Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (411 page)

They made love. For a moment they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was closer than an embrace, more urgent than a call. There were no words for it. Had there been, and had Mae heard them, she would have fled to the darkest corner of the ladies’ washroom and hid her face in a paper towel.

“We want to come on board!” Bill called. “We’re life-preserver salesmen! How about pulling us around to the side?”

Mr. McVitty, the principal, arrived on the scene too late to interfere. The three young Harvard graduates — Ellsworth Ames soaking wet, unconsciously Byronic with his dark curls plastered damply to his forehead, Hamilton Abbot and Bill Frothington surer-footed and dry — climbed and were hoisted over the side. The motorboat bobbed on behind.

With a sort of instinctive reverence for the moment, Mae Purley hung back in the shadow, not through lack of confidence but through excess of it. She knew that he would come straight to her. That was never the trouble and never had been — the trouble was in keeping up her own interest after she had satisfied the deep but casual curiosity of her lips. But tonight was going to be different. She knew this when she saw that he was in no hurry; he was leaning against the rail making a couple of high-school seniors — who suddenly seemed very embryonic to themselves — feel at ease.

He looked at her once.

“It’s all right,” his eyes said, without a movement of his face, “I understand as well as you. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

Life burned high in them both; the steamer and its people were at a distance and in darkness. It was one of those times.

“I’m a Harvard man,” Mr. McVitty was saying, “class of 1907.” The three young men nodded with polite indifference. “I’m glad to know we won the race,” continued the principal, simulating a reborn enthusiasm which had never existed. “I haven’t been to New London in fifteen years.”

“Bill here rowed Number Two,” said Ames. “That’s a coaching launch we’ve got.”

“Oh. You were on the crew?”

“Crew’s over now,” said Bill impatiently. “Everything’s over.”

“Well, let me congratulate you.”

Shortly they froze him into silence. They were not his sort of Harvard man; they wouldn’t have known his name in four years there together. But they would have been much more gracious and polite about it had it not been this particular night. They hadn’t broken away from the hilarious mobs of classmates and relatives at New London to exchange discomfort with the master of a mill-town high school.

“Can we dance?” they demanded.

A few minutes later Bill and Mae Purley were walking down the deck side by side. Life had met over the body of Al Fitzpatrick, engulfing him. The two clear voices:

“Perhaps you’ll dance with me,” with the soft assurance of the moonlight itself, and: “I’d love to,” were nothing that could be argued about, not by twice what Al Fitzpatrick pretended to be. The most consoling thought in Al’s head was that they might be fought over.

What was it they said? Did you hear it? Can you remember? Later that night she remembered only his pale wavy hair and the long limbs that she followed around the dancing floor.

She was thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, then with a rush, pouring out of her heart, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips alone had escaped metamorphosis, whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

“Then you live near?”

“Only about twenty-five miles from you,” Bill said. “Isn’t it funny?”

“Isn’t it funny?”

They looked at each other, a trifle awed in the face of such manifest destiny. They stood between two lifeboats on the top deck. Mae’s hand lay on his arm, playing with a loose ravel of his tweed coat. They had not kissed yet — that was coming in a minute. That was coming any time now, as soon as every cup of emotional moonlight had been drained of its possibilities and cast aside. She was seventeen.

“Are you glad I live near?”

She might have said “I’m delighted” or “Of course I am.” But she whispered, “Yes; are you?”

“Mae — with an
e,”
he said and laughed in a husky whisper. Already they had a joke together. “You look so darn beautiful.”

She accepted the compliment in silence, meeting his eyes. He pressed her to him by her merest elbow in a way that would have been impossible had she not been eager too. He never expected to see her after tonight.

“Mae.” His whisper was urgent. Mae’s eyes came nearer, grew larger, dissolved against his face, like eyes on a screen. Her frail body breathed imperceptibly in his arms.

A dance stopped. There was clapping for an encore. Then clapping for another encore with what had seemed only a poor bar of music in between. There was another dance, scarcely longer than a kiss. They were heavily endowed for love, these two, and both of them had played with it before.

