Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (370 page)

She closed the eye, opened it again.

‘We’re in a hurricane now,’ he told her. ‘The steward says it’s the worst he’s seen in twenty years.’

‘My head,’ she muttered. ‘Hold my head.’

‘How?’

‘In front. My eyes are going out. I think I’m dying.’

‘Nonsense. Do you want the doctor?’

She gave a funny little gasp that frightened him; he rang and sent the steward for the doctor.

The young doctor was pale and tired. There was a stubble of beard upon his face. He bowed curtly as he came in and, turning to Adrian, said with scant ceremony:

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My wife doesn’t feel well.’

‘Well, what is it you want--a bromide?’

A little annoyed by his shortness, Adrian said: ‘You’d better examine her and see what she needs.’

‘She needs a bromide,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve given orders that she is not to have any more to drink on this ship.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Adrian in astonishment.

‘Don’t you know what happened last night?’

‘Why, no, I was asleep.’

‘Mrs Smith wandered around the boat for an hour, not knowing what she was doing. A sailor was sent to follow her, and then the medical stewardess tried to get her to bed, and your wife insulted her.’

‘Oh, my heavens!’ cried Eva faintly.

‘The nurse and I had both been up all night with Steward Carton, who died this morning.’ He picked up his case. ‘I’ll send down a bromide for Mrs Smith. Good-bye.’

For a few minutes there was silence in the cabin. Then Adrian put his arm around her quickly.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’ll straighten it out.’

‘I remember now.’ Her voice was an awed whisper. ‘My pearls. I threw them overboard.’

‘Threw them overboard!’

‘Then I began looking for you.’

‘But I was here in bed.’

‘I didn’t believe it; I thought you were with that girl.’

‘She collapsed during dinner. I was taking a nap down here.’

Frowning, he rang the bell and asked the steward for luncheon and a bottle of beer.

‘Sorry, but we can’t serve any beer to your cabin, sir.’

When he went out Adrian exploded: ‘This is an outrage. You were simply crazy from that storm and they can’t be so high-handed. I’ll see the captain.’

‘Isn’t that awful?’ Eva murmured. ‘The poor man died.’

She turned over and began to sob into her pillow. There was a knock at the door.

‘Can I come in?’

The assiduous Mr Butterworth, surprisingly healthy and immaculate, came into the crazily tipping cabin.

‘Well, how’s the mystic?’ he demanded of Eva. ‘Do you remember praying to the elements in the bar last night?’

‘I don’t want to remember anything about last night.’

They told him about the stewardess, and with the telling the situation lightened; they all laughed together.

‘I’m going to get you some beer to have with your luncheon,’ Butterworth said. ‘You ought to get up on deck.’

‘Don’t go,’ Eva said. ‘You look so cheerful and nice.’

‘Just for ten minutes.’

When he had gone, Adrian rang for two baths.

‘The thing is to put on our best clothes and walk proudly three times around the deck,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ After a moment she added abstractedly: ‘I like that young man. He was awfully nice to me last night when you’d disappeared.’

The bath steward appeared with the information that bathing was too dangerous today. They were in the midst of the wildest hurricane on the North Atlantic in ten years; there were two broken arms this morning from attempts to take baths. An elderly lady had been thrown down a staircase and was not expected to live. Furthermore, they had received the SOS signal from several boats this morning.

‘Will we go to help them?’

‘They’re all behind us, sir, so we have to leave them to the
Mauretania.
If we tried to turn in this sea the portholes would be smashed.’

This array of calamities minimized their own troubles. Having eaten a sort of luncheon and drunk the beer provided by Butterworth, they dressed and went on deck.

Despite the fact that it was only possible to progress step by step, holding on to rope or rail, more people were abroad than on the day before. Fear had driven them from their cabins, where the trunks bumped and the waves pounded the portholes, and they awaited momentarily the call to the boats. Indeed, as Adrian and Eva stood on the transverse deck above the second class, there was a bugle call, followed by a gathering of stewards and stewardesses on the deck below. But the boat was sound: it had outlasted one of its cargo--Steward James Carton was being buried at sea.

