Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (418 page)

At 1:30, on his way back to the office, a chill wave of terror washed suddenly over him. He walked blindly as the remorseless sun led him along a path of flat black and hostile gray. The clamor of a fire engine plunging through the quivering air had the ominous portent of things in a nightmare. He found that someone had closed his windows, and he flung them open to the sweltering machines across the street. Then, with an open ledger before him, he sat down to wait.

Half an hour passed. Butler heard Miss Rousseau’s muffled typewriter in the outer office, and her voice making a connection on the phone. He heard the clock move over two o’clock with a rasping sound; almost immediately he looked at his watch and found it was 2:30. He wiped his forehead, finding how cold sweat can be. Minutes passed. Then he started bolt upright as he heard the outer door open and close slowly, with a sigh.

Simultaneously he felt something change in the day outside — as if it had turned away from him, foreshortening and receding like a view from a train. He got up with difficulty, walked to the door and peered through the transparent place into the outer office.

She was there; her form cut the shadow of the corner; he knew the line of her body under her dress. She was waiting to see if he could give her a job, so that she could keep herself, and her son might not have to give up his ambitions.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing. Come back next week. Between three and four.”

“I’ll come back.”

With a struggle that seemed to draw his last reserve of strength up from his shoes, Butler got himself under control and picked up the phone. Now he would see — he would see.

“Miss Rousseau.”

“Yes, Mr. Butler.”

“If there’s anyone waiting to see me, please send them in.”

“There’s no one waiting to see you, Mr. Butler. There’s —  — “

Uttering a choked sound, he hung up the phone and walked to the door and flung it open.

It was no use; she was there, clearly discernible, distinct and vivid as in life. And as he looked, she rose slowly, her dark garments falling about her like cerements — arose and regarded him with a wan smile, as if, at last and too late, he was going to help her. He took a step backward.

Now she came toward him slowly, until he could see the lines in her face, the wisps of gray-gold hair under her hat.

With a broken cry, he sprang backward so that the door slammed. Simultaneously he knew, with a last fragment of himself, that there was something wrong in the very nature of the logic that had brought him to this point, but it was too late now. He ran across the office like a frightened cat, and with a sort of welcome apprehension of nothingness, stepped out into the dark air beyond his window. Even had he grasped the lest fact that he sought for — the fact that the cleaning woman who had read him the newspaper could neither read nor write — it was too late for it to affect him. He was already too much engrossed in death to connect it with anything or to think what bearing it might have on the situation.

V

Mrs. Summer did not go on into Butler’s office. She had not been waiting to see him, but was here in answer to a summons from Mr. Eddington, and she was intercepted by Eddington himself, who took her aside, talking;

“I’m sorry about all this.” He indicated Butler’s office. “We’re letting him go. We’ve only recently discovered that he fired you practically on his own whim. Why, the number of your ideas we’re using —  — We never considered letting you go. Things have been so mixed up.”

“I came to see you yesterday,” Mrs. Summer said. “I was all in and there was no one in the office at the moment. I must have fainted in the chair, because it was an hour later when I remembered anything, and then I was too tired to do anything except go home.”

“We’ll see about all this,” Eddington said grimly. “We’ll —  — It’s one of those things —  — “ He broke off. The office was suddenly full of confusion; there was a policeman and, behind him, many curious peering faces. “What’s the matter? … Hello, there seems to be something wrong here. What is it, officer?”

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

In 1918, a few days before the Armistice, Caroline Martin, of Derby, in Virginia, eloped with a trivial young lieutenant from Ohio. They were married in a town over the Maryland border and she stayed there until George Corcoran got his discharge — then they went to his home in the North.

It was a desperate, reckless marriage. After she had left her aunt’s house with Corcoran, the man who had broken her heart realized that he had broken his own too; he telephoned, but Caroline had gone, and all that he could do that night was to lie awake and remember her waiting in the front yard, with the sweetness draining down into her out of the magnolia trees, out of the dark world, and remember himself arriving in his best uniform, with boots shining and with his heart full of selfishness that, from shame, turned into cruelty. Next day he learned that she had eloped with Corcoran and, as he had deserved, he had lost her.

