Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (319 page)

“Where’ll we go lunch?” he asked.

“You’re in no shape to go to lunch. Don’t you realize? You’ve got to go home and sleep.”

“I’m all right. I get a drink I’ll be fine.”

A passing cab slowed up at her gesture.

“You go home and go to sleep. You’re not fit to go anywhere.”

As he focused his eyes on her, realizing her suddenly as something fresh, something new and lovely, something alien to the smoky and turbulent world where he had spent his recent hours, a faint current of reason flowed through him. She saw his mouth twist with vague awe, saw him make a vague attempt to stand up straight. The taxi yawned.

“Maybe you’re right. Very sorry.”

“What’s your address?”

He gave it and then tumbled into a corner, his face still struggling toward reality. Julia closed the door.

When the cab had driven off, she hurried across the street and into the Luxembourg Gardens as if someone were after her.

II

Quite by accident, she answered when he telephoned at seven that night. His voice was strained and shaking:

“I suppose there’s not much use apologizing for this morning. I didn’t know what I was doing, but that’s no excuse. But if you could let me see you for a while somewhere tomorrow--just for a minute--I’d like the chance of telling you in person how terribly sorry--”

“I’m busy tomorrow.”

“Well, Friday then, or any day.”

“I’m sorry, I’m very busy this week.”

“You mean you don’t ever want to see me again?”

“Mr. Ragland, I hardly see the use of going any further with this. Really, that thing this morning was a little too much. I’m very sorry. I hope you feel better. Good-by.”

She put him entirely out of her mind. She had not even associated his reputation with such a spectacle--a heavy drinker was someone who sat up late and drank champagne and maybe in the small hours rode home singing. This spectacle at high noon was something else again. Julia was through.

Meanwhile there were other men with whom she lunched at Ciro’s and danced in the Bois. There was a reproachful letter from Phil Hoffman in America. She liked Phil better for having been so right about this. A fortnight passed and she would have forgotten Dick Ragland, had she not heard his name mentioned with scorn in several conversations. Evidently he had done such things before.

Then, a week before she was due to sail, she ran into him in the booking department of the White Star Line. He was as handsome--she could hardly believe her eyes. He leaned with an elbow on the desk, his fine figure erect, his yellow gloves as stainless as his clear, shining eyes. His strong, gay personality had affected the clerk who served him with fascinated deference; the stenographers behind looked up for a minute and exchanged a glance. Then he saw Julia; she nodded, and with a quick, wincing change of expression he raised his hat.

They were together by the desk a long time and the silence was oppressive.

“Isn’t this a nuisance?” she said.

“Yes,” he said jerkily, and then: “You going by the Olympic?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I thought you might have changed.”

“Of course not,” she said coldly.

“I thought of changing; in fact, I was here to ask about it.”

“That’s absurd.”

“You don’t hate the sight of me? So it’ll make you seasick when we pass each other on the deck?”

She smiled. He seized his advantage:

“I’ve improved somewhat since we last met.”

“Don’t talk about that.”

“Well then, you have improved. You’ve got the loveliest costume on I ever saw.”

This was presumptuous, but she felt herself shimmering a little at the compliment.

“You wouldn’t consider a cup of coffee with me at the café next door, just to recover from this ordeal?”

How weak of her to talk to him like this, to let him make advances. It was like being under the fascination of a snake.

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Something terribly timid and vulnerable came into his face, twisting a little sinew in her heart. “Well, all right,” she shocked herself by saying.

Sitting at the sidewalk table in the sunlight, there was nothing to remind her of that awful day two weeks ago. Jekyll and Hyde. He was courteous, he was charming, he was amusing. He made her feel, oh, so attractive! He presumed on nothing.

“Have you stopped drinking?” she asked.

“Not till the fifth.”

“Oh!”

“Not until I said I’d stop. Then I’ll stop.”

When Julia rose to go, she shook her head at his suggestion of a further meeting.

