Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (434 page)

“
Mon Dieu
!” he cried, his fingers rising to his young gray hair. “
Quel commencement
! Noël!”

II

With a sort of quivering heave like the attempt of a team to move a heavy load, René’s schedule got in motion. It was an uncertain motion — the third day Noël lost her schedule and went on a school botany tour, while Aquilla’s brother — a colored boy who had some time ago replaced a far-wandering houseman, but had never quite acquired a name of his own in the household — waited for her two hours in front of the school, so that Becky missed her tennis lesson and Mlle. Ségur, inconvenienced, complained to René. This was on a day that René had passed in despair trying to invent a process for keeping the platinum electrodes nicely blurred in a thousand glass cells. When he came home he blew up and Noël, at his request, had her supper in bed.

Each day plunged him deeper into his two experiments. One was his attempt to develop the catalyst upon which he had stumbled; the second was based on the new knowledge that there are two kinds of water. Should his plan of decomposing electrolytically one hundred thousand gallons of water yield him the chance of studying the two sorts spectrographically, the results might be invaluable. The experiment was backed by a commercial firm as well as by the Foundation, but it was already running into tens of thousands of dollars — there was the small power plant built for his use, the thousand platinum electrodes, each in its glass jar, as well as the time consumed in the difficult and tedious installation of the apparatus.

Necessarily, the domestic part of the day receded in importance. It was nice to know that his girls were safe and well occupied, that there would be two faces waiting for him eagerly at home. But for the moment he could not divert any more energy to his family. Becky had tennis and a reading list she had asked him for. She wanted to be a fine wife to René; she knew that he was trying to rear some structure of solidity in which they could all dwell together, and she guessed that it was the strain of the present situation that made him often seem to put undue emphasis on minor matters. When he began to substitute moments of severe strictness with Noël for the time he would have liked to devote to her, especially to her lessons — which were coming back marked “careless” — Becky protested. Whereupon René insisted that his intensity of feeling about Noël’s manners was an attempt to save her trouble, to conserve her real energies for real efforts and not let them be spent to restore the esteem of her fellows, lost in a moment of carelessness or vanity. “Either one learns politeness at home,” René said, “or the world teaches it with a whip — and many young people in America are ruined in that process. How do I care whether Noël ‘adores’ me or not, as they say? I am not bringing her up to be my wife.”

Still, and in spite of everything, the method was not working. His private life was beginning to interfere with it. If he had been able to spend another half an hour in the laboratory that day when he knew Becky was waiting discreetly a little way down the road, or even if he could have sent an overt message to her, saying that he was delayed thereby, then the tap would not have been left on and a quantity of new water would not have run into the water already separated according to its isotope, thus necessitating starting over. Work, love, his child — his demands did not seem to him exorbitant; he had had forethought and had made a schedule which anticipated all minor difficulties.

“Let us reconsider,” he said, assembling his girls again. “Let us consider that we have a method, embodied in this schedule. A method is better and bigger than a man.”

“Not always,” said Becky.

“How do you mean, not always, little one?”

“Cars really do act up like ours did the other day, René. We can’t stand before them and read them the schedule.”

“No, my darling,” he said excitedly. “It is to ourselves we read the schedule. We foresee — we have the motor examined, we have the tank filled.”

“Well, we’ll try to do better,” said Becky. “Won’t we, Noël? You and I — and the car.”

“You are joking, but I am serious.”

She came close to him.

“I’m not joking, darling. I love you with all my heart and I’m trying to do everything you say — even play tennis: though I’d rather run over and keep your house a little cleaner for you.”

“My house?” he stared around vaguely. “Why, my house is very clean. Aquilla’s sister comes in every other Friday.”

He had cause to remember this one Sunday afternoon a week later, when he had a visit from his chief assistant, Charles Hume, and his wife. They were old friends, and he perceived immediately the light of old friends bent on friendship in their eyes. And how was little Noël? They had had Noël in their house for a week the previous summer.

