Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (413 page)

“Me too,” whispered Bill to himself. “Me too.”

Still he sat there lazily for a moment, listening to the sounds clear and distinct now from the open deck: the high echolalia of the girls, the boys calling significant but obscure jokes to one another across the night. He was feeling fine. The air seemed to have distributed the applejack to all the rusty and unused corners of his body. He bought another pint, stowed it in his hip pocket and walked on board with all the satisfaction, the insouciance of a trans-atlantic traveler.

A girl standing in a group near the gangplank raised her eyes to him as he went past. She was slight and fair. Her mouth curved down and then broke upward as she smiled, half at him, half at the man beside her. Someone made a remark and the group laughed. Once again her glance slipped sideways and met his for an instant as he passed by.

Mr. McVitty was on the top deck with half a dozen other teachers, who moved aside at Bill’s breezy approach.

“Good evening, Mr. McVitty. You don’t remember me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir.” The principal regarded him with tentative noncommittal eyes.

“Yet I took a trip with you on this same boat, exactly eleven years ago tonight.”

“This boat, sir, was only built last year.”

“Well, a boat like it,” said Bill. “I wouldn’t have known the difference myself.”

Mr. McVitty made no reply. After a moment Bill continued confidently, “We found that night that we were both sons of John Harvard.”

“Yes?”

“In fact on that very day I had been pulling an oar against what I might refer to as dear old Yale.”

Mr. McVitty’s eyes narrowed. He came closer to Bill and his nose wrinkled slightly.

“Old Eli,” said Bill; “in fact, Eli Yale.”

“I see,” said Mr. McVitty dryly. “And what can I do for you tonight?”

Someone came up with a question and in the enforced silence it occurred to Bill that he was present on the slightest of all pretexts — a previous and unacknowledged acquaintance. He was relieved when a dull rumble and a quiver of the deck indicated that they had left the shore.

Mr. McVitty, disengaged, turned toward him with a slight frown. “I seem to remember you now,” he said. “We took three of you aboard from a motor boat and we let you dance. Unfortunately the evening ended in a fight.”

Bill hesitated. In eleven years his relation to Mr. McVitty had somehow changed. He recalled Mr. McVitty as a more negligible, more easily dealt with person. There had been no such painful difficulties before.

“Perhaps you wonder how I happen to be here?” he suggested mildly.

“To be frank, I do, Mr —  — -”

“Frothington,” supplied Bill, and he added brazenly, “It’s rather a sentimental excursion for me. My greatest romance began on the evening you speak of. That was when I first met — my wife.”

Mr. McVitty’s attention was caught at last. “You married one of our girls?”

Bill nodded. “That’s why I wanted to take this trip tonight.”

“Your wife’s with you?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand —  — -” He broke off, and suggested gently,

“Or maybe I do. Your wife is dead?”

After a moment Bill nodded. Somewhat to his surprise two great tears rolled suddenly down his face.

Mr. McVitty put his hand on Bill’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I understand your feeling, Mr. Frothington, and I respect it. Please make yourself at home.”

After a nibble at his bottle Bill stood in the door of the salon watching the dance. It might have been eleven years ago. There were the high-school characters that he and Ham and Ellie had laughed at afterward — the fat boy who surely played center on the football team and the adolescent hero with the pompadour and the blatant good manners, president of his class. The pretty girl who had looked at him by the gangplank danced past him, and with a quick lift of his heart he placed her, too; her confidence and the wide but careful distribution of her favors — she was the popular girl, as Mae had been eleven years before.

Next time she went past he touched the shoulder of the boy she was dancing with. “May I have some of this?” he said.

“What?” her partner gasped.

“May I have some of this dance?”

The boy stared at him without relinquishing his hold.

“Oh, it’s all right, Red,” she said impatiently. “That’s the way they do now.”

Red stepped sulkily aside. Bill bent his arm as nearly as he could into the tortuous clasp that they were all using, and started.

