Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (373 page)

Henry Marston’s trembling became a shaking; it would be pleasant if this were the end and nothing more need be done, he thought, and with a certain hope he sat down on a stool. But it is seldom really the end, and after a while, as he became too exhausted to care, the shaking stopped and he was better. Going downstairs, looking as alert and self-possessed as any other officer of the bank, he spoke to two clients he knew, and set his face grimly toward noon.

“Well, Henry Clay Marston!” A handsome old man shook hands with him and took the chair beside his desk.

“Henry, I want to see you in regard to what we talked about the other night. How about lunch? In that green little place with all the trees.”

“Not lunch, Judge Waterbury; I’ve got an engagement.”

“I’ll talk now, then; because I’m leaving this afternoon. What do these plutocrats give you for looking important around here?”

Henry Marston knew what was coming.

“Ten thousand and certain expense money,” he answered.

“How would you like to come back to Richmond at about double that? You’ve been over here eight years and you don’t know the opportunities you’re missing. Why both my boys--”

Henry listened appreciatively, but this morning he couldn’t concentrate on the matter. He spoke vaguely about being able to live more comfortably in Paris and restrained himself from stating his frank opinion upon existence at home.

Judge Waterbury beckoned to a tall, pale man who stood at the mail desk.

“This is Mr. Wiese,” he said. “Mr. Wiese’s from downstate; he’s a halfway partner of mine.”

“Glad to meet you, suh.” Mr. Wiese’s voice was rather too deliberately Southern. “Understand the judge is makin’ you a proposition.”

“Yes,” Henry answered briefly. He recognized and detested the type--the prosperous sweater, presumably evolved from a cross between carpetbagger and poor white. When Wiese moved away, the judge said almost apologetically:

“He’s one of the richest men in the South, Henry.” Then, after a pause: “Come home, boy.”

“I’ll think it over, judge.” For a moment the gray and ruddy head seemed so kind; then it faded back into something one-dimensional, machine-finished, blandly and bleakly un-European. Henry Marston respected that open kindness--in the bank he touched it with daily appreciation, as a curator in a museum might touch a precious object removed in time and space; but there was no help in it for him; the questions which Henry Marston’s life propounded could be answered only in France. His seven generations of Virginia ancestors were definitely behind him every day at noon when he turned home.

Home was a fine high-ceiling apartment hewn from the palace of a Renaissance cardinal in the Rue Monsieur--the sort of thing Henry could not have afforded in America. Choupette, with something more than the rigid traditionalism of a French bourgeois taste, had made it beautiful, and moved through gracefully with their children. She was a frail Latin blonde with fine large features and vividly sad French eyes that had first fascinated Henry in a Grenoble
pension
in 1918. The two boys took their looks from Henry, voted the handsomest man at the University of Virginia a few years before the war.

Climbing the two broad flights of stairs, Henry stood panting a moment in the outside hall. It was quiet and cool here, and yet it was vaguely like the terrible thing that was going to happen. He heard a clock inside his apartment strike one, and inserted his key in the door.

The maid who had been in Choupette’s family for thirty years stood before him, her mouth open in the utterance of a truncated sigh.

“
Bonjour
, Louise.”

“Monsieur!” He threw his hat on a chair. “But, monsieur--but I thought monsieur said on the phone he was going to Tours for the children!”

“I changed my mind, Louise.”

He had taken a step forward, his last doubt melting away at the constricted terror in the woman’s face.

“Is madame home?”

Simultaneously he perceived a man’s hat and stick on the hall table and for the first time in his life he heard silence--a loud, singing silence, oppressive as heavy guns or thunder. Then, as the endless moment was broken by the maid’s terrified little cry, he pushed through the portières into the next room.