René called upstairs for Noël, but got no answer.

“She is in the fields somewhere.” He waved his hand vaguely. “All around, it is country.”

“All very well while the days are long,” said Dolores Hume. “But remember, there are such things as kidnapings.”

René shut his mind swiftly against a new anxiety.

“How are you, René?” Dolores asked. “Charles thinks you’ve been overdoing things.”

“Now, dear,” Charles protested, “I —  — “

“You be still. I’ve known René longer than you have. You two men fuss and fume over those jars all day and then René has his hands full with Noël all evening.”

Did René’s eyes deceive him, or did she look closely to see how he was taking this?

“Charles says this is an easy stage of things, so we wondered if we could help you by taking Noël while you went for a week’s rest.”

Annoyed, René answered abruptly: “I don’t need a rest and I can’t go away.” This sounded rude; René was fond of his assistant. “Not that Charles couldn’t carry on quite as well as I.”

“It’s really poor little Noël I’m thinking of as much as you. Any child needs personal attention.”

His wrath rising, René merely nodded blandly.

“If you won’t consider that,” Dolores pursued, “I wonder you don’t get a little colored girl to keep an eye on Noël in the afternoon. She could help with the cleaning. I’ve noticed that Frenchmen may be more orderly than American men, but not a bit cleaner.”

She drew her hand experimentally along the woodwork.

“Heavens!” she exclaimed, awed. Her hand was black, a particularly greasy, moldy, creepy black, with age-old furniture oil in it and far-drifted grime.

“What a catastrophe!” cried René. Only last week he had refused to let Becky clean the house. “I beg a thousand pardons. Let me get you —  — “

“It serves me right,” she admitted, “and don’t you do anything about it. I know this house like my pocket.”

When she had gone, Charles Hume said:

“I feel I ought to apologize to you for Dolores. She’s a strange woman, René, and she has no damn business butting into your affairs like this!”

He stopped. His wife was suddenly in the room again, and the men had an instant sense of something gone awry. Her face was shocked and hurt, stricken, as if she had been let down in some peculiarly personal way.

“You might not have let me go upstairs,” she said to René. “Your private affairs are your own, but if it was anybody but you, René, I’d think it was a rather bad joke.”

For a moment René was bewildered. Then he half understood, but before he could speak Dolores continued coldly:

“Of course I thought it was Noël in the tub, and I walked right in.”

René was all gestures now; he took a long, slow, audible breath; raising his hands slowly to his eyes, he shook his head in time to a quick “tck, tck, tck, tck.” Then, laying his cards on the table with a sudden downward movement of his arms, he tried to explain. The girl was the niece of a neighbor — he knew, even in the midst of his evasive words, that it was no use. Dolores was just a year or so older than that war generation which took most things for granted. He knew that previous to her marriage she had been a little in love with him, and he saw the story going out into the world of the college town. He knew this even when she pretended to believe him at the last, and when Charles gave him a look of understanding and a tacit promise with his eyes that he’d shut her up, as they went out the door.

“I feel so terrible,” mourned Becky.

“It was the one day the water at the Slocums’ wouldn’t run at all, and I was so hot and sticky I thought I’d just jump in for two seconds. That woman’s face when it came in the door! ‘Oh, it’s not Noël,’ she said, and what could I say? From the way she stared at me, she ought to have seen.”

*****

It was November and the campus was riotous once a week with violets and chrysanthemums, hot dogs and football badges, and all the countryside was a red-and-yellow tunnel of leaves around the flow of many cars. Usually René went to the games, but not this year. Instead he attended upon the activities of the precious water that was not water, that was a heavenlike, mysterious fluid that might cure mental diseases in the Phacochoerus, or perhaps only grow hair on eggs — or else he played valet to his catalyst, wound in five thousand dollars’ worth of platinum wire and gleaming dully at him every morning from its quartz prison.

He took Becky and Noël up there one day because it was unusually early. He was slightly disappointed because Noël was absorbed in an inspection of her schedule while he explained the experiments. The tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.

