Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (405 page)

Thanks to his own foresight everything was in order. If he hadn’t been able to be specific over the phone the coup toward which he had been working would have ended in failure. When it was brought off he was due for a rest and he knew it acutely. He’d had sharp fierce headaches in the past few weeks — he had never known a headache before.

The commissioners had been indefinite as to what time he could expect them that night. They were engaged for dinner and would be free somewhere between nine and eleven. McComas reached home at six, rested for a half hour in a steaming bath and then stretched himself gratefully on his bed. Tomorrow he would join Stella and the children in the country. His week-ends had been too infrequent in this long summer of living alone in the Ninety-second Street house with a deaf housekeeper. Ted Drinkwater would have nothing to say now, for this deal, the most ambitious of all, was his own. He had originated and engineered it — it seemed as if fate had arranged Drinkwater’s absence in order to give him the opportunity of concluding it himself.

He was hungry. He considered whether to take cold chicken and buttered toast at the hands of the housekeeper or to dress and go out to the little restaurant on the corner. Idly he reached his hand toward the bell, abandoned the attempt in the air, overcome by a pleasing languor which dispelled the headache that had bothered him all day.

That reminded him to take some aspirin and as he got up to go toward the bureau he was surprised at the weakened condition in which the hot bath had left him. After a step or two he turned about suddenly and plunged rather than fell back upon the bed. A faint feeling of worry passed over him and then an iron belt seemed to wind itself around his head and tighten, sending a spasm of pain through his body. He would ring for Mrs. Corcoran, who would call a doctor to fix him up. In a moment he would reach up his hand to the bell beside his bed. In a minute — he wondered at his indecision — then he cried out sharply as he realized the cause of it. His will had already given his brain the order and his brain had signaled it to his hand. It was his hand that would not obey.

He looked at his hand. Rather white, relaxed, motionless, it lay upon the counterpane. Again he gave it a command, felt his neck cords tighten with the effort. It did not move.

“It’s asleep,” he thought, but with rising alarm. “It’ll pass off in a minute.”

Then he tried to reach his other hand across his body to massage away the numbness but the other hand remained with a sort of crazy indifference on its own side of the bed. He tried to lift his foot — his knees. . . .

After a few seconds he gave a snort of nervous laughter. There was something ridiculous about not being able to move your own foot. It was like someone else’s foot, a foot in a dream. For a moment he had the fantastic notion that he must be asleep. But no — the unmistakable sense of reality was in the room.

“This is the end,” he thought, without fear, almost without emotion. “This thing, whatever it is, is creeping over me. In a minute I shall be dead.”

But the minute passed and another minute, and nothing happened, nothing moved except the hand of the little leather clock on his dresser which crept slowly over the point of seven minutes to seven. He turned his head quickly from side to side, shaking it as a runner kicks his legs to warm up. But there was no answering response from the rest of his body, only a slight rise and fall between belly and chest as he breathed out and in and a faint tremble of his helpless limbs from the faint tremble of the bed.

“Help!” he called out, “Mrs. Corcoran. Mrs. Cor-cor-an, help! Mrs. Corcor — “

There was no answer. She was in the kitchen probably. No way of calling her except by the bell, two feet over his head. Nothing to do but lie there until this passed off, or until he died, or until someone inquired for him at the front door.

The clock ticked past nine o’clock. In a house two blocks away the four members of the commission finished dinner, looked at their watches and issued forth into the September night with brief-cases in their hands. Outside a private detective nodded and took his place beside the chauffeur in the waiting limousine. One of the men gave an address on Ninety-second Street.

Ten minutes later Henry McComas heard the doorbell ring through the house. If Mrs. Corcoran was in the kitchen she would hear it too. On the contrary if she was in her room with the door shut she would hear nothing.

He waited, listening intently for the sound of footsteps. A minute passed. Two minutes. The doorbell rang again.

“Mrs. Corcoran!” he cried desperately.

Sweat began to roll from his forehead and down the folds of his neck. Again he shook his head desperately from side to side, and his will made a last mighty effort to kick his limbs into life. Not a movement, not a sound, except a third peal of the bell, impatient and sustained this time and singing like a trumpet of doom in his ear.

