Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (419 page)

Caroline saw this with detachment, and not without a certain, almost impersonal, regret. In spite of the fact that sentiment was the legacy of a pretty girl, it was just one thing that was not for her. She surprised herself by saying in front of some other girls that she disliked men, but she knew it was the truth. It was an ugly phrase, but now, moving in an approximately foursquare world, she detested the compromises and evasions of her marriage. “I hate men — I, Caroline, hate men. I want from them no more than courtesy and to be left alone. My life is incomplete, then, but so be it. For others it is complete, for me it is incomplete.”

The day that she looked at her evening dress in the mirror, she was in a country house on Long Island — the home of Evelyn Murdock, the most spectacularly married of all her old Virginia friends. They had met in the street, and Caroline was there for the week-end, moving unfamiliarly through a luxury she had never imagined, intoxicated at finding that in her new evening dress she was as young and attractive as these other women, whose lives had followed more glamorous paths. Like New York the rhythm of the week-end, with its birth, its planned gayeties and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it. The sentiment had gone from Caroline, but the patterns remained. The guests, dimly glimpsed on the veranda, were prospective admirers. The visit to the nursery was a promise of future children of her own; the descent to dinner was a promenade down a marriage aisle, and her gown was a wedding dress with an invisible train.

“The man you’re sitting next to,” Evelyn said, “is an old friend of yours. Sidney Lahaye — he was at Camp Rosecrans.”

After a confused moment she found that it wasn’t going to be difficult at all. In the moment she had met him — such a quick moment that she had no time to grow excited — she realized that he was gone for her. He was only a smallish, handsome man, with a flushed, dark skin, a smart little black mustache and very fine eyes. It was just as gone as gone. She tried to remember why he had once seemed the most desirable person in the world, but she could only remember that he had made love to her, that he had made her think of them as engaged, and then that he had acted badly and thrown her over — into George Corcoran’s arms. Years later he had telephoned like a traveling salesman remembering a dalliance in a casual city. Caroline was entirely unmoved and at her ease as they sat down at table.

But Sidney Lahaye was not relinquishing her so easily.

“So I called you up that night in Derby,” he said; “I called you for half an hour. Everything had changed for me in that ride out to camp.”

“You had a beautiful remorse.”

“It wasn’t remorse; it was self-interest. I realized I was terribly in love with you. I stayed awake all night —  — “

Caroline listened indifferently. It didn’t even explain things; nor did it tempt her to cry out on fate — it was just a fact.

He stayed near her, persistently. She knew no one else at the party; there was no niche in any special group for her. They talked on the veranda after dinner, and once she said coolly:

“Women are fragile that way. You do something to them at certain times and literally nothing can ever change what you’ve done.”

“You mean that you definitely hate me.”

She nodded. “As far as I feel actively about you at all.”

“I suppose so. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“No. I even have to think before I can really remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden that night, holding all my dreams and hopes in my arms like a lot of flowers — they were that to me, anyhow. I thought I was pretty sweet. I’d saved myself up for that — all ready to hand it all to you. And then you came up to me and kicked me.” She laughed incredulously. “You behaved like an awful person. Even though I don’t care any more, you’ll always be an awful person to me. Even if you’d found me that night, I’m not at all sure that anything could have been done about it. Forgiveness is just a silly word in a matter like that.”

Feeling her own voice growing excited and annoyed, she drew her cape around her and said in an ordinary voice:

“It’s getting too cold to sit here.”

“One more thing before you go,” he said. “It wasn’t typical of me. It was so little typical that in the last five years I’ve never spent an unoccupied moment without remembering it. Not only I haven’t married, I’ve never even been faintly in love. I’ve measured up every girl I’ve met to you, Caroline — their faces, their voices, the tips of their elbows.”

“I’m sorry I had such a devastating effect on you. It must have been a nuisance.”

“I’ve kept track of you since I called you in Dayton; I knew that, sooner or later, we’d meet.”

“I’m going to say good night.”