“I saw you talking to Mr. McVitty,” said the girl, looking up into his face with a bright smile. “I don’t know you, but I guess it’s all right.”

“I saw you before that.”

“When?”

“Getting on the boat.”

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“May Schaffer. What’s the matter?”

“Do you spell it with an
e?
”

“No; why?”

A quartet of boys had edged toward them. One of its members suddenly shot out as if propelled from inside the group and bumped awkwardly against Bill.

“Can I have part of this dance?” asked the boy with a sort of giggle.

Without enthusiasm Bill let go. When the next dance began he cut in again. She was lovely. Her happiness in herself, in the evening would have transfigured a less pretty girl. He wanted to talk to her alone and was about to suggest that they go outside when there was a repetition of what had happened before — a young man was apparently shot by force from a group to Bill’s side.

“Can I have part of this dance?”

Bill joined Mr. McVitty by the rail. “Pleasant evening,” he remarked. “Don’t you dance?”

“I enjoy dancing,” said Mr. McVitty; and he added pointedly, “In my position it doesn’t seem quite the thing to dance with young girls.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Bill pleasantly. “Have a drink?”

Mr. McVitty walked suddenly away.

When he danced with May again he was cut in on almost immediately. People were cutting in all over the floor now — evidently he had started something. He cut back, and again he started to suggest that they go outside, but he saw that her attention was held by some horseplay going on across the room.

“I got a swell love nest up in the Bronx,” somebody was saying.

“Won’t you come outside?” said Bill. “There’s the most wonderful moon.”

“I’d rather dance.”

“We could dance out there.”

She leaned away from him and looked up with innocent scorn into his eyes.

“Where’d you get it?” she said.

“Get what?”

“All the happiness.”

Before he could answer, someone cut in. For a moment he imagined that the boy had said, “Part of this dance, daddy?” but his annoyance at May’s indifference drove the idea from his mind. Next time he went to the point at once.

“I live near here,” he said. “I’d be awfully pleased if I could call and drive you over for a week-end sometime.”

“What?” she asked vaguely. Again she was listening to a miniature farce being staged in the corner.

“My wife would like so much to have you,” went on Bill. Great dreams of what he could do for this girl for old times’ sake rose in his mind.

Her head swung toward him curiously. “Why, Mr. McVitty told somebody your wife was dead.”

“She isn’t,” said Bill.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the inevitable catapult coming and danced quickly away from it.

A voice rang out: “Just look at old daddy step.”

“Ask him if I can have some of this dance.”

Afterward Bill only remembered the evening up to that point. A crowd swirled around him and someone kept demanding persistently who was a young boiler maker.

He decided, naturally enough, to teach them a lesson, as he had done before, and he told them so. Then there was a long discussion as to whether he could swim. After that the confusion deepened; there were blows and a short sharp struggle. He picked up the story himself in what must have been several minutes later, when his head emerged from the cool waters of the Thames River.

The river was white with the moon, which had changed from rosy gold to a wafer of shining cheese on high. It was some time before he could locate the direction of the shore, but he moved around unworried in the water. The boat was a mere speck now, far down the river, and he laughed to think how little it all mattered, how little anything mattered. Then, feeling sure that he had his wind and wondering if the taxi was still waiting at Wheatly Village, he struck out for the dark shore.

IV

He was worried as he drew near home next afternoon, possessed of a dark, unfounded fear. It was based, of course, on his own silly transgression. Stella would somehow hear of it. In his reaction from the debonair confidence of last night, it seemed inevitable that Stella would hear of it.

“Who’s here?” he asked the butler immediately.

“No one, sir. The Ameses came about an hour ago, but there was no word, so they went on. They said —  — -”

“Isn’t my wife here?”

“Mrs. Frothington left yesterday just after you.”

The whips of panic descended upon him.

“How long after me?”

“Almost immediately, sir. The telephone rang and she answered it, and almost immediately she had her bag packed and left the house.”

“Mr. Ad Haughton didn’t come?”

“I haven’t seen Mr. Haughton.”

