Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (420 page)

Past Dome d’Ossola, a dim, murkily lighted Italian town; past Brig, where a kindly Swiss official saw his burden and waved him by without demanding his passport; down the valley of the Rhone, where the growing stream was young and turbulent in the moonlight. Then Sierre, and the haven, the sanctuary in the mountains, two miles above, where the snow gleamed. The funicular waited: Caroline sighed a little as he lifted her from the car.

“It’s very good of you to take all this trouble,” she whispered formally.

V

For three weeks she lay perfectly still on her back. She breathed and she saw flowers in her room. Eternally her temperature was taken. She was delirious after the operation and in her dreams she was again a girl in Virginia, waiting in the yard for her lover. Dress stay crisp for him — button stay put — bloom magnolia — air stay still and sweet. But the lover was neither Sidney Lahaye nor an abstraction of many men — it was herself, her vanished youth lingering in that garden, unsatisfied and unfulfilled; in her dream she waited there under the spell of eternal hope for the lover that would never come, and who now no longer mattered.

The operation was a success. After three weeks she sat up, in a month her fever had decreased and she took short walks for an hour every day. When this began, the Swiss doctor who had performed the operation talked to her seriously.

“There’s something you ought to know about Montana Vermala; it applies to all such places. It’s a well-known characteristic of tuberculosis that it tends to hurt the morale. Some of these people you’ll see on the streets are back here for the third time, which is usually the last time. They’ve grown fond of the feverish stimulation of being sick; they come up here and live a life almost as gay as life in Paris — some of the champagne bills in this sanatorium are amazing. Of course, the air helps them, and we manage to exercise a certain salutary control over them, but that kind are never really cured, because in spite of their cheerfulness they don’t want the normal world of responsibility. Given the choice, something in them would prefer to die. On the other hand, we know a lot more than we did twenty years ago, and every month we send away people of character completely cured. You’ve got that chance because your case is fundamentally easy; your right lung is utterly untouched. You can choose; you can run with the crowd and perhaps linger along three years, or you can leave in one year as well as ever.”

Caroline’s observation confirmed his remarks about the environment. The village itself was like a mining town — hasty, flimsy buildings dominated by the sinister bulk of four or five sanatoriums; chastely cheerful when the sun glittered on the snow, gloomy when the cold seeped through the gloomy pines. In contrast were the flushed, pretty girls in Paris clothes whom she passed on the street, and the well-turned-out men. It was hard to believe they were fighting such a desperate battle, and as the doctor had said, many of them were not. There was an air of secret ribaldry — it was considered funny to send miniature coffins to new arrivals, and there was a continual undercurrent of scandal. Weight, weight, weight; everyone talked of weight — how many pounds one had put on last month or lost the week before.

She was conscious of death around her, too, but she felt her own strength returning day by day in the high, vibrant air, and she knew she was not going to die.

After a month came a stilted letter from Sidney. It said:

I stayed only until the immediate danger was past. I knew that, feeling as you do, you wouldn’t want my face to be the first thing you saw. So I’ve been down here in Sierre at the foot of the mountain, polishing up my Cambodge diary. If it’s any consolation for you to have someone who cares about you within call, I’d like nothing better than to stay on here. I hold myself utterly responsible for what happened to you, and many times I’ve wished I had died before I came into your life. Now there’s only the present — to get you well.

About your son — once a month I plan to run up to his school in Fontainebleau and see him for a few days — I’ve seen him once now and we like each other. This summer I’ll either arrange for him to go to a camp or take him through the Norwegian fjords with me, whichever plan seems advisable.

The letter depressed Caroline. She saw herself sinking into a bondage of gratitude to this man — as though she must thank an attacker for binding up her wounds. Her first act would be to earn the money to pay him back. It made her tired even to think of such things now, but it was always present in her subconscious, and when she forgot it she dreamed of it. She wrote:

Dear Sidney:

It’s absurd your staying there and I’d much rather you didn’t. In fact, it makes me uncomfortable. I am, of course, enormously grateful for all you’ve done for me and for Dexter. If it isn’t too much trouble, will you come up here before you go to Paris, as I have some things to send him?

Sincerely,

Caroline M. Corcoran.

He came a fortnight later, full of a health and vitality that she found as annoying as the look of sadness that was sometimes in his eyes. He adored her and she had no use for his adoration. But her strongest sensation was one of fear — fear that since he had made her suffer so much, he might be able to make her suffer again.

“I’m doing you no good, so I’m going away,” he said. “The doctors seem to think you’ll be well by September. I’ll come back and see for myself. After that I’ll never bother you again.”

If he expected to move her, he was disappointed.

“It may be some time before I can pay you back,” she said.

“I got you into this.”

“No, I got myself into it. … Good-by, and thank you for everything you’ve done.”

Her voice might have been thanking him for bringing a box of candy. She was relieved at his departure. She wanted only to rest and be alone.

The winter passed. Toward the end she skied a little, and then spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green. Summer was sad, for two friends she had made there died within a week and she followed their coffins to the foreigners’ graveyard in Sierre. She was safe now. Her affected lung had again expanded; it was scarred, but healed; she had no fever, her weight was normal and there was a bright mountain color in her cheeks.

October was set as the month of her departure, and as autumn approached, her desire to see Dexter again was overwhelming. One day a wire came from Sidney in Tibet stating that he was starting for Switzerland.

Several mornings later the floor nurse looked in to toss her a copy of the
Paris Herald
and she ran her eyes listlessly down the columns. Then she sat up suddenly in bed.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator, and Pilot Missing Four Days.

Teheran, Persia, October 5 —  —

Caroline sprang out of bed, ran with the paper to the window, looked away from it, then looked at it again.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator —  —

“The Black Sea,” she repeated, as if that was the important part of the affair — “in the Black Sea.”