It was very British and sad. There were the rows of stiff, disciplined men and women standing in the driving rain, and there was a shape covered by the flag of the Empire that lived by the sea. The chief purser read the service, a hymn was sung, the body slid off into the hurricane. With Eva’s burst of wild weeping for this humble end, some last string snapped within her. Now she really didn’t care. She responded eagerly when Butterworth suggested that he get some champagne to their cabin. Her mood worried Adrian; she wasn’t used to so much drinking and he wondered what he ought to do. At his suggestion that they sleep instead, she merely laughed, and the bromide the doctor had sent stood untouched on the washstand. Pretending to listen to the insipidities of several Mr Stacombs, he watched her; to his surprise and discomfort she seemed on intimate and even sentimental terms with Butterworth and he wondered if this was a form of revenge for his attention to Betsy D’Amido.

The cabin was full of smoke, the voices went on incessantly, the suspension of activity, the waiting for the storm’s end, was getting on his nerves. They had been at sea only four days; it was like a year.

The two Mr Stacombs left finally, but Butterworth remained. Eva was urging him to go for another bottle of champagne.

‘We’ve had enough,’ objected Adrian. ‘We ought to go to bed.’

‘I won’t go to bed!’ she burst out. ‘You must be crazy! You play around all you want, and then, when I find somebody I--I like, you want to put me to bed.’

‘You’re hysterical.’

‘On the contrary, I’ve never been so sane.’

‘I think you’d better leave us, Butterworth,’ Adrian said. ‘Eva doesn’t know what she’s saying.’

‘He won’t go, I won’t let him go.’ She clasped Butterworth’s hand passionately. ‘He’s the only person that’s been half decent to me.’

‘You’d better go, Butterworth,’ repeated Adrian.

The young man looked at him uncertainly.

‘It seems to me you’re being unjust to your wife,’ he ventured.

‘My wife isn’t herself.’

‘That’s no reason for bullying her.’

Adrian lost his temper. ‘You get out of here!’ he cried.

The two men looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Butterworth turned to Eva, said, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and left the cabin.

‘Eva, you’ve got to pull yourself together,’ said Adrian when the door closed.

She didn’t answer, looked at him from sullen, half-closed eyes.

‘I’ll order dinner here for us both and then we’ll try to get some sleep.’

‘I want to go up and send a wireless.’

‘Who to?’

‘Some Paris lawyer. I want a divorce.’

In spite of his annoyance, he laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Then I want to see the children.’

‘Well, go and see them. I’ll order dinner.’

He waited for her in the cabin twenty minutes. Then impatiently he opened the door across the corridor; the nurse told him that Mrs Smith had not been there.

With a sudden prescience of disaster he ran upstairs, glanced in the bar, the salons, even knocked at Butterworth’s door. Then a quick round of the decks, feeling his way through the black spray and rain. A sailor stopped him at a network of ropes.

‘Orders are no one goes by, sir. A wave has gone over the wireless room.’

‘Have you seen a lady?’

‘There was a young lady here--’ He stopped and glanced around. ‘Hello, she’s gone.’

‘She went up the stairs!’ Adrian said anxiously. ‘Up to the wireless room!’

The sailor ran up to the boat deck; stumbling and slipping, Adrian followed. As he cleared the protected sides of the companionway, a tremendous body struck the boat a staggering blow and, as she keeled over to an angle of forty-five degrees, he was thrown in a helpless roll down the drenched deck, to bring up dizzy and bruised against a stanchion.

‘Eva!’ he called. His voice was soundless in the black storm. Against the faint light of the wireless-room window he saw the sailor making his way forward.

‘Eva!’

The wind blew him like a sail up against a lifeboat. Then there was another shuddering crash, and high over his head, over the very boat, he saw a gigantic, glittering white wave, and in the split second that it balanced there he became conscious of Eva, standing beside a ventilator twenty feet away. Pushing out from the stanchion, he lunged desperately toward her, just as the wave broke with a smashing roar. For a moment the rushing water was five feet deep, sweeping with enormous force towards the side, and then a human body was washed against him, and frantically he clutched it and was swept with it back towards the rail. He felt his body bump against it, but desperately he held on to his burden; then, as the ship rocked slowly back, the two of them, still joined by his fierce grip, were rolled out exhausted on the wet planks. For a moment he knew no more.

