Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (326 page)

Approaching, he put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up.

“You look like Santa Claus,” she said vaguely. “You couldn’t possibly be Santa Claus, could you?”

“I’m going to take you to El Paso.”

“Well,” she considered, “you look perfectly safe to me.”

She was so young--a drenched little rose. He could have wept for her wretched unconsciousness of the old facts, the old penalties of life. Jousting at nothing in an empty tilt yard with a shaking spear. The taxi moved too slowly through the suddenly poisonous night.

Having explained things to a reluctant night clerk, he went out and found a telegraph office.

“Have given up Mexican trip,” he wired. “Leaving here tonight. Please meet train in the St. Paul station at three o’clock and ride with me to Minneapolis, as I can’t spare you for another minute. All my love.”

He could at least keep an eye on her, advise her, see what she did with her life. That silly mother of hers!

On the train, as the baked tropical lands and green fields fell away and the North swept near again with patches of snow, then fields of it, fierce winds in the vestibule and bleak, hibernating farms, he paced the corridors with intolerable restlessness. When they drew into the St. Paul station he swung himself off like a young man and searched the platform eagerly, but his eyes failed to find her. He had counted on those few minutes between the cities; they had become a symbol of her fidelity to their friendship, and as the train started again he searched it desperately from smoker to observation car. But he could not find her, and now he knew that he was mad for her; at the thought that she had taken his advice and plunged into affairs with other men, he grew weak with fear.

Drawing into Minneapolis, his hands fumbled so that he must call the porter to fasten his baggage. Then there was an interminable wait in the corridor while the baggage was taken off and he was pressed up against a girl in a squirrel-trimmed coat.

“Tom!”

“Well, I’ll be--”

Her arms went up around his neck. “But, Tom,” she cried, “I’ve been right here in this car since St. Paul!”

His cane fell in the corridor, he drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.

III

The new intimacy of their definite engagement brought Tom a feeling of young happiness. He awoke on winter mornings with the sense of undeserved joy hovering in the room; meeting young men, he found himself matching the vigor of his mind and body against theirs. Suddenly his life had a purpose and a background; he felt rounded and complete. On gray March afternoons when she wandered familiarly in his apartment the warm sureties of his youth flooded back--ecstasy and poignancy, the mortal and the eternal posed in their immemorially tragic juxtaposition and, a little astounded, he found himself relishing the very terminology of young romance. But he was more thoughtful than a younger lover; and to Annie he seemed to “know everything,” to stand holding open the gates for her passage into the truly golden world.

“We’ll go to Europe first,” he said.

“Oh, we’ll go there a lot, won’t we? Let’s spend our winters in Italy and the spring in Paris.”

“But, little Annie, there’s business.”

“Well, we’ll stay away as much as we can anyhow. I hate Minneapolis.”

“Oh, no.” He was a little shocked. “Minneapolis is all right.”

“When you’re here it’s all right.”

Mrs. Lorry yielded at length to the inevitable. With ill grace she acknowledged the engagement, asking only that the marriage should not take place until fall.

“Such a long time,” Annie sighed.

“After all, I’m your mother. It’s so little to ask.”

It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March was full of billowy drifts, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands. The people waited; their first energy to resist was spent, and man, like weather, simply hung on. There was less to do now and the general restlessness was expressed by surliness in daily contacts. Then, early in April, with a long sigh the ice cracked, the snow ran into the ground and the green, eager spring broke up through.

One day, riding along a slushy road in a fresh, damp breeze with a little starved, smothered grass in it, Annie began to cry. Sometimes she cried for nothing, but this time Tom suddenly stopped the car and put his arm around her.

“Why do you cry like that? Are you unhappy?”

“Oh, no, no!” she protested.

“But you cried yesterday the same way. And you wouldn’t tell me why. You must always tell me.”

“Nothing, except the spring. It smells so good, and it always has so many sad thoughts and memories in it.”

