Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (330 page)

When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking of the look in Caroline’s eyes that morning--the look that seemed to say: “Oh, why couldn’t you have done something about it? Why couldn’t you have been stronger, made me marry you? Don’t you see how sad I am?”

Michael’s fists clenched.

“Well, I won’t give up till the last moment,” he whispered. “I’ve had all the bad luck so far, and maybe it’s turned at last. One takes what one can get, up to the limit of one’s strength, and if I can’t have her, at least she’ll go into this marriage with some of me in her heart.”

II

Accordingly he went to the party at Chez Victor two days later, upstairs and into the little salon off the bar where the party was to assemble for cocktails. He was early; the only other occupant was a tall lean man of fifty. They spoke.

“You waiting for George Packman’s party?”

“Yes. My name’s Michael Curly.”

“My name’s--”

Michael failed to catch the name. They ordered a drink, and Michael supposed that the bride and groom were having a gay time.

“Too much so,” the other agreed, frowning. “I don’t see how they stand it. We all crossed on the boat together; five days of that crazy life and then two weeks of Paris. You”--he hesitated, smiling faintly--”you’ll excuse me for saying that your generation drinks too much.”

“Not Caroline.”

“No, not Caroline. She seems to take only a cocktail and a glass of champagne, and then she’s had enough, thank God. But Hamilton drinks too much and all this crowd of young people drink too much. Do you live in Paris?”

“For the moment,” said Michael.

“I don’t like Paris. My wife--that is to say, my ex-wife, Hamilton’s mother--lives in Paris.”

“You’re Hamilton Rutherford’s father?”

“I have that honor. And I’m not denying that I’m proud of what he’s done; it was just a general comment.”

“Of course.”

Michael glanced up nervously as four people came in. He felt suddenly that his dinner coat was old and shiny; he had ordered a new one that morning. The people who had come in were rich and at home in their richness with one another--a dark, lovely girl with a hysterical little laugh whom he had met before; two confident men whose jokes referred invariably to last night’s scandal and tonight’s potentialities, as if they had important rôles in a play that extended indefinitely into the past and the future. When Caroline arrived, Michael had scarcely a moment of her, but it was enough to note that, like all the others, she was strained and tired. She was pale beneath her rouge; there were shadows under her eyes. With a mixture of relief and wounded vanity, he found himself placed far from her and at another table; he needed a moment to adjust himself to his surroundings. This was not like the immature set in which he and Caroline had moved; the men were more than thirty and had an air of sharing the best of this world’s good. Next to him was Jebby West, whom he knew; and, on the other side, a jovial man who immediately began to talk to Michael about a stunt for the bachelor dinner: They were going to hire a French girl to appear with an actual baby in her arms, crying: “Hamilton, you can’t desert me now!” The idea seemed stale and unamusing to Michael, but its originator shook with anticipatory laughter.

Farther up the table there was talk of the market--another drop today, the most appreciable since the crash; people were kidding Rutherford about it: “Too bad, old man. You better not get married, after all.”

Michael asked the man on his left, “Has he lost a lot?”

“Nobody knows. He’s heavily involved, but he’s one of the smartest young men in Wall Street. Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”

It was a champagne dinner from the start, and toward the end it reached a pleasant level of conviviality, but Michael saw that all these people were too weary to be exhilarated by any ordinary stimulant; for weeks they had drunk cocktails before meals like Americans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whisky-and-soda like the English, and as they were no longer in the twenties, this preposterous
mélange,
that was like some gigantic cocktail in a nightmare, served only to make them temporarily less conscious of the mistakes of the night before. Which is to say that it was not really a gay party; what gayety existed was displayed in the few who drank nothing at all.

But Michael was not tired, and the champagne stimulated him and made his misery less acute. He had been away from New York for more than eight months and most of the dance music was unfamiliar to him, but at the first bars of the “Painted Doll,” to which he and Caroline had moved through so much happiness and despair the previous summer, he crossed to Caroline’s table and asked her to dance.

