Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (245 page)

But she mustn’t linger even a minute, or Life would bind her again and make her suffer once more. She called the apartment porter and asked that her trunk be brought up from the storeroom. Then she began taking things from the bureau and wardrobe, trying to approximate as nearly as possible the possessions that she had brought to her married life. She even found two old dresses that had formed part of her trousseau — out of style now, and a little tight in the hip — which she threw in with the rest. A new life. Charles was well again; and her baby, whom she had worshipped, and who had bored her a little, was dead.

When she had packed her trunk, she went into the kitchen automatically, to see about the preparations for dinner. She spoke to the cook about the special things for Charles and said that she herself was dining out. The sight of one of the small pans that had been used to cook Chuck’s food caught her attention for a moment — but she stared at it unmoved. She looked into the ice-box and saw it was clean and fresh inside. Then she went into Charles’s room. He was sitting up in bed, and the nurse was reading to him. His hair was almost white now, silvery white, and underneath it his eyes were huge and dark in his thin young face.

“The baby is sick?” he asked in his own natural voice.

She nodded.

He hesitated, closing his eyes for a moment. Then he asked:

“The baby is dead?”

“Yes.”

For a long time he didn’t speak. The nurse came over and put her hand on his forehead. Two large, strange tears welled from his eyes.

“I knew the baby was dead.”

After another long wait, the nurse spoke:

“The doctor said he could be taken out for a drive to-day while there was still sunshine. He needs a little change.”

“Yes.”

“I thought” — the nurse hesitated — “I thought perhaps it would do you both good, Mrs. Hemple, if you took him instead of me.”

Luella shook her head hastily.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t feel able to, to-day.”

The nurse looked at her oddly. With a sudden feeling of pity for Charles, Luella bent down gently and kissed his cheek. Then, without a word, she went to her own room, put on her hat and coat, and with her suitcase started for the front door.

Immediately she saw that there was a shadow in the hall. If she could get past that shadow, she was free. If she could go to the right or left of it, or order it out of her way! But, stubbornly, it refused to move, and with a little cry she sank down into a hall chair.

“I thought you’d gone,” she wailed. “I told you to go away.”

“I’m going soon,” said Doctor Moon, “but I don’t want you to make an old mistake.”

“I’m not making a mistake — I’m leaving my mistakes behind.”

“You’re trying to leave yourself behind, but you can’t. The more you try to run away from yourself, the more you’ll have yourself with you.”

“But I’ve got to go away,” she insisted wildly. “Out of this house of death and failure!” “You haven’t failed yet. You’ve only begun.”

She stood up.

“Let me pass.”

“No.”

Abruptly she gave way, as she always did when he talked to her. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

“Go back into that room and tell the nurse you’ll take your husband for a drive,” he suggested.

“I can’t.”

“Oh, yes.”

Once more Luella looked at him, and knew that she would obey. With the conviction that her spirit was broken at last, she took up her suitcase and walked back through the hall.

V

The nature of the curious influence that Doctor Moon exerted upon her, Louella could not guess. But as the days passed, she found herself doing many things that had been repugnant to her before. She stayed at home with Charles; and when he grew better, she went out with him sometimes to dinner, or the theatre, but only when he expressed a wish. She visited the kitchen every day, and kept an unwilling eye on the house, at first with a horror that it would go wrong again, then from habit. And she felt that it was all somehow mixed up with Doctor Moon — it was something he kept telling her about life, or almost telling her, and yet concealing from her, as though he were afraid to have her know.

With the resumption of their normal life, she found that Charles was less nervous. His habit of rubbing his face had left him, and if the world seemed less gay and happy to her than it had before, she experienced a certain peace, sometimes, that she had never known.

Then, one afternoon, Doctor Moon told her suddenly that he was going away.

“Do you mean for good?” she demanded with a touch of panic.

“For good.”

For a strange moment she wasn’t sure whether she was sorry.