She stood there in the middle of an enormous quiet. The pursuing feet that had thundered in her dream had stopped. There was a steady, singing silence.

“Oh-h-h!” she said.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator, and Pilot Missing Four Days.

Teheran, Persia, October 5 —  —

Caroline began to talk to herself in an excited voice.

“I must get dressed,” she said; “I must get to the telegraph and see whether everything possible has been done. I must start for there.” She moved around the room, getting into her clothes. “Oh-h-h!” she whispered. “Oh-h-h!” With one shoe on, she fell face downward across the bed. “Oh, Sidney — Sidney!” she cried, and then again, in terrible protest: “Oh-h-h!” She rang for the nurse. “First, I must eat and get some strength; then I must find out about trains.”

She was so alive now that she could feel parts of herself uncurl, unroll. Her heart picked up steady and strong, as if to say, “I’ll stick by you,” and her nerves gave a sort of jerk as all the old fear melted out of her. Suddenly she was grown, her broken girlhood dropped away from her, and the startled nurse answering her ring was talking to someone she had never seen before.

“It’s all so simple. He loved me and I loved him. That’s all there is. I must get to the telephone. We must have a consul there somewhere.”

For a fraction of a second she tried to hate Dexter because he was not Sidney’s son, but she had no further reserve of hate. Living or dead, she was with her love now, held close in his arms. The moment that his footsteps stopped, that there was no more menace, he had overtaken her. Caroline saw that what she had been shielding was valueless — only the little girl in the garden, only the dead, burdensome past.

“Why, I can stand anything,” she said aloud — “anything — even losing him.”

The doctor, alarmed by the nurse, came hurrying in.

“Now, Mrs. Corcoran, you’re to be quiet. No matter what news you’ve had, you —  — Look here, this may have some bearing on it, good or bad.”

He handed her a telegram, but she could not open it, and she handed it back to him mutely. He tore the envelope and held the message before her:

PICKED UP BY COALER CITY OF CLYDE STOP ALL WELL —  —

The telegram blurred; the doctor too. A wave of panic swept over her as she felt the old armor clasp her metallically again. She waited a minute, another minute; the doctor sat down.

“Do you mind if I sit in your lap a minute?” she said. “I’m not contagious any more, am I?”

With her head against his shoulder, she drafted a telegram with his fountain pen on the back of the one she had just received. She wrote:

PLEASE DON’T TAKE ANOTHER AEROPLANE BACK HERE. WE’VE GOT EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE UP, SO WHAT DOES A DAY OR TWO MATTER? I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART AND SOUL.

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

Driving slowly through New Haven, two of the young girls became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth’s mouth fell open, and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture with his hand. They laughed. “We’ll send him a post card when we get back to school tonight, to see if it really was him.”

Adele Craw, sitting on one of the little seats, kept on talking to Miss Chambers, the chaperon. Glancing sideways at her, Lillian winked at Josephine without batting an eye, but Josephine had gone into a reverie.

This was New Haven — city of her adolescent dreams, of glittering proms where she would move on air among men as intangible as the tunes they danced to. City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden as Timbuktu. Twice a year the life-blood of Chicago, her home, flowed into it, and twice a year flowed back, bringing Christmas or bringing summer. Bingo, bingo, bingo, that’s the lingo; love of mine, I pine for one of your glances; the darling boy on the left there; underneath the stars I wait.

Seeing it for the first time, she found herself surprisingly unmoved — the men they passed seemed young and rather bored with the possibilities of the day, glad of anything to stare at; seemed undynamic and purposeless against the background of bare elms, lakes of dirty snow and buildings crowded together under the February sky. A wisp of hope, a well-turned-out derby-crowned man, hurrying with stick and suitcase towards the station, caught her attention, but his reciprocal glance was too startled, too ingenuous. Josephine wondered at the extent of her own disillusionment.

She was exactly seventeen and she was blase. Already she had been a sensation and a scandal; she had driven mature men to a state of disequilibrium; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as he was over eighty at the time perhaps he just died. Here and there in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspection turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored with the waning September days — and it seemed as though it had happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness, its travelling glee clubs, had brought no one new. There remained to her only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved her.

They stopped at a sporting-goods store and Adele Craw, a pretty girl with clear honourable eyes and piano legs, purchased the sporting equipment which was the reason for their trip — they were the spring hockey committee for the school. Adele was in addition the president of the senior class and the school’s ideal girl. She had lately seen a change for the better in Josephine Perry — rather as an honest citizen might guilelessly approve a peculator retired on his profits. On the other hand, Adele was simply incomprehensible to Josephine — admirable, without doubt, but a member of another species. Yet with the charming adaptability that she had hitherto reserved for men, Josephine was trying hard not to disillusion her, trying to be honestly interested in the small, neat, organized politics of the school.

Two men who had stood with their backs to them at another counter turned to leave the store, when they caught sight of Miss Chambers and Adele. Immediately they came forward. The one who spoke to Miss Chambers was thin and rigid of face. Josephine recognized him as Miss Brereton’s nephew, a student at New Haven, who had spent several week-ends with his aunt at the school. The other man Josephine had never seen before. He was tall and broad, with blond curly hair and an open expression in which strength of purpose and a nice consideration were pleasantly mingled. It was not the sort of face that generally appealed to Josephine. The eyes were obviously without a secret, without a sidewise gambol, without a desperate flicker to show that they had a life of their own apart from the mouth’s speech. The mouth itself was large and masculine; its smile was an act of kindness and control. It was rather with curiosity as to the sort of man who would be attentive to Adele Craw that Josephine continued to look at him, for his voice that obviously couldn’t lie greeted Adele as if this meeting was the pleasant surprise of his day.