An hour later Doctor Derocco,
de la Faculté de Médecine,
rang the apartment bell. Choupette Marston, her face a little drawn and rigid, answered the door. For a moment they went through French forms; then:

“My husband has been feeling unwell for some weeks,” she said concisely. “Nevertheless, he did not complain in a way to make me uneasy. He has suddenly collapsed; he cannot articulate or move his limbs. All this, I must say, might have been precipitated by a certain indiscretion of mine--in all events, there was a violent scene, a discussion, and sometimes when he is agitated, my husband cannot comprehend well in French.”

“I will see him,” said the doctor; thinking: “Some things are comprehended instantly in all languages.”

During the next four weeks several people listened to strange speeches about one thousand chemises, and heard how all the population of Paris was becoming etherized by cheap gasoline--there was a consulting psychiatrist, not inclined to believe in any underlying mental trouble; there was a nurse from the American Hospital, and there was Choupette, frightened, defiant and, after her fashion, deeply sorry. A month later, when Henry awoke to his familiar room, lit with a dimmed lamp, he found her sitting beside his bed and reached out for her hand.

“I still love you,” he said--”that’s the odd thing.”

“Sleep, male cabbage.”

“At all costs,” he continued with a certain feeble irony, “you can count on me to adopt the Continental attitude.”

“Please! You tear at my heart.”

When he was sitting up in bed they were ostensibly close together again--closer than they had been for months.

“Now you’re going to have another holiday,” said Henry to the two boys, back from the country. “Papa has got to go to the seashore and get really well.”

“Will we swim?”

“And get drowned, my darlings?” Choupette cried. “But fancy, at your age. Not at all!”

So, at St. Jean de Luz they sat on the shore instead, and watched the English and Americans and a few hardy French pioneers of
le sport
voyage between raft and diving tower, motorboat and sand. There were passing ships, and bright islands to look at, and mountains reaching into cold zones, and red and yellow villas, called Fleur des Bois, Mon Nid, or Sans-Souci; and farther back, tired French villages of baked cement and gray stone.

Choupette sat at Henry’s side, holding a parasol to shelter her peach-bloom skin from the sun.

“Look!” she would say, at the sight of tanned American girls. “Is that lovely? Skin that will be leather at thirty--a sort of brown veil to hide all blemishes, so that everyone will look alike. And women of a hundred kilos in such bathing suits! Weren’t clothes intended to hide Nature’s mistakes?”

Henry Clay Marston was a Virginian of the kind who are prouder of being Virginians than of being Americans. That mighty word printed across a continent was less to him than the memory of his grandfather, who freed his slaves in ‘58, fought from Manassas to Appomattox, knew Huxley and Spencer as light reading, and believed in caste only when it expressed the best of race.

To Choupette all this was vague. Her more specific criticisms of his compatriots were directed against the women.

“How would you place them?” she exclaimed. “Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses--they are all the same. Look! Where would I be if I tried to act like your friend, Madame de Richepin? My father was a professor in a provincial university, and I have certain things I wouldn’t do because they wouldn’t please my class, my family. Madame de Richepin has other things she wouldn’t do because of her class, her family.” Suddenly she pointed to an American girl going into the water: “But that young lady may be a stenographer and yet be compelled to warp herself, dressing and acting as if she had all the money in the world.”

“Perhaps she will have, some day.”

“That’s the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine. That’s why all their faces over thirty are discontented and unhappy.”

Though Henry was in general agreement, he could not help being amused at Choupette’s choice of target this afternoon. The girl--she was perhaps eighteen--was obviously acting like nothing but herself--she was what his father would have called a thoroughbred. A deep, thoughtful face that was pretty only because of the irrepressible determination of the perfect features to be recognized, a face that could have done without them and not yielded up its poise and distinction.

In her grace, at once exquisite and hardy, she was that perfect type of American girl that makes one wonder if the male is not being sacrificed to it, much as, in the last century, the lower strata in England were sacrificed to produce the governing class.