“You don’t need me any more,” he said quietly. “You don’t realize it, but you’ve grown up.”

He came over and, sitting on the couch beside her, took her hand. Luella sat silent and tense — listening.

“We make an agreement with children that they can sit in the audience without helping to make the play,” he said, “but if they still sit in the audience after they’re grown, somebody’s got to work double time for them, so that they can enjoy the light and glitter of the world.”

“But I want the light and glitter,” she protested. “That’s all there is in life. There can’t be anything wrong in wanting to have things warm.”

“Things will still be warm.”

“How?” “Things will warm themselves from you.”

Luella looked at him, startled.

“It’s your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You’ve got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You’ve got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You’ve got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands.”

He broke off suddenly.

“Get up,” he said, “and go to that mirror and tell me what you see.”

Obediently Luella got up and went close to a purchase of her honeymoon, a Venetian pier-glass on the wall.

“I see new lines in my face here,” she said, raising her finger and placing it between her eyes, “and a few shadows at the sides that might be — that are little wrinkles.”

“Do you care?”

She turned quickly. “No,” she said.

“Do you realize that Chuck is gone? That you’ll never see him any more?”

“Yes.” She passed her hands slowly over her eyes. “But that all seems so vague and far away.”

“Vague and far away,” he repeated; and then: “And are you afraid of me now?”

“Not any longer,” she said, and she added frankly, “now that you’re going away.”

He moved toward the door. He seemed particularly weary to-night, as though he could hardly move about at all.

“The household here is in your keeping,” he said in a tired whisper. “If there is any light and warmth in it, it will be your light and warmth; if it is happy, it will be because you’ve made it so. Happy things may come to you in life, but you must never go seeking them any more. It is your turn to make the fire.”

“Won’t you sit down a moment longer?” Luella ventured.

“There isn’t time.” His voice was so low now that she could scarcely hear the words. “But remember that whatever suffering comes to you, I can always help you — if it is something that can be helped. I promise nothing.”

He opened the door. She must find out now what she most wanted to know, before it was too late.

“What have you done to me?” she cried. “Why have I no sorrow left for Chuck — for anything at all? Tell me, I almost see, yet I can’t see. Before you go — tell me who you are!”

“Who am I? — “

His worn suit paused in the doorway. His round, pale face seemed to dissolve into two faces, a dozen faces, a score, each one different yet the same — sad, happy, tragic, indifferent, resigned — until threescore Doctor Moons were ranged like an infinite series of reflections, like months stretching into the vista of the past.

“Who am I?” he repeated; “I am five years.”

The door closed.

At six o’clock Charles Hemple came home, and as usual Luella met him in the hall. Except that now his hair was dead white, his long illness of two years had left no mark upon him. Luella herself was more noticeably changed — she was a little stouter, and there were those lines around her eyes that had come when Chuck died one evening back in 1921. But she was still lovely, and there was a mature kindness about her face at twenty-eight, as if suffering had touched her only reluctantly and then hurried away.

“Ede and her husband are coming to dinner,” she said. “I’ve got theatre tickets, but if you’re tired, I don’t care whether we go or not.” “I’d like to go.”

She looked at him. “You wouldn’t.” “I really would.”

“We’ll see how you feel after dinner.”

He put his arm around her waist. Together they walked into the nursery where the two children were waiting up to say good night.

HOT AND COLD BLOOD

One day when the young Mathers had been married for about a year, Jaqueline walked inti the rooms of the hardware brekerage which her husband carried on with more than average success. At the open door of the inner office she stopped and said: “Oh, excuse me -” She had interrupted an apparently trivial yet somehow intriguing scene. A young man named Bronson whom she knew slightly was standing with her husband; the latter had risen from his desk. Bronson seized her husband’s hand and shook it earnestly — something more than earnestly. When they heard Jaqueline’s step in the doorway both men turned and Jaqueline saw that Bronson’s eyes were red.

