Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (455 page)

She seized the straps of his shoulder belt and tugged at him until his grey eyes looked into hers.

“Clay, Clay, don’t — you musn’t use small petty words like that at this time. Compromise! What’s that to words like Life and Love and Death and England. Compromise! Clay, I don’t believe anyone uses that word except servants.” She laughed. “Clay, you and our butler are the only men in England who use the word compromise. My maid and I have been warned within a week — How odd — Clay, look at me.”

He looked at her and saw what she intended, beauty heightened by enthusiasm. Her lips were half parted in a smile, her hair just so slightly disarranged.

“Damned witch,” he muttered. “You used to read Tolstoy, and believe him.”

“Did I?” her gaze wandered to the fire. “So I did, so I did.” Then her eyes came back to him and the present. “Really, Clay, we must stop gazing at the fire. It puts our minds on the past and tonight there’s got to be no past or future, no time, just tonight, you and I sitting here and I most tired for a military shoulder to rest my head upon.” But he was off on an old tack thinking of Dick and he spoke his thoughts aloud.

“You used to talk Tolstoy to Dick and I thought it was scandalous for such a good-looking girl to be intellectual.”

“I wasn’t, really,” she admitted. “It was to impress Dick.”

“I was shocked, too, when I read something of Tolstoy’s, I struck the something Sonata.”

“‘Kreutzer Sonata,’” she suggested.

“That’s it. I thought it was immoral for young girls to read Tolstoy and told Dick so. He used to nag me about that. I was nineteen.”

“Yes, we thought you quite the young prig. We considered ourselves advanced.”

“You’re only twenty, aren’t you?” asked Clay suddenly.

She nodded.

“Don’t you believe in Tolstoy any more?” he asked, almost fiercely.

She shook her head and then looked up at him almost wistfully.

“Won’t you let me lean against your shoulder just the smallest bit?”

He put his arm around her, never once taking his eyes from her face, and suddenly the whole strength of her appeal burst upon him. Clay was no saint, but he had always been rather decent about women. Perhaps that’s why he felt so helpless now. His emotions were not complex. He knew what was wrong, but he knew also that he wanted this woman, this wallet creature of silk and life who crept so close to him. There were reasons why he oughtn’t to have her, but he had suddenly seen how love was a big word like Life and Death, and she knew that he realized and was glad. Still they sat without moving for a long while and watched the fire.

II

At two-twenty next day Clay shook hands gravely with his father and stepped into the train for Dover. Eleanor, comfortable with a novel, was nestled into a corner of his compartment, and as he entered she smiled a welcome and closed the book.

“Well,” she began. “I felt like a minion of the almighty secret service as I slid by your inspiring and impecable father, swathed in yards and yards of veiling.”

“He wouldn’t have noticed you without your veil,” answered Clayton, sitting down. “He was really most emotional under all that brusqueness. Really, you know he’s quite a nice chap. Wish I knew him better.”

The train was in motion; the last uniforms had drifted in like brown, blown leaves, and now it seemed as if one tremendous wind was carrying them shoreward.

“How far are you going with me?” asked Clayton.

“Just to Rochester, an hour and a half. I absolutely had to see you before you left, which isn’t very Spartan of me. But really, you see, I feel that you don’t quite understand about last night, and look at me, as” she paused “well — as rather exceptional.”

“Wouldn’t I be rather an awful cad if I thought about it in those terms at all?”

“No,” she said cheerily, “I, for instance, am both a romantiscist and a psychologist. It does take the romance out of anything to analyze it, but I’m going to do it if only to clear myself in your eyes.”

“You don’t have to — “ he began.

“I know I don’t,” she interrupted, “but I’m going to, and when I’ve finished you’ll see where weakness and inevitability shade off. No, I don’t believe in Zola.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Well, my dear, Zola said that environment is environment, but he referred to families and races, and this is the story of a class.”

“What class?”

“Our class.”

“Please,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to hear.”

She settled herself against his shoulder, and gazing out at the vanishing country, began to talk very deliberately.

“It was said, before the war, that England was the only country in the world where women weren’t safe from men of their own class.”

“One particular fast set,” he broke in.