“It’s our spring, my sweetheart,” he said. “Annie, don’t let’s wait. Let’s be married in June.”

“I promised mother, but if you like we can announce our engagement in June.”

The spring came fast now. The sidewalks were damp, then dry, and the children roller-skated on them and boys played baseball in the soft, vacant lots. Tom got up elaborate picnics of Annie’s contemporaries and encouraged her to play golf and tennis with them. Abruptly, with a final, triumphant lurch of Nature, it was full summer.

On a lovely May evening Tom came up the Lorrys’ walk and sat down beside Annie’s mother on the porch.

“It’s so pleasant,” he said, “I thought Annie and I would walk instead of driving this evening. I want to show her the funny old house I was born in.”

“On Chambers Street, wasn’t it? Annie’ll be home in a few minutes. She went riding with some young people after dinner.”

“Yes, on Chambers Street.”

He looked at his watch presently, hoping Annie would come while it was still light enough to see. Quarter of nine. He frowned. She had kept him waiting the night before, kept him waiting an hour yesterday afternoon.

“If I was twenty-one,” he said to himself, “I’d make scenes and we’d both be miserable.”

He and Mrs. Lorry talked; the warmth of the night precipitated the vague evening lassitude of the fifties and softened them both, and for the first time since his attentions to Annie began, there was no unfriendliness between them. By and by long silences fell, broken only by the scratch of a match or the creak of her swinging settee. When Mr. Lorry came home Tom threw away his second cigar in surprise and looked at his watch; it was after ten.

“Annie’s late,” Mrs. Lorry said.

“I hope there’s nothing wrong,” said Tom anxiously. “Who is she with?”

“There were four when they started out. Randy Cambell and another couple--I didn’t notice who. They were only going for a soda.”

“I hope there hasn’t been any trouble. Perhaps--Do you think I ought to go and see?”

“Ten isn’t late nowadays. You’ll find--” Remembering that Tom Squires was marrying Annie, not adopting her, she kept herself from adding: “You’ll get used to it.”

Her husband excused himself and went up to bed, and the conversation became more forced and desultory. When the church clock over the way struck eleven they both broke off and listened to the beats. Twenty minutes later just as Tom impatiently crushed out his last cigar, an automobile drifted down the street and came to rest in front of the door.

For a minute no one moved on the porch or in the auto. Then Annie, with a hat in her hand, got out and came quickly up the walk. Defying the tranquil night, the car snorted away.

“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m so sorry! What time is it? Am I terribly late?”

Tom didn’t answer. The street lamp threw wine color upon her face and expressed with a shadow the heightened flush of her cheek. Her dress was crushed, her hair was in brief, expressive disarray. But it was the strange little break in her voice that made him afraid to speak, made him turn his eyes aside.

“What happened?” Mrs. Lorry asked casually.

“Oh, a blow-out and something wrong with the engine--and we lost our way. Is it terribly late?”

And then, as she stood before them, her hat still in her hand, her breast rising and falling a little, her eyes wide and bright, Tom realized with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another. Try as he might, he could not separate himself from Mrs. Lorry. When she excused herself he suppressed a frantic tendency to say, “But why should you go now? After sitting here all evening?”

They were alone. Annie came up to him and pressed his hand. He had never been so conscious of her beauty; her damp hands were touched with dew.

“You were out with young Cambell,” he said.

“Yes. Oh, don’t be mad. I feel--I feel so upset tonight.”

“Upset?”

She sat down, whimpering a little.

“I couldn’t help it. Please don’t be mad. He wanted so for me to take a ride with him and it was such a wonderful night, so I went just for an hour. And we began talking and I didn’t realize the time. I felt so sorry for him.”

“How do you think I felt?” He scorned himself, but it was said now.

“Don’t, Tom. I told you I was terribly upset. I want to go to bed.”

“I understand. Good night, Annie.”

“Oh, please don’t act that way, Tom. Can’t you understand?”