In Sidney Lahaye’s overwhelming grief, the petty reasons for his act disgusted him — the alternative of a long trip around the world or of a bachelor apartment in New York with four Harvard friends; more positively the fear of being held, of being bound. The trip — they could have taken it together. The bachelor apartment — it had resolved into its bare, cold constituent parts in a single night. Being held? Why, that was all he wanted — to be close to that freshness, to be held in those young arms forever.

He had been an egoist, brought up selfishly by a selfish mother; this was his first suffering. But like his small, wiry, handsome person, he was all knit of one piece and his reactions were not trivial. What he did he carried with him always, and he knew he had done a contemptible and stupid thing. He carried his grief around, and eventually it was good for him. But inside of him, utterly unassimilable, indigestible, remained the memory of the girl.

Meanwhile, Caroline Corcoran, lately the belle of a Virginia town, was paying for the luxury of her desperation in a semi-slum of Dayton, Ohio.

II

She had been three years in Dayton and the situation had become intolerable. Brought up in a district where everyone was comparatively poor, where not two gowns out of fifty at country-club dances cost more than thirty dollars, lack of money had not been formidable in itself. This was very different. She came into a world not only of straining poverty but of a commonness and vulgarity that she had never touched before. It was in this regard that George Corcoran had deceived her. Somewhere he had acquired a faint patina of good breeding and he had said or done nothing to prepare her for his mother, into whose two-room flat he introduced her. Aghast, Caroline realized that she had stepped down several floors. These people had no position of any kind; George knew no one; she was literally alone in a strange city. Mrs. Corcoran disliked Caroline — disliked her good manners, her Southern ways, the added burden of her presence. For all her airs, she had brought them nothing save, eventually, a baby. Meanwhile George got a job and they moved to more spacious quarters, but mother came, too, for she owned her son, and Caroline’s months went by in unimaginable dreariness. At first she was too ashamed and too poor to go home, but at the end of a year her aunt sent her money for a visit and she spent a month in Derby with her little son, proudly reticent, but unable to keep some of the truth from leaking out to her friends. Her friends had done well, or less well, but none of them had fared quite so ill as she.

But after three years, when Caroline’s child became less dependent, and when the last of her affection for George had been frittered away, as his pleasant manners became debased with his own inadequacies, and when her bright, unused beauty still plagued her in the mirror, she knew that the break was coming. Not that she had specific hopes of happiness — for she accepted the idea that she had wrecked her life, and her capacity for dreaming had left her that November night three years before — but simply because conditions were intolerable. The break was heralded by a voice over the phone — a voice she remembered only as something that had done her terrible injury long ago.

“Hello,” said the voice — a strong voice with strain in it. “Mrs. George Corcoran?”

“Yes.”

“Who was Caroline Martin?”

“Who is this?”

“This is someone you haven’t seen for years. Sidney Lahaye.”

After a moment she answered in a different tone: “Yes?”

“I’ve wanted to see you for a long time,” the voice went on.

“I don’t see why,” said Caroline simply.

“I want to see you. I can’t talk over the phone.”

Mrs. Corcoran, who was in the room, asked “Who is it?” forming the words with her mouth. Caroline shook her head slightly.

“I don’t see why you want to see me,” she said, “and I don’t think I want to see you.” Her breath came quicker; the old wound opened up again, the injury that had changed her from a happy young girl in love into whatever vague entity in the scheme of things she was now.

“Please don’t ring off,” Sidney said. “I didn’t call you without thinking it over carefully. I heard things weren’t going well with you.”

“That’s not true.” Caroline was very conscious now of Mrs. Corcoran’s craning neck. “Things are going well. And I can’t see what possible right you have to intrude in my affairs.”

“Wait, Caroline! You don’t know what happened back in Derby after you left. I was frantic —  — “

“Oh, I don’t care —  — “ she cried. “Let me alone; do you hear?”

She hung up the receiver. She was outraged that this man, almost forgotten now save as an instrument of her disaster, should come back into her life!

“Who was it?” demanded Mrs. Corcoran.