It had happened. The spirit of adventure had seized Stella too. He knew that her life had been not without a certain pressure from sentimental men, but that she would ever go anywhere without telling him —  — -

He threw himself face downward on a couch. What had happened? He had never meant things to happen. Was that what she had meant when she had looked at him in that peculiar way the other night?

He went upstairs. Almost as soon as he entered the big bedroom he saw the note, written on blue stationery lest he miss it against the white pillow. In his misery an old counsel of his mother’s came back to him: “The more terrible things seem the more you’ve got to keep yourself in shape.”

Trembling, he divested himself of his clothes, turned on a bath and lathered his face. Then he poured himself a drink and shaved. It was like a dream, this change in his life. She was no longer his; even if she came back she was no longer his. Everything was different — this room, himself, everything that had existed yesterday. Suddenly he wanted it back. He got out of the bathtub and knelt down on the bath mat beside it and prayed. He prayed for Stella and himself and Ad Haughton; he prayed crazily for the restoration of his life — the life that he had just as crazily cut in two. When he came out of the bathroom with a towel around him, Ad Haughton was sitting on the bed.

“Hello, Bill. Where’s your wife?”

“Just a minute,” Bill answered. He went back into the bathroom and swallowed a draught of rubbing alcohol guaranteed to produce violent gastric disturbances. Then he stuck his head out the door casually.

“Mouthful of gargle,” he explained. “How are you, Ad? Open that envelope on the pillow and we’ll see where she is.”

“She’s gone to Europe with a dentist. Or rather her dentist is going to Europe, so she had to dash to New York —  — “

He hardly heard. His mind, released from worry, had drifted off again. There would be a full moon tonight, or almost a full moon. Something had happened under a full moon once. What it was he was unable for the moment to remember.

His long, lanky body, his little lost soul in the universe, sat there on the bathroom window seat.

“I’m probably the world’s worst guy,” he said, shaking his head at himself in the mirror — “probably the world’s worst guy. But I can’t help it. At my age you can’t fight against what you know you are.”

Trying his best to be better, he sat there faithfully for an hour. Then it was twilight and there were voices downstairs, and suddenly there it was, in the sky over his lawn, all the restless longing after fleeing youth in all the world — the bright uncapturable moon.

ON YOUR OWN

The third time he walked around the deck Evelyn stared at him. She stood leaning against the bulwark and when she heard his footsteps again she turned frankly and held his eyes for a moment until his turned away, as a woman can when she has the protection of other men’s company, Barlotto, playing ping-pong with Eddie O’Sullivan, noticed the encounter. “Aha!” he said, before the stroller was out of hearing, and when the rally was finished: “Then you’re still interested even if it’s not the German Prince.”

“How do you know it’s not the German Prince?” Evelyn demanded.

“Because the German Prince is the horse-faced man with white eyes. This one” — he took a passenger list from his pocket — “is either Mr George Ives, Mr Jubal Early Robbins and valet, or Mr Joseph Widdle with Mrs Widdle and six children.”

It was a medium-sized German boat, five days westbound from Cherbourg. The month was February and the sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.

K’tap K’tap K’tap K’tap. Barlotto looked like Valentino — since he got fresh in the rumba number she had disliked playing opposite him. But Eddie O’Sullivan had been one of her best friends in the company.

Subconsciously she was waiting for the solitary promenader to round the deck again but he didn’t. She faced about and looked at the sea through the glass windows; instantly her throat closed and she held herself dose to the wooden rail to keep her shoulders from shaking. Her thoughts rang aloud in her ears: “My father is dead — when I was little we would walk to town on Sunday morning, I in my starched dress, and he would buy the Washington paper and a cigar and he was so proud of his pretty little girl. He was always so proud of me — he came to New York to see me when I opened with the Marx Brothers and he told everybody in the hotel he was my father, even the elevator boys. I’m glad he did, it was so much pleasure for him, perhaps the best time he ever had since he was young. He would like it if he knew I was coming all the way from London.”

“Game and set,” said Eddie.