved in different spheres. Marcia acted as practical factotum, and Horace lived either in his old world of abstract ideas or in a sort of triumphantly earthy worship and adoration of his wife. She was a continual source of astonishment to him — the freshness and originality of her mind, her dynamic, clear-headed energy, and her unfailing good humor.

And Marcia’s co-workers in the nine-o’clock show, whither she had transferred her talents, were impressed with her tremendous pride in her husband’s mental powers. Horace they knew only as a very slim, tight-lipped, and immature-looking young man, who waited every night to take her home.

“Horace,” said Marcia one evening when she met him as usual at eleven, “you looked like a ghost standing there against the street lights. You losing weight?”

He shook his head vaguely.

“I don’t know. They raised me to a hundred and thirty-five dollars to-day, and —  — “

“I don’t care,” said Marcia severely. “You’re killing yourself working at night. You read those big books on economy —  — “

“Economics,” corrected Horace.

“Well, you read ‘em every night long after I’m asleep. And you’re getting all stooped over like you were before we were married.”

“But, Marcia, I’ve got to —  — “

“No, you haven’t dear. I guess I’m running this shop for the present, and I won’t let my fella ruin his health and eyes. You got to get some exercise.”

“I do. Every morning I —  — “

“Oh, I know! But those dumb-bells of yours wouldn’t give a consumptive two degrees of fever. I mean real exercise. You’ve got to join a gymnasium. ‘Member you told me you were such a trick gymnast once that they tried to get you out for the team in college and they couldn’t because you had a standing date with Herb Spencer?”

“I used to enjoy it,” mused Horace, “but it would take up too much time now.”

“All right,” said Marcia. “I’ll make a bargain with you. You join a gym and I’ll read one of those books from the brown row of ‘em.”

“‘Pepys’ Diary’? Why, that ought to be enjoyable. He’s very light.”

“Not for me — he isn’t. It’ll be like digesting plate glass. But you been telling me how much it’d broaden my lookout. Well, you go to a gym three nights a week and I’ll take one big dose of Sammy.”

Horace hesitated.

“Well —  — “

“Come on, now! You do some giant swings for me and I’ll chase some culture for you.”

So Horace finally consented, and all through a baking summer he spent three and sometimes four evenings a week experimenting on the trapeze in Skipper’s Gymnasium. And in August he admitted to Marcia that it made him capable of more mental work during the day.

“
Mens sana in corpore sano
,” he said.

“Don’t believe in it,” replied Marcia. “I tried one of those patent medicines once and they’re all bunk. You stick to gymnastics.”

One night in early September while he was going through one of his contortions on the rings in the nearly deserted room he was addressed by a meditative fat man whom he had noticed watching him for several nights.

“Say, lad, do that stunt you were doin’ last night.”

Horace grinned at him from his perch.

“I invented it,” he said. “I got the idea from the fourth proposition of Euclid.”

“What circus he with?”

“He’s dead.”

“Well, he must of broke his neck doin’ that stunt. I set here last night thinkin’ sure you was goin’ to break yours.”

“Like this!” said Horace, and swinging onto the trapeze he did his stunt.

“Don’t it kill your neck an’ shoulder muscles?”

“It did at first, but inside of a week I wrote the
Quod erat demonstrandum
on it.”

“Hm!”

Horace swung idly on the trapeze.

“Ever think of takin’ it up professionally?” asked the fat man.

“Not I.”

“Good money in it if you’re willin’ to do stunts like ‘at an’ can get away with it.”

“Here’s another,” chirped Horace eagerly, and the fat man’s mouth dropped suddenly agape as he watched this pink-jerseyed Prometheus again defy the gods and Isaac Newton.

The night following this encounter Horace got home from work to find a rather pale Marcia stretched out on the sofa waiting for him.

“I fainted twice to-day,” she began without preliminaries.

“What?”

“Yep. You see baby’s due in four months now. Doctor says I ought to have quit dancing two weeks ago.”

Horace sat down and thought it over.

“I’m glad of course,” he said pensively — “I mean glad that we’re going to have a baby. But this means a lot of expense.”

“I’ve got two hundred and fifty in the bank,” said Marcia hopefully, “and two weeks’ pay coming.”

Horace computed quickly.

“Inducing my salary, that’ll give us nearly fourteen hundred for the next six months.”

Marcia looked blue.

“That all? Course I can get a job singing somewhere this month. And I can go to work again in March.”

“Of course nothing!” said Horace gruffly. “You’ll stay right here. Let’s see now — there’ll be doctor’s bills and a nurse, besides the maid: We’ve got to have some more money.”

“Well,” said Marcia wearily, “I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s up to the old head now. Shoulders is out of business.”

Horace rose and pulled on his coat.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got an idea,” he answered. “I’ll be right back.”

Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper’s Gymnasium he felt a placid wonder, quite unmixed with humor, at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at himself a year before! How every one would have gaped! But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.

The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.

“Say,” began Horace directly, “were you in earnest last night when you said I could make money on my trapeze stunts?”