IV

Two days later, as the boat train moved tranquilly south toward Paris, Adrian tried to persuade his children to look out the window at the Norman countryside.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he assured them. ‘All the little farms like toys. Why, in heaven’s name, won’t you look?’

‘I like the boat better,’ said Estelle.

Her parents exchanged an infanticidal glance.

‘The boat is still rocking for me,’ Eva said with a shiver. ‘Is it for you?’

‘No. Somehow, it all seems a long way off. Even the passengers looked unfamiliar going through the customs.’

‘Most of them hadn’t appeared above ground before.’

He hesitated. ‘By the way, I cashed Butterworth’s cheque for him.’

‘You’re a fool. You’ll never see the money again.’

‘He must have needed it pretty badly or he would not have come to me.’

A pale and wan girl, passing along the corridor, recognized them and put her head through the doorway.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Awful.’

‘Me, too,’ agreed Miss D’Amido. ‘I’m vainly hoping my fiancé will recognize me at the Gare du Nord. Do you know two waves went over the wireless room?’

‘So we heard,’ Adrian answered dryly.

She passed gracefully along the corridor and out of their life.

‘The real truth is that none of it happened,’ said Adrian after a moment. ‘It was a nightmare--an incredibly awful nightmare.’

‘Then, where are my pearls?’

‘Darling, there are better pearls in Paris. I’ll take the responsibility for those pearls. My real belief is that you saved the boat.’

‘Adrian, let’s never get to know anyone else, but just stay together always--just we two.’

He tucked her arm under his and they sat close. ‘Who do you suppose those Adrian Smiths on the boat were?’ he demanded. ‘It certainly wasn’t me.’

‘Nor me.’

‘It was two other people,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘There are so many Smiths in this world.’

SIX OF ONE--

Redbook
(February 1932)

Barnes stood on the wide stairs looking down through a wide hall into the living-room of the country place and at the group of youths. His friend Schofield was addressing some benevolent remarks to them, and Barnes did not want to interrupt; as he stood there, immobile, he seemed to be drawn suddenly into rhythm with the group below; he perceived them as statuesque beings, set apart, chiseled out of the Minnesota twilight that was setting on the big room.

In the first place all five, the two young Schofields and their friends, were fine-looking boys, very American, dressed in a careless but not casual way over well-set-up bodies, and with responsive faces open to all four winds. Then he saw that they made a design, the faces profile upon profile, the heads blond and dark, turning toward Mr. Schofield, the erect yet vaguely lounging bodies, never tense but ever ready under the flannels and the soft angora wool sweaters, the hands placed on other shoulders, as if to bring each one into the solid freemasonry of the group. Then suddenly, as though a group of models posing for a sculptor were being dismissed, the composition broke and they all moved toward the door. They left Barnes with a sense of having seen something more than five young men between sixteen and eighteen going out to sail or play tennis or golf, but having gained a sharp impression of a whole style, a whole mode of youth, something different from his own less assured, less graceful generation, something unified by standards that he didn’t know. He wondered vaguely what the standards of 1920 were, and whether they were worth anything--had a sense of waste, of much effort for a purely esthetic achievement. Then Schofield saw him and called him down into the living-room.

“Aren’t they a fine bunch of boys?” Schofield demanded. “Tell me, did you ever see a finer bunch?”

“A fine lot,” agreed Barnes, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. He felt a sudden premonition that his generation in its years of effort had made possible a Periclean age, but had evolved no prospective Pericles. They had set the scene: was the cast adequate?

“It isn’t just because two of them happen to be mine,” went on Schofield. “It’s self-evident. You couldn’t match that crowd in any city in the country. First place, they’re such a husky lot. Those two little Kavenaughs aren’t going to be big men--more like their father; but the oldest one could make any college hockey-team in the country right now.”

“How old are they?” asked Barnes.

“Well, Howard Kavenaugh, the oldest, is nineteen--going to Yale next year. Then comes my Wister--he’s eighteen, also going to Yale next year. You liked Wister, didn’t you? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. He’d make a great politician, that kid. Then there’s a boy named Larry Patt who wasn’t here today--he’s eighteen too, and he’s State golf champion. Fine voice too; he’s trying to get in Princeton.”