Suddenly he began to swear at the top of his voice calling in turn upon Mrs. Corcoran, upon the men in the street, asking them to break down the door, reassuring, imprecating, explaining. When he finished, the bell had stopped ringing; there was silence once more within the house.

A few minutes later the four men outside reentered their limousine and drove south and west toward the docks. They were to sleep on board ship that night. They worked late for there were papers to go ashore but long after the last of them was asleep Henry McComas lay awake and felt the sweat rolling from his neck and forehead. Perhaps all his body was sweating. He couldn’t tell.

For a year and a half Henry McComas lay silent in hushed and darkened rooms and fought his way back to life. Stella listened while a famous specialist explained that certain nervous systems were so constituted that only the individual could judge what was, or wasn’t, a strain. The specialist realized that a host of hypochondriacs imposed upon this fact to nurse and pamper themselves through life when in reality they were as hardy and phlegmatic as the policeman on the corner, but it was nevertheless a fact. Henry McComas’ large, lazy body had been the protection and insulation of a nervous intensity as fine and taut as a hair wire. With proper rest it functioned brilliantly for three or four hours a day — fatigued ever so slightly over the danger line it snapped like a straw.

Stella listened, her face wan and white. Then a few weeks later she went to Ted Drinkwater’s office and told him what the specialist had said. Drinkwater frowned uncomfortably — he remarked that specialists were paid to invent consoling nonsense. He was sorry but business must go on, and he thought it best for everyone, including Henry, that the partnership be dissolved. He didn’t blame Henry but he couldn’t forget that just because his partner didn’t see fit to keep in good condition they had missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

After a year Henry McComas found one day that he could move his arms down to the wrists; from that hour onward he grew rapidly well. In 1919 he went into business for himself with very little except his abilities and his good name and by the time this story ends, in 1926, his name alone was good for several million dollars.

What follows is another story. There are different people in it and it takes place when Henry McComas’ personal problems are more or less satisfactorily solved; yet it belongs to what has gone before. It concerns Henry McComas’ daughter.

Honoria was nineteen, with her father’s yellow hair (and, in the current fashion, not much more of it), her mother’s small pointed chin and eyes that she might have invented herself, deep-set yellow eyes with short stiff eyelashes that sprang from them like the emanations from a star in a picture. Her figure was slight and childish and when she smiled you were afraid that she might expose the loss of some baby teeth, but the teeth were there, a complete set, little and white. Many men had looked upon Honoria in flower. She expected to be married in the fall.

Whom to marry was another matter. There was a young man who traveled incessantly back and forth between London and Chicago playing in golf tournaments. If she married him she would at least be sure of seeing her husband every time he passed through New York. There was Max Van Camp who was unreliable, she thought, but good-looking in a brisk sketchy way. There was a dark man named Strangler who played polo and would probably beat her with a riding crop like the heroes of Ethel M. Dell. And there was Russel Codman, her father’s right-hand man, who had a future and whom she liked best of all.

He was not unlike her father in many ways — slow in thought, leisurely and inclined to stoutness — and perhaps these qualities had first brought him to Henry McComas’ favor. He had a genial manner and a hearty confident smile, and he had made up his mind about Honoria when he first saw her stroll into her father’s office one day three years before. But so far he hadn’t asked her to marry him, and though this annoyed Honoria she liked him for it too — he wanted to be secure and successful before he asked her to share his life. Max Van Camp, on the other hand, had asked her a dozen times. He was a quick-witted “alive” young man of the new school, continually bubbling over with schemes that never got beyond McComas’ waste-paper basket — one of those curious vagabonds of business who drift from position to position like strolling minstrels and yet manage to keep moving in an upward direction all their lives. He had appeared in McComas’ office the year before bearing an introductory letter from a friend.

He got the position. For a long while neither he nor his employer, nor anyone in the office, was quite sure what the position was. McComas at that time was interested in exporting, in real estate developments and, as a venture, in the possibilities of carrying the chain store idea into new fields.