A moment later he came out, passing her with a somewhat embarrassed “How do you do?” She walked into her husband’s office.

“What was Ed Bronson doing here?” she demanded curiously, and at once.

Jim Mather smiled at her, half shutting his gray eyes, and drew her quietly to a sitting position on his desk.

“He just dropped in for a minute,” he answered easily. “How’s everything at home?”

“All right.” She looked at him with curiosity. “What did he want?” she insisted.

“Oh, he just wanted to see me about something.”

“What?”

“Oh, just something. Business.”

“Why were his eyes red?”

“Were they?” He looked at her innocently, and then suddenly they both began to laugh. Jaqueline rose and walked around the desk and plumped down into his swivel chair.

“You might as well tell me,” she announced cheerfully, “because I’m going to stay right here till you do.”

“Well -” he hesitated, frowning. “He wanted me to do him a little favor.”

Then Jaqueline understood, or rather her mind leaped half accidentally to the truth.

“Oh.” Her voice tightened a little. “You’ve been lending him some money.”

“Only a little.”

“How much?”

“Only three hundred.” “Only three hundred.” The voice was of the texture of Bessemer cooled. “How much do we spend a month, Jim?”

“Why — why, about five or six hundred, I guess.” He shifted uneasily.

“Listen, Jack. Bronson’ll pay that back. He’s in a little trouble. He’s made a mistake about a girl out in Woodmere -”

“And he knows you’re famous for being an easy mark, so he comes to you,” interrupted Jaqueline.

“No.” He denied this formally.

“Don’t you suppose I could use that three hundred dollars?” she demanded. “How about that trip to New York we couldn’t afford last November?”

The lingering smile faded from Mather’s face. He went over and shut the door to the outer office.

“Listen, Jack,” he began, “you don’t understand this. Bronson’s one of the men I eat lunch with almost every day. We used to play together when we were kids, we went to school together. Don’t you see that I’m just the person he’d be right to come to in trouble? And that’s just why I couldn’t refuse.”

Jaqueline gave her shoulders a twist as if to shake off this reasoning.

“Well,” she answered decidedly, “all I know is that he’s no good. He’s always lit and if he doesn’t choose to work he has no business living off the work you do.”

They were sitting now on either side of the desk, each having adopted the attitude of one talking to a child. They began their sentences with “Listen!” and their faces wore expressions of rather tried patience.

“If you can’t understand, I can’t tell you,” Mather concluded, at the end of fifteen minutes, on what was, for him, an irritated key. “Such obligations do happen to exist sometimes among men and they have to be met. It’s more complicated than just refusing to lend money, especially in a business like mine where so much depends on the good-will of men down-town.”

Mather was putting on his coat as he said this. He was going home with her on the street-car to lunch. They were between automobiles — they had sold their old one and were going to get a new one in the spring. Now the street-car, on this particular day, was distinctly unfortunate. The argument in the office might have been forgotten under other circumstances, but what followed irritated the scratch until it became a serious temperamental infection.

They found a seat near the front of the car. It was late February an eager, unpunctilious sun was turning the scrawny street snow into dirty, cheerful rivulets that echoed in the gutters. Because of this the car was less full than usual — there was no one standing. The motorman had even opened his window and a yellow breeze was blowing the late breath of winter from the car.

It occurred pleasurably to Jaqueline that her husband sitting beside her was handsome and kind above other men. It was silly to try to change him. Perhaps Bronson might return the money after all, and anyhow three hundred dollars wasn’t a fortune. Of course he had no business doing it — but then -

Her musings were interrupted as an eddy of passengers pushed up the aisle, Jaqueline wished they’d put their hands over their mouths when they coughed, and she hoped that Jim would get a new machine pretty soon. You couldn’t tell what disease you’d run into in these trolleys.

She turned to Jim to discuss the subject — but Jim had stood up and was offering his seat to a woman who had been standing beside him in the aisle. The woman, without so much as a grunt, sat down. Jaqueline frowned.