Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (252 page)
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Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘You shouldn’t have let him get away with that,’ she said. ‘What’s in there? Clothes?’
‘No,’ answered Roger absently. ‘Just all my wife’s shoes.’
He slept in the office that night on a sofa beside his desk. At dawn he awoke with a nervous start, rushed out into the street for coffee, and returned in ten minutes in a panic--afraid that he might have missed Mr Garrod’s telephone call. It was then 6.30.
By eight o’clock his whole body seemed to be on fire. When his two artists arrived he was stretched on the couch in almost physical pain. The phone rang imperatively at 9.30, and he picked up the receiver with trembling hands.
‘Hello.’
‘Is this the Halsey agency?’
‘Yes, this is Mr Halsey speaking.’
‘This is Mr H. G. Garrod.’
Roger’s heart stopped beating.
‘I called up, young fellow, to say that this is wonderful work you’ve given us here. We want all of it and as much more as your office can do.’
‘Oh, God!’ cried Roger into the transmitter.
‘What?’ Mr H. G. Garrod was considerably startled. ‘Say, wait a minute there!’
But he was talking to nobody. The phone had clattered to the floor, and Roger, stretched full length on the couch, was sobbing as if his heart would break.
IV
Three hours later, his face somewhat pale, but his eyes calm as a child’s, Roger opened the door of his wife’s bedroom with the morning paper under his arm. At the sound of his footsteps she started awake.
‘What time is it?’ she demanded.
He looked at his watch.
‘Twelve o’clock.’
Suddenly she began to cry.
‘Roger,’ she said brokenly, ‘I’m sorry I was so bad last night.’
He nodded coolly.
‘Everything’s all right now,’ he answered. Then, after a pause: ‘I’ve got the account--the biggest one.’
She turned towards him quickly.
‘You have?’ Then, after a minute’s silence: ‘Can I get a new dress?’
‘Dress?’ He laughed shortly. ‘You can get a dozen. This account alone will bring us in forty thousand a year. It’s one of the biggest in the West.’
She looked at him, startled.
‘Forty thousand a year!’
‘Yes.’
‘Gosh’--and then faintly--’I didn’t know it’d really be anything like that.’ Again she thought a minute. ‘We can have a house like George Tompkins’.’
‘I don’t want an interior-decoration shop.’
‘Forty thousand a year!’ she repeated again, and then added softly: ‘Oh, Roger--’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m not going out with George Tompkins.’
‘I wouldn’t let you, even if you wanted to,’ he said shortly.
She made a show of indignation.
‘Why, I’ve had a date with him for this Thursday for weeks.’
‘It isn’t Thursday.’
‘It is.’
‘It’s Friday.’
‘Why, Roger, you must be crazy! Don’t you think I know what day it is?’
‘It isn’t Thursday,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Look!’ And he held out the morning paper.
‘Friday!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, this is a mistake! This must be last week’s paper. Today’s Thursday.’
She closed her eyes and thought for a moment.
‘Yesterday was Wednesday,’ she said decisively. ‘The laundress came yesterday. I guess I know.’
‘Well,’ he said smugly, ‘look at the paper. There isn’t any question about it.’
With a bewildered look on her face she got out of bed and began searching for her clothes. Roger went into the bathroom to shave. A minute later he heard the springs creak again. Gretchen was getting back into bed.
‘What’s the matter?’ he inquired, putting his head around the corner of the bathroom.
‘I’m scared,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I think my nerves are giving way. I can’t find any of my shoes.’
‘Your shoes? Why, the closet’s full of them.’
‘I know, but I can’t see one.’ Her face was pale with fear. ‘Oh, Roger!’
Roger came to her bedside and put his arm around her.
‘Oh, Roger,’ she cried, ‘what’s the matter with me? First that newspaper, and now all my shoes. Take care of me, Roger.’
‘I’ll get the doctor,’ he said.
He walked remorselessly to the telephone and took up the receiver.
‘Phone seems to be out of order,’ he remarked after a minute; ‘I’ll send Bebé.’
The doctor arrived in ten minutes.
‘I think I’m on the verge of a collapse,’ Gretchen told him in a strained voice.
Doctor Gregory sat down on the edge of the bed and took her wrist in his hand.
‘It seems to be in the air this morning.’
‘I got up,’ said Gretchen in an awed voice, ‘and I found that I’d lost a whole day. I had an engagement to go riding with George Tompkins--’
‘What?’ exclaimed the doctor in surprise. Then he laughed.
‘George Tompkins won’t go riding with anyone for many days to come.’
‘Has he gone away?’ asked Gretchen curiously.
‘He’s going West.’
‘Why?’ demanded Roger. ‘Is he running away with somebody’s wife?’
