Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (240 page)

But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back against a chair.

“Oh, my God!” he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the floor.

Then a human oppression rose from the priest’s worn clothes, and mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp cry and ran in a panic from the house--while the collapsed man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of laughter.

Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.

RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

The
Majestic
came gliding into New York harbor on an April morning. She sniffed at the tugboats and turtle-gaited ferries, winked at a gaudy young yacht, and ordered a cattle-boat out of her way with a snarling whistle of steam. Then she parked at her private dock with all the fuss of a stout lady sitting down, and announced complacently that she had just come from Cherbourg and Southampton with a cargo of the very best people in the world.

The very best people in the world stood on the deck and waved idiotically to their poor relations who were waiting on the dock for gloves from Paris. Before long a great toboggan had connected the
Majestic
with the North American continent, and the ship began to disgorge these very best people in the world--who turned out to be Gloria Swanson, two buyers from Lord & Taylor, the financial minister from Graustark with a proposal for funding the debt, and an African king who had been trying to land somewhere all winter and was feeling violently seasick.

The photographers worked passionately as the stream of passengers flowed on to the dock. There was a burst of cheering at the appearance of a pair of stretchers laden with two Middle-Westerners who had drunk themselves delirious on the last night out.

The deck gradually emptied, but when the last bottle of Benedictine had reached shore the photographers still remained at their posts. And the officer in charge of debarkation still stood at the foot of the gangway, glancing first at his watch and then at the deck as if some important part of the cargo was still on board. At last from the watchers on the pier there arose a long-drawn “Ah-h-h!” as a final entourage began to stream down from deck B.

First came two French maids, carrying small, purple dogs, and followed by a squad of porters, blind and invisible under innumerable bunches and bouquets of fresh flowers. Another maid followed, leading a sad-eyed orphan child of a French flavor, and close upon its heels walked the second officer pulling along three neurasthenic wolfhounds, much to their reluctance and his own.

A pause. Then the captain, Sir Howard George Witchcraft, appeared at the rail, with something that might have been a pile of gorgeous silver-fox fur standing by his side.

Rags Martin-Jones, after five years in the capitals of Europe, was returning to her native land!

Rags Martin-Jones was not a dog. She was half a girl and half a flower, and as she shook hands with Captain Sir Howard George Witchcraft she smiled as if some one had told her the newest, freshest joke in the world. All the people who had not already left the pier felt that smile trembling on the April air and turned around to see.

She came slowly down the gangway. Her hat, an expensive, inscrutable experiment, was crushed under her arm, so that her scant boy’s hair, convict’s hair, tried unsuccessfully to toss and flop a little in the harbor wind. Her face was like seven o’clock on a wedding morning save where she had slipped a preposterous monocle into an eye of clear childish blue. At every few steps her long lashes would tilt out the monocle, and she would laugh, a bored, happy laugh, and replace the supercilious spectacle in the other eye.

Tap! Her one hundred and five pounds reached the pier and it seemed to sway and bend from the shock of her beauty. A few porters fainted. A large, sentimental shark which had followed the ship across made a despairing leap to see her once more, and then dove, broken-hearted, back into the deep sea. Rags Martin-Jones had come home.

There was no member of her family there to meet her, for the simple reason that she was the only member of her family left alive. In 1913 her parents had gone down on the
Titanic
together rather than be separated in this world, and so the Martin-Jones fortune of seventy-five millions had been inherited by a very little girl on her tenth birthday. It was what the consumer always refers to as a “shame.”

Rags Martin-Jones (everybody had forgotten her real name long ago) was now photographed from all sides. The monocle persistently fell out, and she kept laughing and yawning and replacing it, so no very clear picture of her was taken--except by the motion-picture camera. All the photographs, however, included a flustered, handsome young man, with an almost ferocious love-light burning in his eyes, who had met her on the dock. His name was John M. Chestnut, he had already written the story of his success for the
American Magazine,
and he had been hopelessly in love with Rags ever since the time when she, like the tides, had come under the influence of the summer moon.

When Rags became really aware of his presence they were walking down the pier, and she looked at him blankly as though she had never seen him before in this world.

“Rags,” he began, “Rags--”

“John M. Chestnut?” she inquired, inspecting him with great interest.

“Of course!” he exclaimed angrily. “Are you trying to pretend you don’t know me? That you didn’t write me to meet you here?”

She laughed. A chauffeur appeared at her elbow, and she twisted out of her coat, revealing a dress made in great splashy checks of sea-blue and gray. She shook herself like a wet bird.

“I’ve got a lot of junk to declare,” she remarked absently.

“So have I,” said Chestnut anxiously, “and the first thing I want to declare is that I’ve loved you, Rags, every minute since you’ve been away.”

She stopped him with a groan.

“Please! There were some young Americans on the boat. The subject has become a bore.”

“My God!” cried Chestnut, “do you mean to say that you class
my
love with what was said to you on a
boat
?”

His voice had risen, and several people in the vicinity turned to hear.

“Sh!” she warned him, “I’m not giving a circus. If you want me to even see you while I’m here, you’ll have to be less violent.”

But John M. Chestnut seemed unable to control his voice.

“Do you mean to say”--it trembled to a carrying pitch--”that you’ve forgotten what you said on this very pier five years ago last Thursday?”

Half the passengers from the ship were now watching the scene on the dock, and another little eddy drifted out of the customs-house to see.

“John”--her displeasure was increasing--”if you raise your voice again I’ll arrange it so you’ll have plenty of chance to cool off. I’m going to the Ritz. Come and see me there this afternoon.”