Down below, Al Fitzpatrick’s awareness of time and space had reached a pitch that would have been invaluable to an investigator of the new mathematics. Bit by bit the boat presented itself to him as it really was, a wooden hulk garish with forty-watt bulbs, peopled by the commonplace young people of a commonplace town. The river was water, the moon was a flat meaningless symbol in the sky. He was in agony — which is to speak tritely. Rather, he was in deadly fear; his throat was dry, his mouth drooped into a hurt half moon as he tried to talk to some of the other boys — shy unhappy boys, who loitered around the stern.

Al was older than the rest — he was twenty-two, and out in the world for seven years. He worked in the Hammacker Mills and attended special high-school classes at night. Another year might see him assistant manager of the shops, and Mae Purley, with about as much eagerness as was to be expected in a girl who was having everything her own way, had half promised to marry him when she was eighteen. His wasn’t a temperament to go to pieces. When he had brooded up to the limit of his nature he felt a necessity for action. Miserably and desperately he climbed up to the top deck to make trouble.

Bill and Mae were standing close together by the lifeboat, quiet, absorbed and happy. They moved a little apart as he came near. “Is that you, Mae?” called Al in a hard voice. “Aren’t you going to come down and dance?”

“We were just coming.”

They walked toward him in a trance.

“What’s the idea?” Al said hoarsely. “You’ve been up here over two hours.”

At their indifference he felt pain swelling and spreading inside him, constricting his breath.

“Have you met Mr. Frothington?” She laughed shyly at the unfamiliar name.

“Yeah,” said Al rudely. “I don’t see the idea of his keeping you up here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bill. “We didn’t realize.”

“Oh, you didn’t? Well, I did.” His jealousy cut through their absorption. They acknowledged it by an effort to hurry, to be impersonal, to defer to his wishes. Ungraciously he followed and the three of them came in a twinkling upon a scene that had suddenly materialized on the deck below.

Ellsworth Ames, smiling, but a little flushed, was leaning against the rail while Ham Abbot attempted to argue with a distraught young husky who kept trying to brush past him and get at Ames. Near them stood an indignant girl with another girl’s soothing arm around her waist.

“What is it?” demanded Bill quickly.

The distraught young man glared at him. “Just a couple of snobs that come here and try to spoil everybody else’s good time!” he cried wildly.

“He doesn’t like me,” said Ellsworth lightly. “I invited his girl to dance.”

“She didn’t want to dance with you!” shouted the other. “You think you’re so damn smart — ask her if she wanted to dance with you.”

The girl murmured indistinguishable words and disclaimed all responsibility by beginning to cry.

“You’re too fresh, that’s the trouble!” continued her defender. “I know what you said to her when you danced with her before. What do you think these girls are? They’re just as good as anybody, see?”

Al Fitzpatrick moved in closer.

“Let’s put ‘em all off the boat,” he suggested, stubborn and ashamed. “They haven’t got any business butting in here.”

A mild protest went up from the crowd, especially from the girls, and Abbot put his hand conciliatingly on the husky’s shoulder. But it was too late.

“You’ll put me off?” Ellsworth was saying coldly. “If you try to lay your hands on me I’ll rearrange your whole face.”

“Shut up, Ellie!” snapped Bill. “No use getting disagreeable. They don’t want us; we’d better go.” He stepped close to Mae, and whispered, “Good night. Don’t forget what I said. I’ll drive over and see you Sunday afternoon.”

As he pressed her hand quickly and turned away he saw the argumentative boy swing suddenly at Ames, who caught the blow with his left arm. In a moment they were slugging and panting, knee to knee in the small space left by the gathering crowd. Simultaneously Bill felt a hand pluck at his sleeve and he turned to face Al Fitzpatrick. Then the deck was in an uproar. Abbot’s attempt to separate Ames and his antagonist was misinterpreted; instantly he was involved in a battle of his own, cannonading against the other pairs, slipping on the smooth deck, bumping against noncombatants and scurrying girls who sent up shrill cries. He saw Al Fitzpatrick slap the deck suddenly with his whole body, not to rise again. He heard calls of “Get Mr. McVitty!” and then his own opponent was dropped by a blow he did not strike, and Bill’s voice said: “Come on to the boat!”

