Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (355 page)

“Do you know where the Minnehaha is anchored, and the Privateer?”

As they slid out into the bay he lay back in the stern and stared with vague discontent at the Riviera moon. That was the right moon, all right. Frequently, five nights out of seven, there was the right moon. And here was the soft air, aching with enchantment, and here was the music, many strains of music from many orchestras, drifting out from the shore. Eastward lay the dark Cape of Antibes, and then Nice, and beyond that Monte Carlo, where the night rang chinking full of gold. Some day he would enjoy all that, too, know its every pleasure and success--when he was too old and wise to care.

But tonight--tonight, that stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon; those soft romantic lights of Cannes behind him, the irresistible ineffable love in this air--that was to be wasted forever.

“Which one?” asked the boatman suddenly.

“Which what?” demanded Val, sitting up.

“Which boat?”

He pointed. Val turned; above hovered the gray, sword-like prow of a yacht. During the sustained longing of his wish they had covered half a mile.

He read the brass letters over his head. It was the Privateer, but there were only dim lights on board, and no music and no voices, only a murmurous k-plash at intervals as the small waves leaped at the sides.

“The other one,” said Val; “the Minnehaha.”

“Don’t go yet.”

Val started. The voice, low and soft, had dropped down from the darkness overhead.

“What’s the hurry?” said the soft voice. “Thought maybe somebody was coming to see me, and have suffered terrible disappointment.”

The boatman lifted his oars and looked hesitatingly at Val. But Val was silent, so the man let the blades fall into the water and swept the boat out into the moonlight.

“Wait a minute!” cried Val sharply.

“Good-by,” said the voice. “Come again when you can stay longer.”

“But I am going to stay now,” he answered breathlessly.

He gave the necessary order and the rowboat swung back to the foot of the small companionway. Someone young, someone in a misty white dress, someone with a lovely low voice, had actually called to him out of the velvet dark. “If she has eyes!” Val murmured to himself. He liked the romantic sound of it and repeated it under his breath--”If she has eyes.”

“What are you?” She was directly above him now; she was looking down and he was looking up as he climbed the ladder, and as their eyes met they both began to laugh.

She was very young, slim, almost frail, with a dress that accentuated her youth by its blanched simplicity. Two wan dark spots on her cheeks marked where the color was by day.

“What are you?” she repeated, moving back and laughing again as his head appeared on the level of the deck. “I’m frightened now and I want to know.”

“I am a gentleman,” said Val, bowing.

“What sort of a gentleman? There are all sorts of gentlemen. There was a--there was a colored gentleman at the table next to ours in Paris, and so--” She broke off. “You’re not American, are you?”

“I’m Russian,” he said, as he might have announced himself to be an archangel. He thought quickly and then added, “And I am the most fortunate of Russians. All this day, all this spring I have dreamed of falling in love on such a night, and now I see that heaven has sent me to you.”

“Just one moment!” she said, with a little gasp. “I’m sure now that this visit is a mistake. I don’t go in for anything like that. Please!”

“I beg your pardon.” He looked at her in bewilderment, unaware that he had taken too much for granted. Then he drew himself up formally.

“I have made an error. If you will excuse me I will say good night.”

He turned away. His hand was on the rail.

“Don’t go,” she said, pushing a strand of indefinite hair out of her eyes. “On second thoughts you can talk any nonsense you like if you’ll only not go. I’m miserable and I don’t want to be left alone.”

Val hesitated; there was some element in this that he failed to understand. He had taken it for granted that a girl who called to a strange man at night, even from the deck of a yacht, was certainly in a mood for romance. And he wanted intensely to stay. Then he remembered that this was one of the two yachts he had been seeking.

“I imagine that the dinner’s on the other boat,” he said.

“The dinner? Oh, yes, it’s on the Minnehaha. Were you going there?”

“I was going there--a long time ago.”

“What’s your name?”

He was on the point of telling her when something made him ask a question instead.

“And you? Why are you not at the party?”

“Because I preferred to stay here. Mrs. Jackson said there would be some Russians there--I suppose that’s you.” She looked at him with interest. “You’re a very young man, aren’t you?”

“I am much older than I look,” said Val stiffly. “People always comment on it. It’s considered rather a remarkable thing.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he lied.

She laughed.

“What nonsense! You’re not more than nineteen.”

His annoyance was so perceptible that she hastened to reassure him. “Cheer up! I’m only seventeen myself. I might have gone to the party if I’d thought there’d be anyone under fifty there.”

He welcomed the change of subject.

“You preferred to sit and dream here beneath the moon.”

“I’ve been thinking of mistakes.” They sat down side by side in two canvas deck chairs. “It’s a most engrossing subject--the subject of mistakes. Women very seldom brood about mistakes--they’re much more willing to forget than men are. But when they do brood--”

“You have made a mistake?” inquired Val.

She nodded.

“Is it something that cannot be repaired?”

“I think so,” she answered. “I can’t be sure. That’s what I was considering when you came along.”

“Perhaps I can help in some way,” said Val. “Perhaps your mistake is not irreparable, after all.”

“You can’t,” she said unhappily. “So let’s not think about it. I’m very tired of my mistake and I’d much rather you’d tell me about all the gay, cheerful things that are going on in Cannes tonight.”

They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring lights, the big toy banks with candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows rising on slow hills toward the dark sky.

“What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”

“Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.