But he could, and that was just the trouble. With the courteous bow of another generation, he walked down the steps and off into the obliterating moonlight. In a moment he was just a shadow passing the street lamps and then a faint footfall up the street.

IV

All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy. On his customary routes there were other sharp landmarks of the 90’s, converted habitats of gayeties that no longer existed--the shell of Jansen’s Livery Stables and the old Nushka Rink, where every winter his father had curled on the well-kept ice.

“And it’s a darn pity,” he would mutter. “A darn pity.”

He had a tendency, too, to walk past the lights of a certain drug store, because it seemed to him that it had contained the seed of another and nearer branch of the past. Once he went in, and inquiring casually about the blonde clerk, found that she had married and departed several months before. He obtained her name and on an impulse sent her a wedding present “from a dumb admirer,” for he felt he owed something to her for his happiness and pain. He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin--refusing to die. But he could not have walked down wasted into the darkness without being used up a little; what he had wanted, after all, was only to break his strong old heart. Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat, and those three months--he had them forever.

BASIL AND CLEOPATRA

Saturday Evening Post
(27 April 1929)

Wherever she was, became a beautiful and enchanted place to Basil, but he did not think of it that way. He thought the fascination was inherent in the locality, and long afterward a commonplace street or the mere name of a city would exude a peculiar glow, a sustained sound, that struck his soul alert with delight. In her presence he was too absorbed to notice his surroundings; so that her absence never made them empty, but, rather, sent him seeking for her through haunted rooms and gardens that he had never really seen before.

This time, as usual, he saw only the expression of her face, the mouth that gave an attractive interpretation of any emotion she felt or pretended to feel--oh, invaluable mouth--and the rest of her, new as a peach and old as sixteen. He was almost unconscious that they stood in a railroad station and entirely unconscious that she had just glanced over his shoulder and fallen in love with another young man. Turning to walk with the rest to the car, she was already acting for the stranger; no less so because her voice was pitched for Basil and she clung to him, squeezing his arm.

Had Basil noticed this other young man that the train discharged he would merely have been sorry for him--as he had been sorry for the wretched people in the villages along the railroad and for his fellow travelers--they were not entering Yale in a fortnight nor were they about to spend three days in the same town with Miss Erminie Gilberte Labouisse Bibble. There was something dense, hopeless and a little contemptible about them all.

Basil had come to visit here because Erminie Bibble was visiting here.

On the sad eve of her departure from his native Western city a month before, she had said, with all the promise one could ask in her urgent voice:

“If you know a boy in Mobile, why don’t you make him invite you down when I’ll be there?”

He had followed this suggestion. And now with the soft, unfamiliar Southern city actually flowing around him, his excitement led him to believe that Fat Gaspar’s car floated off immediately they entered it. A voice from the curb came as a surprise:

“Hi, Bessie Belle. Hi, William. How you all?”

The newcomer was tall and lean and a year or so older than Basil. He wore a white linen suit and a panama hat, under which burned fierce, undefeated Southern eyes.

“Why, Littleboy Le Moyne!” exclaimed Miss Cheever. “When did you get home?”

“Jus’ now, Bessie Belle. Saw you lookin’ so fine and pretty, had to come and see closer.”

He was introduced to Minnie and Basil.

“Drop you somewhere, Littleboy?” asked Fat--on his native heath, William.

“Why--” Le Moyne hesitated. “You’re very kind, but the man ought to be here with the car.”

“Jump in.”

Le Moyne swung his bag on top of Basil’s and with courteous formality got in the back seat beside them. Basil caught Minnie’s eye and she smiled quickly back, as if to say, “This is too bad, but it’ll soon be over.”

“Do you happen to come from New Orleans, Miss Bibble?” asked Le Moyne.

“Sure do.”

“‘Cause I just came from there and they told me one of their mos’ celebrated heartbreakers was visiting up here, and meanwhile her suitors were shooting themselves all over the city. That’s the truth. I used to help pick ‘em up myself sometimes when they got littering the streets.”