Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (414 page)

She turned around. “We’ll go down and wake up the Barneys and have some bridge, eh?” suggested Barlotto.

Evelyn led the way, pirouetting once and again on the moist deck, then breaking into an “Off to Buffalo” against a sudden breath of wet wind. At the door she slipped and fell inward down the stair, saved herself by a perilous one-arm swing — and was brought up against the solitary promenader. Her mouth fell open comically — she balanced for a moment Then the man said, “I beg your pardon,” in an unmistakably southern voice. She met his eyes again as the three of them passed on. The man picked up Eddie O’Sullivan in the smoking room the next afternoon.

“Aren’t you the London cast of Chronic Affection?”

“We were until three days ago. We were going to run another two weeks but Miss Lovejoy was called to America so we closed.”

“The whole cast on board?” The man’s curiosity was inoffensive, it was a really friendly interest combined with a polite deference to the romance of the theatre. Eddie O’Sullivan liked him.

“Sure, sit down. No, there’s only Barlotto, the juvenile, and Miss Lovejoy and Charles Barney, the producer, and his wife. We left in twenty-four hours — the others are coming on the Homeric.”

“I certainly did enjoy seeing your show. I’ve been on a trip around the world and I turned up in London two weeks ago just ready for something American — and you had it.”

An hour later Evelyn poked her head around the corner of the smoking-room door and found them there.

“Why are you hiding out on us?” she demanded. “Who’s going to laugh at my stuff? That bunch of card sharps down there?”

Eddie introduced Mr George Ives. Evelyn saw a handsome, well-built man of thirty with a firm and restless face. At the corners of his eyes two pairs of fine wrinkles indicated an effort to meet the world on some other basis than its own. On his pan George Ives saw a rather small dark-haired girl of twenty-six, burning with a vitality that could only be described as “professional”. Which is to say it was not amateur — it could never use itself up upon any one person or group. At moments it possessed her so entirely, turning every shade of expression, every casual gesture, into a thing of such moment that she seemed to have no real self of her own. Her mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries pointing off into a bright smile; she had enormous, dark brown eyes. She was not beautiful but it took her only about ten seconds to persuade people that she was. Her body was lovely with little concealed muscles of iron. She was in black now and overdressed — she was always very chic and a little overdressed.

“I’ve been admiring you ever since you hurled yourself at me yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“I had to make you some way or other, didn’t I? What’s a girl going to with herself on a boat — fish?” They sat down.

“Have you been in England long?” George asked. “About five years — I go bigger over there.” In its serious moments her voice had the ghost of a British accent. “I’m not really very good at anything — I sing a little, dance a little, down a little, so the English think they’re getting a bargain. In New York they want specialists.”

It was apparent that she would have preferred an equivalent popularity in New York.

Barney, Mrs Barney and Barlotto came into the bar. “Aha!” Barlotto cried when George Ives was introduced. “She won’t believe he’s not the Prince.” He put his hand on George’s knee. “Miss Lovejoy was looking for the Prince the first day when she heard he was on board. We told her it was you.”

Evelyn was weary of Barlotto, weary of all of them, except Eddie O’Sullivan, though she was too tactful to have shown it when they were working together. She looked around. Save for two Russian priests playing chess their party was alone in the smoking-room — there were only thirty first-class passengers, with accommodations for two hundred. Again she wondered what sort of an America she was going back to. Suddenly the room depressed her — it was too big, too empty to fill and she felt the necessity of creating some responsive joy and gaiety around her.

“Let’s go down to my salon,” she suggested, pouring all her enthusiasm into her voice, making them a free and thrilling promise. “We’ll play the phonograph and send for the handsome doctor and the chief engineer and get them in a game of stud. I’ll be the decoy.”

As they went downstairs she knew she was doing this for the new man.

She wanted to play to him, show him what a good time she could give people. With the phonograph wailing “You’re driving me crazy” she began building up a legend. She was a “gun moll” and the whole trip had been a I frame to get Mr Ives into the hands of the mob. Her throaty mimicry flicked here and there from one to the other; two ship’s officers coming in were caught up in it and without knowing much English still understood the verve and magic of the impromptu performance. She was Anne Pennington, Helen Morgan, the effeminate waiter who came in for an order, she was everyone there in turn, and all in pace with the ceaseless music.

Later George Ives invited them all to dine with him in the upstairs restaurant that night. And as the party broke up and Evelyn’s eyes sought his approval he asked her to walk with him before dinner.

The deck was still damp, still canvassed in against the persistent of rain. The lights were a dim and murky yellow and blankets tumbled awry on empty deck chairs.

“You were a treat,” he said. “You’re like — Mickey Mouse.”

She took his arm and bent double over it with laughter.

“I like being Mickey Mouse. Look — there’s where I stood and stared you every time you walked around. Why didn’t you come around the fourth time?”

“I was embarrassed so I went up to the boat deck.”

As they turned at the bow there was a great opening of doors and a flooding out of people who rushed to the rail.

“They must have had a poor supper,” Evelyn said. “No — look!”

It was the Europa — a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his own pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.

“Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried, and then something suddenly broke inside her — the sight of beauty, the reaction to her late excitement choked her up and she thought vividly of her father. Without a word she went inside.

Two days later she stood with George Ives on the deck while the gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.

“What was Barlotto saying to you just now?” she demanded.

George laughed.

“He was saying just about what Barney said this afternoon, only he was more excited about it.”

She groaned.

“He said that you played with everybody — and that I was foolish if I thought this little boat flirtation meant anything — everybody had been through being in love with you and nothing ever came of it.”