“Is that it?” She looked for a long time, with a strange expression in her eyes. “Then I want to go home to America,” she said. “There is too much love here. I want to go home tomorrow.”

“You are afraid of being in love then?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t that. It’s just because--there is no love here for me.”

“Or for me either,” added Val quietly. “It is sad that we two should be at such a lovely place on such a lovely night and have--nothing.”

He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and chaste romance in his eyes--and she drew back.

“Tell me more about yourself,” she inquired quickly. “If you are Russian where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”

“My mother was American,” he admitted. “My grandfather was American also, so she had no choice in the matter.”

“Then you’re American too!”

“I am Russian,” said Val with dignity.

She looked at him closely, smiled and decided not to argue. “Well then,” she said diplomatically, “I suppose you must have a Russian name.”

But he had no intention now of telling her his name. A name, even the Rostoff name, would be a desecration of the night. They were their own low voices, their two white faces--and that was enough. He was sure, without any reason for being sure but with a sort of instinct that sang triumphantly through his mind, that in a little while, a minute or an hour, he was going to undergo an initiation into the life of romance. His name had no reality beside what was stirring in his heart.

“You are beautiful,” he said suddenly.

“How do you know?”

“Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.”

“Am I nice in the moonlight?”

“You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”

“Oh.” She thought this over. “Of course I had no business to let you come on board. I might have known what we’d talk about--in this moon. But I can’t sit here and look at the shore--forever. I’m too young for that. Don’t you think I’m too young for that?”

“Much too young,” he agreed solemnly.

Suddenly they both became aware of new music that was close at hand, music that seemed to come out of the water not a hundred yards away.

“Listen!” she cried. “It’s from the Minnehaha. They’ve finished dinner.”

For a moment they listened in silence.

“Thank you,” said Val suddenly.

“For what?”

He hardly knew he had spoken. He was thanking the deep low horns for singing in the breeze, the sea for its warm murmurous complaint against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing over them until he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air.

“So lovely,” she whispered.

“What are we going to do about it?”

“Do we have to do something about it? I thought we could just sit and enjoy--”

“You didn’t think that,” he interrupted quietly. “You know that we must do something about it. I am going to make love to you--and you are going to be glad.”

“I can’t,” she said very low. She wanted to laugh now, to make some light cool remark that would bring the situation back into the safe waters of a casual flirtation. But it was too late now. Val knew that the music had completed what the moon had begun.

“I will tell you the truth,” he said. “You are my first love. I am seventeen--the same age as you, no more.”

There was something utterly disarming about the fact that they were the same age. It made her helpless before the fate that had thrown them together. The deck chairs creaked and he was conscious of a faint illusive perfume as they swayed suddenly and childishly together.

III

Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion--regret, desire, despair--but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never known. First love--this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.

The music had ceased for some time when presently the murmurous silence was broken by the sound of a rowboat disturbing the quiet waves. She sprang suddenly to her feet and her eyes strained out over the bay.

“Listen!” she said quickly. “I want you to tell me your name.”

“No.”

“Please,” she begged him. “I’m going away tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t want you to forget me,” she said. “My name is--”

“I won’t forget you. I will promise to remember you always. Whoever I may love I will always compare her to you, my first love. So long as I live you will always have that much freshness in my heart.”

“I want you to remember,” she murmured brokenly. “Oh, this has meant more to me than it has to you--much more.”

She was standing so close to him that he felt her warm young breath on his face. Once again they swayed together. He pressed her hands and wrists between his as it seemed right to do, and kissed her lips. It was the right kiss, he thought, the romantic kiss--not too little or too much. Yet there was a sort of promise in it of other kisses he might have had, and it was with a slight sinking of his heart that he heard the rowboat close to the yacht and realized that her family had returned. The evening was over.

“And this is only the beginning,” he told himself. “All my life will be like this night.”

She was saying something in a low quick voice and he was listening tensely.

“You must know one thing--I am married. Three months ago. That was the mistake that I was thinking about when the moon brought you out here. In a moment you will understand.”

She broke off as the boat swung against the companionway and a man’s voice floated up out of the darkness.

“Is that you, my dear?”

“Yes.”

“What is this other rowboat waiting?”

“One of Mrs. Jackson’s guests came here by mistake and I made him stay and amuse me for an hour.”

A moment later the thin white hair and weary face of a man of sixty appeared above the level of the deck. And then Val saw and realized too late how much he cared.

IV

When the Riviera season ended in May the Rostoffs and all the other Russians closed their villas and went north for the summer. The Russian Orthodox Church was locked up and so were the bins of rarer wine, and the fashionable spring moonlight was put away, so to speak, to wait for their return.

“We’ll be back next season,” they said as a matter of course.

But this was premature, for they were never coming back any more. Those few who straggled south again after five tragic years were glad to get work as chambermaids or
valets de chambre
in the great hotels where they had once dined. Many of them, of course, were killed in the war or in the revolution; many of them faded out as spongers and small cheats in the big capitals, and not a few ended their lives in a sort of stupefied despair.

When the Kerensky government collapsed in 1917, Val was a lieutenant on the eastern front, trying desperately to enforce authority in his company long after any vestige of it remained. He was still trying when Prince Paul Rostoff and his wife gave up their lives one rainy morning to atone for the blunders of the Romanoffs--and the enviable career of Morris Hasylton’s daughter ended in a city that bore even more resemblance to a butcher shop than had Chicago in 1892.