But saying good night was easier than sleeping, and Caroline had only an hour’s haunted doze behind her when she awoke at seven. Packing her bag, she made up a polite, abject letter to Evelyn Murdock, explaining why she was unexpectedly leaving on Sunday morning. It was difficult and she disliked Sidney Lahaye a little bit more intensely for that.

IV

Months later Caroline came upon a streak of luck. A Mrs. O’Connor, whom she met through Evelyn Murdock, offered her a post as private secretary and traveling companion. The duties were light, the traveling included an immediate trip abroad, and Caroline, who was thin and run down from work, jumped at the chance. With astonishing generosity the offer included her boy.

From the beginning Caroline was puzzled as to what had attracted Helen O’Connor to her. Her employer was a woman of thirty, dissipated in a discreet way, extremely worldly and, save for her curious kindness to Caroline, extremely selfish. But the salary was good and Caroline shared in every luxury and was invariably treated as an equal.

The next three years were so different from anything in her past that they seemed years borrowed from the life of someone else. The Europe in which Helen O’Connor moved was not one of tourists but of seasons. Its most enduring impression was a phantasmagoria of the names of places and people — of Biarritz, of Mme de Colmar, of Deauville, of the Comte de Berme, of Cannes, of the Derehiemers, of Paris and the Chateau de Madrid. They lived the life of casinos and hotels so assiduously reported in the Paris American papers — Helen O’Connor drank and sat up late, and after a while Caroline drank and sat up late. To be slim and pale was fashionable during those years, and deep in Caroline was something that had become directionless and purposeless, that no longer cared. There was no love; she sat next to many men at table, appreciated compliments, courtesies and small gallantries, but the moment something more was hinted, she froze very definitely. Even when she was stimulated with excitement and wine, she felt the growing hardness of her sheath like a breastplate. But in other ways she was increasingly restless.

At first it had been Helen O’Connor who urged her to go out; now it became Caroline herself for whom no potion was too strong or any evening too late. There began to be mild lectures from Helen.

“This is absurd. After all, there’s such a thing as moderation.”

“I suppose so, if you really want to live.”

“But you want to live; you’ve got a lot to live for. If my skin was like yours, and my hair —  — Why don’t you look at some of the men that look at you?”

“Life isn’t good enough, that’s all,” said Caroline. “For a while I made the best of it, but I’m surer every day that it isn’t good enough. People get through by keeping busy; the lucky ones are those with interesting work. I’ve been a good mother, but I’d certainly be an idiot putting in a sixteen-hour day mothering Dexter into being a sissy.”

“Why don’t you marry Lahaye? He has money and position and everything you could want.”

There was a pause. “I’ve tried men. To hell with men.”

Afterward she wondered at Helen’s solicitude, having long realized that the other woman cared nothing for her. They had not even mutual tastes; often they were openly antipathetic and didn’t meet for days at a time. Caroline wondered why she was kept on, but she had grown more self-indulgent in these years and she was not inclined to quibble over the feathers that made soft her nest.

One night on Lake Maggiore things changed in a flash. The blurred world seen from a merry-go-round settled into place; the merry-go-round suddenly stopped.

They had gone to the hotel in Locarno because of Caroline. For months she had had a mild but persistent asthma and they had come there for rest before the gayeties of the fall season at Biarritz. They met friends, and with them Caroline wandered to the Kursaal to play mild
boule
at a maximum of two Swiss francs. Helen remained at the hotel.

Caroline was sitting in the bar. The orchestra was playing a Wiener Walzer, and suddenly she had the sensation that the chords were extending themselves, that each bar of three-four time was bending in the middle, dropping a little and thus drawing itself out, until the waltz itself, like a phonograph running down, became a torture. She put her fingers in her ears; then suddenly she coughed into her handkerchief.

She gasped.

The man with her asked: “What is it? Are you sick?”

She leaned back against the bar, her handkerchief with the trickle of blood clasped concealingly in her hand. It seemed to her half an hour before she answered, “No, I’m all right,” but evidently it was only a few seconds, for the man did not continue his solicitude.