“But, Rags!” he protested hoarsely. “Listen to me. Five years ago--”

Then the watchers on the dock were treated to a curious sight. A beautiful lady in a checkered dress of sea-blue and gray took a brisk step forward so that her hands came into contact with an excited young man by her side. The young man retreating instinctively reached back with his foot, but, finding nothing, relapsed gently off the thirty-foot dock and plopped, after a not ungraceful revolution, into the Hudson River.

A shout of alarm went up, and there was a rush to the edge just as his head appeared above water. He was swimming easily, and, perceiving this, the young lady who had apparently been the cause of the accident leaned over the pier and made a megaphone of her hands.

“I’ll be in at half past four,” she cried.

And with a cheerful wave of her hand, which the engulfed gentleman was unable to return, she adjusted her monocle, threw one haughty glance at the gathered crowd, and walked leisurely from the scene.

II

The five dogs, the three maids, and the French orphan were installed in the largest suite at the Ritz, and Rags tumbled lazily into a steaming bath, fragrant with herbs, where she dozed for the greater part of an hour. At the end of that time she received business calls from a masseuse, a manicure, and finally a Parisian hair-dresser, who restored her hair-cut to criminal’s length. When John M. Chestnut arrived at four he found half a dozen lawyers and bankers, the administrators of the Martin-Jones trust fund, waiting in the hall. They had been there since half past one, and were now in a state of considerable agitation.

After one of the maids had subjected him to a severe scrutiny, possibly to be sure that he was thoroughly dry, John was conducted immediately into the presence of m’selle. M’selle was in her bedroom reclining on the chaise-longue among two dozen silk pillows that had accompanied her from the other side. John came into the room somewhat stiffly and greeted her with a formal bow.

“You look better,” she said, raising herself from her pillows and staring at him appraisingly. “It gave you a color.”

He thanked her coldly for the compliment.

“You ought to go in every morning.” And then she added irrelevantly: “I’m going back to Paris tomorrow.”

John Chestnut gasped.

“I wrote you that I didn’t intend to stay more than a week anyhow,” she added.

“But, Rags--”

“Why should I? There isn’t an amusing man in New York.”

“But listen, Rags, won’t you give me a chance? Won’t you stay for, say, ten days and get to know me a little?”

“Know you!” Her tone implied that he was already a far too open book. “I want a man who’s capable of a gallant gesture.”

“Do you mean you want me to express myself entirely in pantomime?”

Rags uttered a disgusted sigh.

“I mean you haven’t any imagination,” she explained patiently. “No Americans have any imagination. Paris is the only large city where a civilized woman can breathe.”

“Don’t you care for me at all any more?”

“I wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic to see you if I didn’t. But as soon as I looked over the Americans on the boat, I knew I couldn’t marry one. I’d just hate you, John, and the only fun I’d have out of it would be the fun of breaking your heart.”

She began to twist herself down among the cushions until she almost disappeared from view.

“I’ve lost my monocle,” she explained.

After an unsuccessful search in the silken depths she discovered the illusive glass hanging down the back of her neck.

“I’d love to be in love,” she went on, replacing the monocle in her childish eye. “Last spring in Sorrento I almost eloped with an Indian rajah, but he was half a shade too dark, and I took an intense dislike to one of his other wives.”

“Don’t talk that rubbish!” cried John, sinking his face into his hands.

“Well, I didn’t marry him,” she protested. “But in one way he had a lot to offer. He was the third richest subject of the British Empire. That’s another thing--are you rich?”

“Not as rich as you.”

“There you are. What have you to offer me?”

“Love.”

“Love!” She disappeared again among the cushions. “Listen, John. Life to me is a series of glistening bazaars with a merchant in front of each one rubbing his hands together and saying ‘Patronize this place here. Best bazaar in the world.’ So I go in with my purse full of beauty and money and youth, all prepared to buy. ‘What have you got for sale?’ I ask him, and he rubs his hands together and says: ‘Well, Mademoiselle, to-day we have some perfectly be-
oo
-tiful love.’ Sometimes he hasn’t even got that in stock, but he sends out for it when he finds I have so much money to spend. Oh, he always gives me love before I go--and for nothing. That’s the one revenge I have.”

John Chestnut rose despairingly to his feet and took a step toward the window.

“Don’t throw yourself out,” Rags exclaimed quickly.

“All right.” He tossed his cigarette down into Madison Avenue.

“It isn’t just you,” she said in a softer voice. “Dull and uninspired as you are, I care for you more than I can say. But life’s so endless here. Nothing ever comes off.”

“Loads of things come off,” he insisted. “Why, to-day there was an intellectual murder in Hoboken and a suicide by proxy in Maine. A bill to sterilize agnostics is before Congress--”

“I have no interest in humor,” she objected, “but I have an almost archaic predilection for romance. Why, John, last month I sat at a dinner-table while two men flipped a coin for the kingdom of Schwartzberg-Rhineminster. In Paris I knew a man named Blutchdak who really started the war, and has a new one planned for year after next.”

“Well, just for a rest you come out with me tonight,” he said doggedly.

“Where to?” demanded Rags with scorn. “Do you think I still thrill at a night-club and a bottle of sugary mousseaux? I prefer my own gaudy dreams.”

“I’ll take you to the most highly-strung place in the city.”

“What’ll happen? You’ve got to tell me what’ll happen.”

John Chestnut suddenly drew a long breath and looked cautiously around as if he were afraid of being overheard.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said in a low, worried tone, “if everything was known, something pretty awful would be liable to happen to
me
.”