“I’ll see you on the boat. After your twenty-eighth birthday.”

“All right; one more thing: It fits in with the high price of crime that I did something inexcusable to the one girl I’ve ever been in love with in my life.”

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

He was popular on the boat; she heard that he was giving a party on the night of his twenty-eighth birthday. Julia was not invited; when they met they spoke pleasantly, nothing more.

It was the day after the fifth that she found him stretched in his deck chair looking wan and white. There were wrinkles on his fine brow and around his eyes, and his hand, as he reached out for a cup of bouillon, was trembling. He was still there in the late afternoon, visibly suffering, visibly miserable. After three times around, Julia was irresistibly impelled to speak to him:

“Has the new era begun?”

He made a feeble effort to rise, but she motioned him not to and sat on the next chair.

“You look tired.”

“I’m just a little nervous. This is the first day in five years that I haven’t had a drink.”

“It’ll be better soon.”

“I know,” he said grimly.

“Don’t weaken.”

“I won’t.”

“Can’t I help you in any way? Would you like a bromide?”

“I can’t stand bromides,” he said almost crossly. “No, thanks, I mean.”

Julia stood up: “I know you feel better alone. Things will be brighter tomorrow.”

“Don’t go, if you can stand me.”

Julia sat down again.

“Sing me a song--can you sing?”

“What kind of a song?”

“Something sad--some sort of blues.”

She sang him Libby Holman’s “This is how the story ends,” in a low, soft voice.

“That’s good. Now sing another. Or sing that again.”

“All right. If you like, I’ll sing to you all afternoon.”

III

The second day in New York he called her on the phone. “I’ve missed you so,” he said. “Have you missed me?”

“I’m afraid I have,” she said reluctantly.

“Much?”

“I’ve missed you a lot. Are you better?”

“I’m all right now. I’m still just a little nervous, but I’m starting work tomorrow. When can I see you?”

“When you want.”

“This evening then. And look--say that again.”

“What?”

“That you’re afraid you have missed me.”

“I’m afraid that I have,” Julia said obediently.

“Missed me,” he added.

“I’m afraid I have missed you.”

“All right. It sounds like a song when you say it.”

“Good-by, Dick.”

“Good-by, Julia dear.”

She stayed in New York two months instead of the fortnight she had intended, because he would not let her go. Work took the place of drink in the daytime, but afterward he must see Julia.

Sometimes she was jealous of his work when he telephoned that he was too tired to go out after the theater. Lacking drink, night life was less than nothing to him--something quite spoiled and well lost. For Julia, who never drank, it was a stimulus in itself--the music and the parade of dresses and the handsome couple they made dancing together. At first they saw Phil Hoffman once in a while; Julia considered that he took the matter rather badly; then they didn’t see him any more.

A few unpleasant incidents occurred. An old schoolmate, Esther Cary, came to her to ask if she knew of Dick Ragland’s reputation. Instead of growing angry, Julia invited her to meet Dick and was delighted with the ease with which Esther’s convictions were changed. There were other, small, annoying episodes, but Dick’s misdemeanors had, fortunately, been confined to Paris and assumed here a far-away unreality. They loved each other deeply now--the memory of that morning slowly being effaced from Julia’s imagination--but she wanted to be sure.

“After six months, if everything goes along like this, we’ll announce our engagement. After another six months we’ll be married.”

“Such a long time,” he mourned.

“But there were five years before that,” Julia answered. “I trust you with my heart and with my mind, but something else says wait. Remember, I’m also deciding for my children.”

Those five years--oh, so lost and gone.

In August, Julia went to California for two months to see her family. She wanted to know how Dick would get along alone. They wrote every day; his letters were by turns cheerful, depressed, weary and hopeful. His work was going better. As things came back to him, his uncle had begun really to believe in him, but all the time he missed his Julia so. It was when an occasional note of despair began to appear that she cut her visit short by a week and came East to New York.