“Daddy, can I look at your schedule one minute?” Noël asked. “There’s one dumb word that I never know what it means.”

He handed it toward her vaguely, for a change in the caliber and quality of the sound in the room made him aware that something was happening. He knelt down beside the quartz vessel with a fountain pen in his hand.

He had changed the conditions of his experiment yesterday, and now he noted quickly:

Flow of 500 c.c. per minute, temperature 255°C. Changed gas mixture to 2 vol. oxygen and 1.56 vol. nitrogen. Slight reaction, about 1 per cent. Changing to 2 vol. 0 and 1.76 vol. N. Temperature 283°C. platinum filament is now red-hot.

He worked quickly, noting the pressure gauge. Ten minutes passed; the filament glowed and faded, and René put down figure after figure. When he arose, with a rather far-away expression, he seemed almost surprised to see Becky and Noël still there.

“Well, now; that was luck,” he said.

“We’re going to be late to school,” Becky told him, and then added apologetically: “What happened, René?”

“It is too long to explain.”

“Of course you see, daddy,” said Noël reprovingly, “that we have to keep the schedule.”

“Of course, of course. Go along.” He kissed them each hungrily on the nape of the neck, watching them with pride and joy, yet putting them aside for a while as he walked around the laboratory with some of the unworldliness of an altar boy. The electrolysis also seemed to be going better. Both of his experiments, like a recalcitrant team, had suddenly decided to function, realizing the persistence they were up against.

He heard Charles Hume coming in, but he reserved his news about the catalyst while they concentrated upon the water. It was noon before he had occasion to turn to his notes — realized with a shock that he had no notes. The back of the schedule on which he had taken them was astonishingly, inexplicably blank; it was as if he had written in vanishing ink or under the spell of an illusion. Then he saw what had happened — he had made the notes on Noël’s schedule and she had taken it to school. When Aquilla’s brother arrived with a registered package, he dispatched him to the school with the schedule to make the exchange. The data he had observed seemed irreplaceable, the more so as — despite his hopeful “Look! Look! Come here, Charles, now, and look!” — the catalyst failed entirely to act up.

He wondered what was delaying Aquilla’s brother and felt a touch of anxiety as he and Charles walked up to Main Street for lunch. Afterward Charles left, to jack up a chemistry-supply firm in town.

“Don’t worry too hard,” he said. “Open the windows — the room’s full of nitrogen-chloride.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Well —  — “ Charles hesitated. “I didn’t agree with Dolores’ attitude the other day, but I think you’re trying to do too much.”

“Not at all,” René protested. “Only, I am anxious to get possession of my notes again. It might be months or never, before I would blunder on that same set of conditions again.”

He was hardly alone before a small voice on the telephone developed as Noël calling up from school:

“Daddy?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Can you understand French or English better on the phone?”

“What? I can understand anything.”

“Well, it’s about my schedule.”

“I am quite aware of that. You took away my schedule. How do you explain that?”

Noël’s voice was hesitant: “But I didn’t, daddy. You handed me your schedule with a whole lot of dumb things on the back.”

“They are not dumb things!” he exclaimed. “They are very valuable things. That is why I sent Aquilla’s brother to exchange the schedules. Has that been done?”

“I was gone to French when he came, so he went away — I guess on account of that day he was so dumb and waited. So I haven’t got any schedule and I don’t know whether Becky is coming for me after play hour or whether I’m to ride out with the Sheridans and walk home from there.”

“You haven’t got any schedule at all?” he demanded, his world breaking up around him.

“I don’t know what became of it. Maybe I left it in the car.”

“Maybe you left it in the car?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

He set down the receiver because he needed both hands now for the gesture he was under compulsion to make. He threw them up so high that it seemed as if they left his wrists and were caught again on their descent. Then he seized the phone again.

“ —  — because school closes at four o’clock, and if I wait for Becky and she doesn’t come, then I’ll have to be locked out.”