She was lovely in a dress of thin ethereal blue, and the proximity of her crackly yellow hair, of her cool and tender gray eyes, turned his body clumsy and rigid; he stumbled with their first step on the floor. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing to say; he wanted to tell her about his inheritance, but the idea seemed abrupt, unprepared for.

“Michael, it’s so nice to be dancing with you again.”

He smiled grimly.

“I’m so happy you came,” she continued. “I was afraid maybe you’d be silly and stay away. Now we can be just good friends and natural together. Michael, I want you and Hamilton to like each other.”

The engagement was making her stupid; he had never heard her make such a series of obvious remarks before.

“I could kill him without a qualm,” he said pleasantly, “but he looks like a good man. He’s fine. What I want to know is, what happens to people like me who aren’t able to forget?”

As he said this he could not prevent his mouth from dropping suddenly, and glancing up, Caroline saw, and her heart quivered violently, as it had the other morning.

“Do you mind so much, Michael?”

“Yes.”

For a second as he said this, in a voice that seemed to have come up from his shoes, they were not dancing; they were simply clinging together. Then she leaned away from him and twisted her mouth into a lovely smile.

“I didn’t know what to do at first, Michael. I told Hamilton about you--that I’d cared for you an awful lot--but it didn’t worry him, and he was right. Because I’m over you now--yes, I am. And you’ll wake up some sunny morning and be over me just like that.”

He shook his head stubbornly.

“Oh, yes. We weren’t for each other. I’m pretty flighty, and I need somebody like Hamilton to decide things. It was that more than the question of--of--”

“Of money.” Again he was on the point of telling her what had happened, but again something told him it was not the time.

“Then how do you account for what happened when we met the other day,” he demanded helplessly--”what happened just now? When we just pour toward each other like we used to--as if we were one person, as if the same blood was flowing through both of us?”

“Oh, don’t,” she begged him. “You mustn’t talk like that; everything’s decided now. I love Hamilton with all my heart. It’s just that I remember certain things in the past and I feel sorry for you--for us--for the way we were.”

Over her shoulder, Michael saw a man come toward them to cut in. In a panic he danced her away, but inevitably the man came on.

“I’ve got to see you alone, if only for a minute,” Michael said quickly. “When can I?”

“I’ll be at Jebby West’s tea tomorrow,” she whispered as a hand fell politely upon Michael’s shoulder.

But he did not talk to her at Jebby West’s tea. Rutherford stood next to her, and each brought the other into all conversations. They left early. The next morning the wedding cards arrived in the first mail.

Then Michael, grown desperate with pacing up and down his room, determined on a bold stroke; he wrote to Hamilton Rutherford, asking him for a rendezvous the following afternoon. In a short telephone communication Rutherford agreed, but for a day later than Michael had asked. And the wedding was only six days away.

They were to meet in the bar of the Hotel Jena. Michael knew what he would say: “See here, Rutherford, do you realize the responsibility you’re taking in going through with this marriage? Do you realize the harvest of trouble and regret you’re sowing in persuading a girl into something contrary to the instincts of her heart?” He would explain that the barrier between Caroline and himself had been an artificial one and was now removed, and demand that the matter be put up to Caroline frankly before it was too late.

Rutherford would be angry, conceivably there would be a scene, but Michael felt that he was fighting for his life now.

He found Rutherford in conversation with an older man, whom Michael had met at several of the wedding parties.

“I saw what happened to most of my friends,” Rutherford was saying, “and I decided it wasn’t going to happen to me. It isn’t so difficult; if you take a girl with common sense, and tell her what’s what, and do your stuff damn well, and play decently square with her, it’s a marriage. If you stand for any nonsense at the beginning, it’s one of these arrangements--within five years the man gets out, or else the girl gobbles him up and you have the usual mess.”

“Right!” agreed his companion enthusiastically. “Hamilton, boy, you’re right.”

Michael’s blood boiled slowly.

“Doesn’t it strike you,” he inquired coldly, “that your attitude went out of fashion about a hundred years ago?”