“Oh, thank God you’re here!” he cried as they linked arms and walked out of the Grand Central station. “It’s been so hard. Half a dozen times lately I’ve wanted to go on a bust and I had to think of you, and you were so far away.”

“Darling--darling, you’re so tired and pale. You’re working too hard.”

“No, only that life is so bleak alone. When I go to bed my mind churns on and on. Can’t we get married sooner?”

“I don’t know; we’ll see. You’ve got your Julia near you now, and nothing matters.”

After a week, Dick’s depression lifted. When he was sad, Julia made him her baby, holding his handsome head against her breast, but she liked it best when he was confident and could cheer her up, making her laugh and feel taken care of and secure. She had rented an apartment with another girl and she took courses in biology and domestic science in Columbia. When deep fall came, they went to football games and the new shows together, and walked through the first snow in Central Park, and several times a week spent long evenings together in front of her fire. But time was going by and they were both impatient. Just before Christmas, an unfamiliar visitor--Phil Hoffman--presented himself at her door. It was the first time in many months. New York, with its quality of many independent ladders set side by side, is unkind to even the meetings of close friends; so, in the case of strained relations, meetings are easy to avoid.

And they were strange to each other. Since his expressed skepticism of Dick, he was automatically her enemy; on another count, she saw that he had improved, some of the hard angles were worn off; he was now an assistant district attorney, moving around with increasing confidence through his profession.

“So you’re going to marry Dick?” he said. “When?”

“Soon now. When mother comes East.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Julia, don’t marry Dick. This isn’t jealousy--I know when I am licked--but it seems awful for a lovely girl like you to take a blind dive into a lake full of rocks. What makes you think that people change their courses? Sometimes they dry up or even flow into a parallel channel, but I’ve never known anybody to change.”

“Dick’s changed.”

“Maybe so. But isn’t that an enormous ‘maybe’? If he was unattractive and you liked him, I’d say go ahead with it. Maybe I’m all wrong, but it’s so darn obvious that what fascinates you is that handsome pan of his and those attractive manners.”

“You don’t know him,” Julia answered loyally. “He’s different with me. You don’t know how gentle he is, and responsive. Aren’t you being rather small and mean?”

“Hm.” Phil thought for a moment. “I want to see you again in a few days. Or perhaps I’ll speak to Dick.”

“You let Dick alone,” she cried. “He has enough to worry him without your nagging him. If you were his friend you’d try to help him instead of coming to me behind his back.”

“I’m your friend first.”

“Dick and I are one person now.”

But three days later Dick came to see her at an hour when he would usually have been at the office.

“I’m here under compulsion,” he said lightly, “under threat of exposure by Phil Hoffman.”

Her heart dropping like a plummet. “Has he given up?” she thought. “Is he drinking again?”

“It’s about a girl. You introduced me to her last summer and told me to be very nice to her--Esther Cary.”

Now her heart was beating slowly.

“After you went to California I was lonesome and I ran into her. She’d liked me that day, and for a while we saw quite a bit of each other. Then you came back and I broke it off. It was a little difficult; I hadn’t realized that she was so interested.”

“I see.” Her voice was starved and aghast.

“Try and understand. Those terribly lonely evenings. I think if it hadn’t been for Esther, I’d have fallen off the wagon. I never loved her--I never loved anybody but you--but I had to see somebody who liked me.”

He put his arm around her, but she felt cold all over and he drew away.

“Then any woman would have done,” Julia said slowly. “It didn’t matter who.”

“No!” he cried.

“I stayed away so long to let you stand on your own feet and get back your self-respect by yourself.”

“I only love you, Julia.”

“But any woman can help you. So you don’t really need me, do you?”

His face wore that vulnerable look that Julia had seen several times before; she sat on the arm of his chair and ran her hand over his cheek.

“Then what do you bring me?” she demanded. “I thought that there’d be the accumulated strength of having beaten your weakness. What do you bring me now?”

“Everything I have.”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Just your good looks--and the head waiter at dinner last night had that.”