The next few minutes streaked by in wild confusion. Avoiding Bill, whose hammerlike arms had felled their two champions, the high-school boys tried to pull down Ham and Ellie, and the harassed group edged and revolved toward the stern rail.

“Hidden-ball stuff!” Bill panted. “Save it for Haughton. I’m G-Gardner, you’re Bradlee and Mahan — hip!”

Mr. McVitty’s alarmed face appeared above the combat, and his high voice, ineffectual at first, finally pierced the heat of battle.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves! Bob — Cecil — George Roberg! Let go, I say!”

Abruptly the battle was over and the combatants, breathing hard, eyed one another impassively in the moonlight.

Ellie laughed and held out a pack of cigarettes. Bill untied the motor boat and walked forward with the painter to bring it alongside.

“They claim you insulted one of the girls,” said Mr. McVitty uncertainly. “Now that’s no way to behave after we took you aboard.”

“That’s nonsense,” snapped Ellie, between gasps. “I only told her I’d like to bite her neck.”

“Do you think that was a very gentlemanly thing to say?” demanded Mr. McVitty heatedly.

“Come on, Ellie!” Bill cried. “Good-by, everybody! Sorry there was such a row!”

They were already shadows of the past as they slipped one by one over the rail. The girls were turning cautiously back to their own men, and not one of them answered, and not one of them waved farewell.

“A bunch of meanies,” remarked Ellie ironically. “I wish all you ladies had one neck so I could bite it all at once. I’m a glutton for ladies’ necks.”

Feeble retorts went up here and there like muffled pistol shots.

“
Good night, ladies,
” Ham sang, as Bill shoved away from the side:

Good night, ladies,

Good night, ladies,

We’re going to leave you now-ow-ow.

The boat moved up the river through the summer night, while the launch, touched by its swell, rocked to and fro gently in the wide path of the moon.

II

On the following Sunday afternoon Bill Frothington drove over from Truro to the isolated rural slum known as Wheatly Village. He had stolen away from a house full of guests, assembled for his sister’s wedding, to pursue what his mother would have called an “unworthy affair.” But behind him lay an extremely successful career at Harvard and a youth somewhat more austere than the average, and this fall he would disappear for life into the banking house of Read, Hoppe and Company in Boston. He felt that the summer was his own. And had the purity of his intentions toward Mae Purley been questioned he would have defended himself with righteous anger. He had been thinking of her for five days. She attracted him violently, and he was following the attraction with eyes that did not ask to see.

Mae lived in the less offensive quarter of town on the third floor of its only apartment house, an unsuccessful relic of those more prosperous days of New England textile weaving that ended twenty years ago. Her father was a timekeeper who had fallen out of the white-collar class; Mae’s two older brothers were working at the loom, and Bill’s only impression as he entered the dingy flat was one of hopeless decay. The mountainous, soiled mother, at once suspicious and deferential, and the anaemic, beaten Anglo-Saxon asleep on the couch after his Sunday dinner were no more than shadows against the poor walls. But Mae was clean and fresh. No breath of squalor touched her. The pale pure youth of her cheeks, and her thin childish body shining through a new organdie dress, measured up full to the summer day.

“Where you going to take my little girl?” Mrs. Purley asked anxiously.

“I’m going to run away with her,” he said, laughing.

“Not with my little girl.”

“Oh, yes, I am. I don’t see why she hasn’t been run away with before.”

“Not my little girl.”

They held hands going downstairs, but not for an hour did the feeling of being intimate strangers pass. When the first promise of evening blew into the air at five o’clock and the light changed from white to yellow, their eyes met once in a certain way and Bill knew that it was time. They turned up a side road and down a wagon track, and in a moment the spell was around them again — the equal and opposite urge that drew them together. They talked about each other and then their voices grew quiet and they kissed, while chestnut blossoms slid in white diagonals through the air and fell across the car. After a long while an instinct told her that they had stayed long enough. He drove her home.