Van Camp wrote advertising, investigated properties and accomplished such vague duties as might come under the phrase, “We’ll get Van Camp to do that.” He gave the effect always of putting much more clamor and energy into a thing than it required and there were those who, because he was somewhat flashy and often wasted himself like an unemployed dynamo, called him a bluff and pronounced that he was usually wrong.

“What’s the matter with you young fellows?” Henry McComas said to him one day. “You seem to think business is some sort of trick game, discovered about 1910, that nobody ever heard of before. You can’t even look at a proposition unless you put it into this new language of your own. What do you mean you want to ‘sell’ me this proposition? Do you want to suggest it — or are you asking money for it?”

“Just a figure of speech, Mr. McComas.”

“Well, don’t fool yourself that it’s anything else. Business sense is just common sense with your personal resources behind it — nothing more.”

“I’ve heard Mr. Codman say that,” agreed Max Van Camp meekly.

“He’s probably right. See here — “ he looked keenly at Van Camp; “how would you like a little competition with that same gentleman? I’ll put up a bonus of five hundred dollars on who comes in ahead.”

“I’d like nothing better, Mr. McComas.”

“All right. Now listen. We’ve got retail hardware stores in every city of over a thousand population in Ohio and Indiana. Some fellow named McTeague is horning in on the idea — he’s taken the towns of twenty thousand and now he’s got a chain as long as mine. I want to fight him in the towns of that size. Codman’s gone to Ohio. Suppose you take Indiana. Stay six weeks. Go to every town of over twenty thousand in the state and buy up the best hardware stores in sight.”

“Suppose I can only get the second-best?”

“Do what you can. There isn’t any time to waste because McTeague’s got a good start on us. Think you can leave tonight?”

He gave some further instructions while Van Camp fidgeted impatiently. His mind had grasped what was required of him and he wanted to get away. He wanted to ask Honoria McComas one more question, the same one, before it was time to go.

He received the same answer because Honoria knew she was going to marry Russel Codman, just as soon as he asked her to. Sometimes when she was alone with Codman she would shiver with excitement, feeling that now surely the time had come at last — in a moment the words would flow romantically from his lips. What the words would be she didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, but they would be thrilling and extraordinary, not like the spontaneous appeals of Max Van Camp which she knew by heart.

She waited excitedly for Russel Codman’s return from the West. This time, unless he spoke, she would speak herself. Perhaps he didn’t want her after all, perhaps there was someone else. In that case she would marry Max Van Camp and make him miserable by letting him see that he was getting only the remnants of a blighted life.

Then before she knew it the six weeks were up and Russel Codman came back to New York. He reported to her father that he was going to see her that night. In her excitement Honoria found excuses for being near the front door. The bell rang finally and a maid stepped past her and admitted a visitor into the hall.

“Max,” she cried.

He came toward her and she saw that his face was tired and white.

“Will you marry me?” he demanded without preliminaries.

She sighed.

“How many times, Max?”

“I’ve lost count,” he said cheerfully. “But I haven’t even begun. Do I understand that you refuse?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Waiting for Codman?”

She grew annoyed.

“That’s not your affair.”

“Where’s your father?”

She pointed, not deigning to reply.

Max entered the library where McComas rose to meet him.

“Well?” inquired the older man. “How did you make out?”

“How did Codman make out?” demanded Van Camp.

“Codman did well. He bought about eighteen stores — in several cases the very stores McTeague was after.”

“I knew he would,” said Van Camp.

“I hope you did the same.”

“No,” said Van Camp unhappily. “I failed.”

“What happened?” McComas slouched his big body reflectively back in his chair and waited.

“I saw it was no use,” said Van Camp after a moment. “I don’t know what sort of places Codman picked up in Ohio but if it was anything like Indiana they weren’t worth buying. These towns of twenty thousand haven’t got three good hardware stores. They’ve got one man who won’t sell out on account of the local wholesaler; then mere’s one man that McTeague’s got, and after that only little places on the corner. Anything else you’ll have to build up yourself. I saw right away that it wasn’t worth while.” He broke off. “How many places did Codman buy?”