“A set, my dear man, who were fast but who kept every bit of their standing and position. You see even that was reaction. The idea of physical fitness came in with the end of the Victorians. Drinking died down in the Universities. Why you yourself once told me that the really bad men never drank, rather kept themselves fit for moral or intellectual crimes.”

“It was rather Victorian to drink much,” he agreed. “Chaps who drank were usually young fellows about to become curates, sowing the conventional wild oats by the most orthodox tippling.”

“Well,”she continued, “there had to be an outlet — and there was, and you know the form it took in what you called the fast set. Next enter Mr. Mars. You see as long as there was moral pressure exerted, the rotten side of society was localized. I won’t say it wasn’t spreading, but it was spreading slowly, some people even thought, rather normally, but when men began to go away and not come back, when marriage became a hurried thing and widows filled London, and all traditions seemed broken, why then things were different.”

“How did it start?”

“It started in cases where men were called away hurriedly and girls lost their nerve. Then the men didn’t come back — and there were the girls — “

He gasped.

“That was going on at the beginning? — I didn’t know at all.”

“Oh it was very quiet at first. Very little leaked out into daylight, but the thing spread in the dark. The next thing, you see, was to weave a sentimental mantle to throw over it. It was there and it had to be excused. Most girls either put on trousers and drove cars all day or painted their faces and danced with officers all night.”

“And what mighty principle had the honor of being a cloak for all that?” he asked sarcastically.

“Now here, you see, is the paradox. I can talk like this and pretend to analyze, and even sneer at the principle. Yet I’m as much under the spell as the most wishy-washy typist who spends a week end at Brighton with her young man before he sails with the conscripts.”

“I’m waiting to hear what the spell is.”

“It’s this — self sacrifice with a capitol S. Young men going to get killed for us. — We would have been their wives — we can’t be — therefore we’ll be as much as we can. And that’s the story.”

“Good God!”

“Young officer comes back,” she went on; “must amuse him, must amuse him; must give him the impression that people here are with him, that it’s a big home he’s coming to, that he’s appreciated. Now you know, of course, in the lower classes that sort of thing means children. Whether that will ever spread to us will depend on the duration of the war.”

“How about old ideas, and standards of woman and that sort of thing?” he asked, rather sheepishly.

“Sky-high, my dear — dead and gone. It might be said for utility that it’s better and safer for the race that officers stay with women of their own class. Think of the next generation in France.”

To Clay the whole compartment had suddenly become smothering. Bubbles of conventional ethics seemed to have burst and the long stagnant gas was reaching him. He was forced to seize his mind and make it cling to whatever shreds of the old still floated on the moral air. Eleanor’s voice came to him like the grey creed of a new materialistic world, the contrast was the more vivid because of the remains of erratic honor and sentimental religiosity that she flung out with the rest.

“So you see, my dear, utility, heroism and sentiment all combine and
le voice
. And we’re pulling into Rochester,” she turned to him pathetically. “I see that in trying to clear myself I’ve only indicted my whole sex,” and with tears in their eyes they kissed.

On the platform they talked for half a minute more. There was no emotion. She was trying to analyze again and her smooth brow was wrinkled in the effort. He was endeavoring to digest what she had said, but his brain was in a whirl.

“Do you remember,” he asked, “what you said last night about love being a big word like Life and Death?”

“A regular phrase; part of the technique of — of the game; a catch word.” The train moved off and as Clay swung himself on the last car she raised her voice so that he could hear her to the last — “
Love
is a big word, but I was flattering us. Real Love’s as big as Life and Death, but not that love — not that — “ Her voice failed and mingled with the sound of the rails, and to Clay she seemed to fade out like a grey ghost on the platform.

III

When the charge broke and the remnants lapped back like spent waves, Sergeant O’Flaherty, a bullet through the left side, dropped beside him, and as weary castaways fight half listlessly for shore, they crawled and pushed and edged themselves into a shell crater. Clay’s shoulder and back were bleeding profusely and he searched heavily and clumsily for his first aid package.

“That’ll be that the Seventeenth Sussex gets reorganized,” remarked O’Flaherty, sagely. “Two weeks in the rear and two weeks home.”