“No, it didn’t,” said Rutherford pleasantly, but impatiently. “I’m as modern as anybody. I’d get married in an aeroplane next Saturday if it’d please my girl.”

“I don’t mean that way of being modern. You can’t take a sensitive woman--”

“Sensitive? Women aren’t so darn sensitive. It’s fellows like you who are sensitive; it’s fellows like you they exploit--all your devotion and kindness and all that. They read a couple of books and see a few pictures because they haven’t got anything else to do, and then they say they’re finer in grain than you are, and to prove it they take the bit in their teeth and tear off for a fare-you-well--just about as sensitive as a fire horse.”

“Caroline happens to be sensitive,” said Michael in a clipped voice.

At this point the other man got up to go; when the dispute about the check had been settled and they were alone, Rutherford leaned back to Michael as if a question had been asked him.

“Caroline’s more than sensitive,” he said. “She’s got sense.”

His combative eyes, meeting Michael’s, flickered with a gray light. “This all sounds pretty crude to you, Mr. Curly, but it seems to me that the average man nowadays just asks to be made a monkey of by some woman who doesn’t even get any fun out of reducing him to that level. There are darn few men who possess their wives any more, but I am going to be one of them.”

To Michael it seemed time to bring the talk back to the actual situation: “Do you realize the responsibility you’re taking?”

“I certainly do,” interrupted Rutherford. “I’m not afraid of responsibility. I’ll make the decisions--fairly, I hope, but anyhow they’ll be final.”

“What if you didn’t start right?” said Michael impetuously. “What if your marriage isn’t founded on mutual love?”

“I think I see what you mean,” Rutherford said, still pleasant. “And since you’ve brought it up, let me say that if you and Caroline had married, it wouldn’t have lasted three years. Do you know what your affair was founded on? On sorrow. You got sorry for each other. Sorrow’s a lot of fun for most women and for some men, but it seems to me that a marriage ought to be based on hope.” He looked at his watch and stood up.

“I’ve got to meet Caroline. Remember, you’re coming to the bachelor dinner day after tomorrow.”

Michael felt the moment slipping away. “Then Caroline’s personal feelings don’t count with you?” he demanded fiercely.

“Caroline’s tired and upset. But she has what she wants, and that’s the main thing.”

“Are you referring to yourself?” demanded Michael incredulously.

“Yes.”

“May I ask how long she’s wanted you?”

“About two years.” Before Michael could answer, he was gone.

During the next two days Michael floated in an abyss of helplessness. The idea haunted him that he had left something undone that would sever this knot drawn tighter under his eyes. He phoned Caroline, but she insisted that it was physically impossible for her to see him until the day before the wedding, for which day she granted him a tentative rendezvous. Then he went to the bachelor dinner, partly in fear of an evening alone at his hotel, partly from a feeling that by his presence at that function he was somehow nearer to Caroline, keeping her in sight.

The Ritz Bar had been prepared for the occasion by French and American banners and by a great canvas covering one wall, against which the guests were invited to concentrate their proclivities in breaking glasses.

At the first cocktail, taken at the bar, there were many slight spillings from many trembling hands, but later, with the champagne, there was a rising tide of laughter and occasional bursts of song.

Michael was surprised to find what a difference his new dinner coat, his new silk hat, his new, proud linen made in his estimate of himself; he felt less resentment toward all these people for being so rich and assured. For the first time since he had left college he felt rich and assured himself; he felt that he was part of all this, and even entered into the scheme of Johnson, the practical joker, for the appearance of the woman betrayed, now waiting tranquilly in the room across the hall.

“We don’t want to go too heavy,” Johnson said, “because I imagine Ham’s had a pretty anxious day already. Did you see Fullman Oil’s sixteen points off this morning?”

“Will that matter to him?” Michael asked, trying to keep the interest out of his voice.

“Naturally. He’s in heavily; he’s always in everything heavily. So far he’s had luck; anyhow, up to a month ago.”

The glasses were filled and emptied faster now, and men were shouting at one another across the narrow table. Against the bar a group of ushers was being photographed, and the flash light surged through the room in a stifling cloud.