“I must get out,” Caroline thought. “What is it?” Once or twice before she had noticed tiny flecks of blood, but never anything like this. She felt another cough coming and, cold with fear and weakness, wondered if she could get to the wash room.

After a long while the trickle stopped and someone wound the orchestra up to normal time. Without a word she walked slowly from the room, holding herself delicately as glass. The hotel was not a block away; she set out along the lamplit street. After a minute she wanted to cough again, so she stopped and held her breath and leaned against the wall. But this time it was no use; she raised her handkerchief to her mouth and lowered it after a minute, this time concealing it from her eyes. Then she walked on.

In the elevator another spell of weakness overcame her, but she managed to reach the door of her suite, where she collapsed on a little sofa in the antechamber. Had there been room in her heart for any emotion except terror, she would have been surprised at the sound of an excited dialogue in the salon, but at the moment the voices were art of a nightmare and only the shell of her ear registered what they said.

“I’ve been six months in Central Asia, or I’d have caught up with this before,” a man’s voice said, and Helen answered, “I’ve no sense of guilt whatsoever.”

“I don’t suppose you have. I’m just panning myself for having picked you out.”

“May I ask who told you this tale, Sidney?”

“Two people. A man in New York had seen you in Monte Carlo and said for a year you’d been doing nothing but buying drinks for a bunch of cadgers and spongers. He wondered who was backing you. Then I saw Evelyn Murdock in Paris, and she said Caroline was dissipating night after night; she was thin as a rail and her face looked like death. That’s what brought me down here.”

“Now listen, Sidney. I’m not going to be bullied about this. Our arrangement was that I was to take Caroline abroad and give her a good time, because you were in love with her or felt guilty about her, or something. You employed me for that and you backed me. Well, I’ve done just what you wanted. You said you wanted her to meet lots of men.”

“I said men.”

“I’ve rounded up what I could. In the first place, she’s absolutely indifferent, and when men find that out, they’re liable to go away.”

He sat down. “Can’t you understand that I wanted to do her good, not harm? She’s had a rotten time; she’s spent most of her youth paying for something that was my fault, so I wanted to make it up the best way I could. I wanted her to have two years of pleasure; I wanted her to learn not to be afraid of men and to have some of the gayety that I cheated her out of. With the result that you led her into two years of dissipation —  — “ He broke off: “What was that?” he demanded.

Caroline had coughed again, irrepressibly. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing in little gasps as they came into the hall. Her hand opened and her handkerchief dropped to the floor.

In a moment she was lying on her own bed and Sidney was talking rapidly into the phone. In her dazed state the passion in his voice shook her like a vibration, and she whispered “Please! Please!” in a thin voice. Helen loosened her dress and took off her slippers and stockings.

The doctor made a preliminary examination and then nodded formidably at Sidney. He said that by good fortune a famous Swiss specialist on tuberculosis was staying at the hotel; he would ask for an immediate consultation.

The specialist arrived in bedroom slippers. His examination was as thorough as possible with the instruments at hand. Then he talked to Sidney in the salon.

“So far as I can tell without an X ray, there is a sudden and widespread destruction of tissue on one side — sometimes happens when the patient is run down in other ways. If the X ray bears me out, I would recommend an immediate artificial pneumothorax. The only chance is to completely isolate the left lung.”

“When could it be done?”

The doctor considered. “The nearest center for this trouble is Montana Vermala, about three hours from here by automobile. If you start immediately and I telephone to a colleague there, the operation might be performed tomorrow morning.”

In the big, springy car Sidney held her across his lap, surrounding with his arms the mass of pillows. Caroline hardly knew who held her, nor did her mind grasp what she had overheard. Life jostled you around so — really very tiring. She was so sick, and probably going to die, and that didn’t matter, except that there was something she wanted to tell Dexter.

Sidney was conscious of a desperate joy in holding her, even though she hated him, even though he had brought her nothing but harm. She was his in these night hours, so fair and pale, dependent on his arms for protection from the jolts of the rough road, leaning on his strength at last, even though she was unaware of it; yielding him the responsibility he had once feared and ever since desired. He stood between her and disaster.