The two young men, coming out of the water as she went in, had large shoulders and empty faces. She had a smile for them that was no more than they deserved--that must do until she chose one to be the father of her children and gave herself up to destiny. Until then--Henry Marston was glad about her as her arms, like flying fish, clipped the water in a crawl, as her body spread in a swan dive or doubled in a jackknife from the springboard and her head appeared from the depth, jauntily flipping the damp hair away.

The two young men passed near.

“They push water,” Choupette said, “then they go elsewhere and push other water. They pass months in France and they couldn’t tell you the name of the President. They are parasites such as Europe has not known in a hundred years.”

But Henry had stood up abruptly, and now all the people on the beach were suddenly standing up. Something had happened out there in the fifty yards between the deserted raft and the shore. The bright head showed upon the surface; it did not flip water now, but called: “
Au secours!
Help!” in a feeble and frightened voice.

“Henry!” Choupette cried. “Stop! Henry!”

The beach was almost deserted at noon, but Henry and several others were sprinting toward the sea; the two young Americans heard, turned and sprinted after them. There was a frantic little time with half a dozen bobbing heads in the water. Choupette, still clinging to her parasol, but managing to wring her hands at the same time, ran up and down the beach crying: “Henry! Henry!”

Now there were more helping hands, and then two swelling groups around prostrate figures on the shore. The young fellow who pulled in the girl brought her around in a minute or so, but they had more trouble getting the water out of Henry, who had never learned to swim.

II

“This is the man who didn’t know whether he could swim, because he’d never tried.”

Henry got up from his sun chair, grinning. It was next morning, and the saved girl had just appeared on the beach with her brother. She smiled back at Henry, brightly casual, appreciative rather than grateful.

“At the very least, I owe it to you to teach you how,” she said.

“I’d like it. I decided that in the water yesterday, just before I went down the tenth time.”

“You can trust me. I’ll never again eat chocolate ice cream before going in.”

As she went on into the water, Choupette asked: “How long do you think we’ll stay here? After all, this life wearies one.”

“We’ll stay till I can swim. And the boys too.”

“Very well. I saw a nice bathing suit in two shades of blue for fifty francs that I will buy you this afternoon.”

Feeling a little paunchy and unhealthily white, Henry, holding his sons by the hand, took his body into the water. The breakers leaped at him, staggering him, while the boys yelled with ecstasy; the returning water curled threateningly around his feet as it hurried back to sea. Farther out, he stood waist deep with other intimidated souls, watching the people dive from the raft tower, hoping the girl would come to fulfill her promise, and somewhat embarrassed when she did.

“I’ll start with your eldest. You watch and then try it by yourself.”

He floundered in the water. It went into his nose and started a raw stinging; it blinded him; it lingered afterward in his ears, rattling back and forth like pebbles for hours. The sun discovered him, too, peeling long strips of parchment from his shoulders, blistering his back so that he lay in a feverish agony for several nights. After a week he swam, painfully, pantingly, and not very far. The girl taught him a sort of crawl, for he saw that the breast stroke was an obsolete device that lingered on with the inept and the old. Choupette caught him regarding his tanned face in the mirror with a sort of fascination, and the youngest boy contracted some sort of mild skin infection in the sand that retired him from competition. But one day Henry battled his way desperately to the float and drew himself up on it with his last breath.

“That being settled,” he told the girl, when he could speak, “I can leave St. Jean tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What will you do now?”

“My brother and I are going to Antibes; there’s swimming there all through October. Then Florida.”

“And swim?” he asked with some amusement.

“Why, yes. We’ll swim.”

“Why do you swim?”

“To get clean,” she answered surprisingly.

“Clean from what?”

She frowned. “I don’t know why I said that. But it feels clean in the sea.”

“Americans are too particular about that,” he commented.

“How could anyone be?”

“I mean we’ve got too fastidious even to clean up our messes.”

“I don’t know.”

“But tell me why you--” He stopped himself in surprise. He had been about to ask her to explain a lot of other things--to say what was clean and unclean, what was worth knowing and what was only words--to open up a new gate to life. Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.