“Just a man — a man I loathe.”

“Who?”

“Just an old friend.”

Mrs. Corcoran looked at her sharply. “It wasn’t that man, was it?” she asked.

“What man?”

“The one you told Georgie about three years ago, when you were first married — it hurt his feelings. The man you were in love with that threw you over.”

“Oh, no,” said Caroline. “That is my affair.”

She went to the bedroom that she shared with George. If Sidney should persist and come here, how terrible — to find her sordid in a mean street.

When George came in, Caroline heard the mumble of his mother’s conversation behind the closed door; she was not surprised when he asked at dinner:

“I hear that an old friend called you up.”

“Yes. Nobody you know.”

“Who was it?”

“It was an old acquaintance, but he won’t call again,” she said.

“I’ll bet he will,” guessed Mrs. Corcoran. “What was it you told him wasn’t true?”

“That’s my affair.”

Mrs. Corcoran glanced significantly at George, who said:

“It seems to me if a man calls up my wife and annoys her, I have a right to know about it.”

“You won’t, and that’s that.” She turned to his mother: “Why did you have to listen, anyhow?”

“I was there. You’re my son’s wife.”

“You make trouble,” said Caroline quietly; “you listen and watch me and make trouble. How about the woman who keeps calling up George — you do your best to hush that up.”

“That’s a lie!” George cried. “And you can’t talk to my mother like that! If you don’t think I’m sick of your putting on a lot of dog when I work all day and come home to find —  — “

As he went off into a weak, raging tirade, pouring out his own self-contempt upon her, Caroline’s thoughts escaped to the fifty-dollar bill, a present from her grandmother hidden under the paper in a bureau drawer. Life had taken much out of her in three years; she did not know whether she had the audacity to run away — it was nice, though, to know the money was there.

Next day, in the spring sunlight, things seemed better — and she and George had a reconciliation. She was desperately adaptable, desperately sweet-natured, and for an hour she had forgotten all the trouble and felt the old emotion of mingled passion and pity for him. Eventually his mother would go; eventually he would change and improve; and meanwhile there was her son with her own kind, wise smile, turning over the pages of a linen book on the sunny carpet. As her soul sank into a helpless, feminine apathy, compounded of the next hour’s duty, of a fear of further hurt or incalculable change, the phone rang sharply through the flat.

Again and again it rang, and she stood rigid with terror. Mrs. Corcoran was gone to market, but it was not the old woman she feared. She feared the black cone hanging from the metal arm, shrilling and shrilling across the sunny room. It stopped for a minute, replaced by her heartbeats; then began again. In a panic she rushed into her room, threw little Dexter’s best clothes and her only presentable dress and shoes into a suitcase and put the fifty-dollar bill in her purse. Then taking her son’s hand, she hurried out of the door, pursued down the apartment stairs by the persistent cry of the telephone. The windows were open, and as she hailed a taxi and directed it to the station, she could still hear it clamoring out into the sunny morning.

III

Two years later, looking a full two years younger, Caroline regarded herself in the mirror, in a dress that she had paid for. She was a stenographer, employed by an importing firm in New York; she and young Dexter lived on her salary and on the income of ten thousand dollars in bonds, a legacy from her aunt. If life had fallen short of what it had once promised, it was at least livable again, less than misery. Rising to a sense of her big initial lie, George had given her freedom and the custody of her child. He was in kindergarten now, and safe until 5:30, when she would call for him and take him to the small flat that was at least her own. She had nothing warm near her, but she had New York, with its diversion for all purses, its curious yielding up of friends for the lonely, its quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative, pageantry and drama to the drab.

But though life was possible it was less than satisfactory. Her work was hard, she was physically fragile; she was much more tired at the day’s end than the girls with whom she worked. She must consider a precarious future when her capital should be depleted by her son’s education. Thinking of the Corcoran family, she had a horror of being dependent on her son; and she dreaded the day when she must push him from her. She found that her interest in men had gone. Her two experiences had done something to her; she saw them clearly and she saw them darkly, and that part of her life was sealed up, and it grew more and more faint, like a book she had read long ago. No more love.