“He wasn’t in love with me,” she protested. “He got fresh in a dance we had together and I called him for it.”

“Barney was wrought up too — said he felt like a father to you.”

“They make me tired,” she exclaimed. “Now they think they’re in love with me just because —  — “

“Because they see I am.”

“Because they think I’m interested in you. None of them were so eager until two days ago. So long as I make them laugh it’s all right but the minute I have any impulse of my own they all bustle up and think they’re being so protective. I suppose Eddie O’Sullivan will be next.”

“It was my fault telling them we found we lived only a few miles from each other in Maryland.”

“No, it’s just that I’m the only decent-looking girl on an eight-day boat, and the boys are beginning to squabble among themselves. Once they’re in New York they’ll forget I’m alive.”

Still later they were together when the city burst thunderously upon them in the early dusk — the high white range of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge, rising again into uptown New York, hallowed with diadems of foamy light, suspended from the stars.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Evelyn sobbed. “I cry so much lately. Maybe I’ve been handling a parrot.”

The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the inarch trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.

“Oh, God! It’s so beautiful,” she whispered brokenly.

If he had not been going south with her the affair would probably have ended an hour later in the customs shed. And as they rode south to Washington next day he receded for the moment and her father came nearer. He was just a nice American who attracted her physically — a little necking behind a lifeboat in the darkness. At the iron grating in the Washington station where their ways divided she kissed him good-bye and for the time forgot him altogether as her train shambled down into the low-forested clayland of southern Maryland. Screening her eyes with her hands Evelyn looked out upon the dark infrequent villages and the scattered farm lights. Rocktown was a shrunken little station and there was her brother with a neighbour’s Ford — she was ashamed that her luggage was so good against the exploded upholstery. She saw a star she knew and heard Negro laughter from out of the night; the breeze was cool but in it there was some smell she recognized — she was home.

At the service next day in the Rocktown churchyard, the sense that she was on a stage, that she was being watched, froze Evelyn’s grief — then it was over and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Then as they turned from the graveside her eyes fell

on George Ives who stood a little apart with his hat in his hand. Outside the gate he spoke to her.

“You’ll excuse my coming. I had to see that you were all right.”

“Can’t you take me away somewhere now?” she asked impulsively. “I can’t stand much of this. I want to go to New York tonight.”

His face fell. “So soon?”

“I’ve got to be learning a lot of new dance routines and freshening up my stuff. You get sort of stale abroad.”

He called for her that afternoon, crisp and shining as his coupe. As they started off she noticed that the men in the gasoline stations seemed to know him with liking and respect. He fitted into the quickening spring landscape, into a legendary Maryland of graciousness and gallantry. He had not the range of a European; he gave her little of that constant reassurance as to her attractiveness — there were whole half-hours when he seemed scarcely aware of her at all.

They stopped once more at the churchyard — she brought a great armful of flowers to leave as a last offering on her father’s grave. Leaving him at the gate she went in.

The flowers scattered on the brown unsettled earth. She had no more ties here now and she did not know whether she would come back any more. She knelt down. All these dead, she knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with hard blue flashing eyes, their spare violent bodies, their souls made of new earth in the long forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. Minute by minute the spell grew on her until it was hard to struggle back to the old world where she had dined with kings and princes, where her name in letters two feet high challenged the curiosity of the night A line of William McFee’s surged through her:

O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me

I waste my years sailing along the sea.

The words released her — she broke suddenly and sat back on her heels, crying.

How long she was staying she didn’t know; the flowers had grown invisible when a voice called her name from the churchyard and she got up and wiped her eyes.

“I’m coming.” And then, “Good-bye then Father, all my fathers.”

George helped her into the car and wrapped a robe around her. Then he took a long drink of country rye from his flask.

“Kiss me before we start,” he said suddenly.

She put up her face towards him.

“No, really kiss me.”

“Not now.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t feel like it, and my face is dirty.”

“As if that mattered.”

His persistence annoyed her.

“Let’s go on,” she said.

He put the car into gear.

“Sing me a song.”

“Not now, I don’t feel like it.”

He drove fast for half an hour — then he stopped under thick sheltering trees.

“Time for another drink. Don’t you think you better have one — it’s getting cold.”

“You know I don’t drink. You have one.”

“If you don’t mind.”

When he had swallowed he turned towards her again.

“I think you might kiss me now.”

Again she kissed him obediently but he was not satisfied.

“I mean really,” he repeated. “Don’t hold away like that. You know I’m in love with you and you say you like me.”

“Of course I do,” she said impatiently, “but there are times and times. This isn’t one of them. Let’s go on.”

“But I thought you liked me.”

“I won’t if you act this way.”

“You don’t like me then.”

“Oh don’t be absurd,” she broke out, “of course I like you, but I want to get to Washington.”

“We’ve got lots of time.” And then as she didn’t answer, “Kiss me once before we start.”

She grew angry. If she had liked him less she could have laughed him out of this mood. But there was no laughter in her — only an increasing distaste for the situation.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “this car is very stubborn. It refuses to start until you kiss me.” He put his hand on hers but she drew hers away.

“Now look here.” Her temper mounted into her cheeks, her forehead. “If there was anything you could do to spoil everything it was just this. I thought people only acted like this in cartoons. It’s so utterly crude and” — she searched for a word — “and American. You only forgot to call me „baby”.”

“Oh.” After a minute he started the engine and then the car. The lights of Washington were a red blur against the sky.

“Evelyn,” he said presently. “I can’t think of anything more natural than wanting to kiss you, I —  — “