“Damn good regiment, it was, O’Flaherty,” said Clay. They would have seemed like two philosophic majors commenting from safe behind the lines had it not been that Clay was flat on his back, his face in a drawn ecstasy of pain, and that the Irishman was most evidently bleeding to death. The latter was twining an improvised tourniquet on his thigh, watching it with the careless casual interest a bashful suitor bestows upon his hat.

“I can’t get up no emotion over a regiment these nights,” he commented disgustedly. “This’ll be the fifth I was in that I seen smashed to hell. I joined these Sussex byes so I needn’t see more o’ me own go.”

“I think you know every one in Ireland, Sergeant.”

“All Ireland’s me friend, Captain, though I niver knew it ‘till I left. So I left the Irish, what was left of them. You see when an English bye dies he does some play actin’ before. Blood on an Englishman always calls rouge to me mind. It’s a game with him. The Irish take death damn serious.”

Clayton rolled painfully over and watched the night come softly down and blend with the drifting smoke. They were certainly between the devil and the deep sea and the slang of the next generation will use “no man’s land” for that. O’Flaherty was still talking.

“You see you has to do somethin’. You haven’t any God worth remarkin’ on. So you pass from life in the names of your holy principles, and hope to meet in Westminster.”

“We’re not mystics, O’Flaherty,” muttered Clay, “but we’ve got a firm grip on God and reality.”

“Mystics, my eye, beggin’ your pardon, lieutenant,” cried the Irishman, “a mystic ain’t no race, it’s a saint. You got the most airy way o’ thinkin’ in the wurruld an yit you talk about plain faith as if it was cloud gazin’. There was a lecture last week behind Vimy Y.M.C.A., an’ I stuck my head in the door; ‘Tan-gi-ble,’ the fellow was sayin’ ‘we must be Tan-gi-ble in our religion, we must be practicle’ an’ he starts off on Christian brotherhood an’ honorable death — so I stuck me head out again. An’ you got lots a good men dyin’ for that every day-tryin’ to be tan-gi-ble, dyin’ because their father’s a Duke or because he ain’t. But that ain’t what I got to think of. An’ right here let’s light a pipe before it gets dark enough for the damn burgomasters to see the match and practice on it.”

Pipes, as indispensible as the hard ration, were going in no time, and the sergeant continued as he blew a huge lung full of smoke towards the earth with incongruous supercaution.

“I fight because I like it, an’ God ain’t to blame for that, but when it’s death you’re talkin’ about I’ll tell you what I get an’ you don’t. Pere Dupont gets in front of the Frenchies an’ he says: ‘Allon, mes enfants!’ fine! an’ Father O’Brien, he says: ‘Go on in byes and bate the Luther out o’ them’ — great stuff! But can you see the reverent Updike — Updike just out o’ Oxford — yellin’ ‘mix it up, chappies,’ or ‘soak ‘em blokes?’ — NO, Captain, the best leader you ever get is a six foot rowin’ man that thinks God’s got a seat in the House o’ Commons. All sportin’ men have to have a bunch o’ cheerin’ when they die. Give an Englishman four inches in the sportin’ page this side of the whistle an’ he’ll die happy — but not O’Flaherty.”

But Clay’s thoughts were far away. Half delirious, his mind wandered to Eleanor. He had thought of nothing else for a week, ever since their parting at Rochester, and so many new sides of what he had learned were opening up. He had suddenly realized about Dick and Eleanor, they must have been married to all intents and purposes. Of course Clay had written to Eleanor from Paris, asking her to marry him on his return, and just yesterday he had gotten a very short, very kind, but definite refusal. And he couldn’t understand at all.

Then there was his sister — Eleanor’s words still rang in his ear. “They either put on trousers and act as chauffers all day or put on paint and dance with officers all night.” He felt perfectly sure that Clara was still well — virtuous. Virtuous — what a ridiculous word it seemed, and how odd to be using it about his sister. Clara had always been so painfully good. At fourteen she had been sent to Boston for a souvenir picture of Louisa M. Alcott to hang over her bed. His favorite amusement had been to replace it by some startling soubrette in tights, culled from the pages of the
Pink Un
. Well Clara, Eleanor, Dick, he himself, were all in the same boat, no matter what the actuality of their innocence or guilt. If he ever got back —