‘No,’ said Doctor Gregory. ‘He’s had a nervous breakdown.’
‘What?’ they exclaimed in unison.
‘He just collapsed like an opera-hat in his cold shower.’
‘But he was always talking about his--his balanced life,’ gasped Gretchen. ‘He had it on his mind.’
‘I know,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s been babbling about it all morning. I think it’s driven him a little mad. He worked pretty hard at it, you know.’
‘At what?’ demanded Roger in bewilderment.
‘At keeping his life balanced.’ He turned to Gretchen. ‘Now all I’ll prescribe for this lady here is a good rest. If she’ll just stay around the house for a few days and take forty winks of sleep she’ll be as fit as ever. She’s been under some strain.’
‘Doctor,’ exclaimed Roger hoarsely, ‘don’t you think I’d better have a rest or something? I’ve been working pretty hard lately.’
‘You!’ Doctor Gregory laughed, slapped him violently on the back. ‘My boy, I never saw you looking better in your life.’
Roger turned away quickly to conceal his smile--winked forty times, or almost forty times, at the autographed picture of Mr George Tompkins, which hung slightly askew on the bedroom wall.
TAPS AT REVEILLE
Published in 1935, this book of 18 short stories is Fitzgerald’s fourth and final collection printed in his lifetime. The book was dedicated to his agent Harold Ober.
The first edition
CONTENTS
JOSEPHINE: A WOMAN WITH A PAST
Harold Ober – Fitzgerald’s friend and agent
THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES
I
It was a hot afternoon in May and Mrs. Buckner thought that a pitcher of fruit lemonade might prevent the boys from filling up on ice cream at the drug store. She belonged to that generation, since retired, upon whom the great revolution in American family life was to be visited; but at that time she believed that her children’s relation to her was as much as hers had been to her parents, for this was more than twenty years ago.
Some generations are close to those that succeed them; between others the gap is infinite and unbridgeable. Mrs. Buckner--a woman of character, a member of Society in a large Middle-Western city--carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother; what was happening in a room above the stable would have been entirely unintelligible to them both. In what had once served as the coachman’s sleeping apartment, her son and a friend were not behaving in a normal manner, but were, so to speak, experimenting in a void. They were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and materials they found ready at their hand--ideas destined to become, in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally commonplace. At the moment when she called up to them they were sitting with disarming quiet upon the still unhatched eggs of the mid-twentieth century.
Riply Buckner descended the ladder and took the lemonade. Basil Duke Lee looked abstractedly down at the transaction and said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Buckner.”
“Are you sure it isn’t too hot up there?”
“No, Mrs. Buckner. It’s fine.”
It was stifling; but they were scarcely conscious of the heat, and they drank two tall glasses each of the lemonade without knowing that they were thirsty. Concealed beneath a sawed-out trapdoor from which they presently took it was a composition book bound in imitation red leather which currently absorbed much of their attention. On its first page was inscribed, if you penetrated the secret of the lemon-juice ink: “The Book of Scandal, written by Riply Buckner, Jr., and Basil D. Lee, Scandal Detectives.”
In this book they had set down such deviations from rectitude on the part of their fellow citizens as had reached their ears. Some of these false steps were those of grizzled men, stories that had become traditions in the city and were embalmed in the composition book by virtue of indiscreet exhumations at family dinner tables. Others were the more exciting sins, confirmed or merely rumored, of boys and girls their own age. Some of the entries would have been read by adults with bewilderment, others might have inspired wrath, and there were three or four contemporary reports that would have prostrated the parents of the involved children with horror and despair.
One of the mildest items, a matter they had hesitated about setting down, though it had shocked them only last year, was: “Elwood Leaming has been to the Burlesque Show three or four times at the Star.”
Another, and perhaps their favorite, because of its uniqueness, set forth that “H. P. Cramner committed some theft in the East he could be imprisoned for and had to come here”--H. P. Cramner being now one of the oldest and “most substantial” citizens of the city.
The single defect in the book was that it could only be enjoyed with the aid of the imagination, for the invisible ink must keep its secrets until that day when, the pages being held close to the fire, the items would appear. Close inspection was necessary to determine which pages had been used--already a rather grave charge against a certain couple had been superimposed upon the dismal facts that Mrs. R. B. Cary had consumption and that her son, Walter Cary, had been expelled from PawlingSchool. The purpose of the work as a whole was not blackmail. It was treasured against the time when its protagonists should “do something” to Basil and Riply. Its possession gave them a sense of power. Basil, for instance, had never seen Mr. H. P. Cramner make a single threatening gesture in Basil’s direction but let him even hint that he was going to do something to Basil, and there preserved against him was the record of his past.