Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (382 page)

She had lain there an hour perhaps when she was startled from a slow reverie by a sharp cry which seemed to proceed from the adjoining room. She sat up in bed and listened, and in a minute it was repeated. It sounded exactly like the plaint of a weary child stopped summarily by the placing of a hand over its mouth. In the dark silence her bewilderment shaded gradually off into uneasiness. She waited for the cry to recur, but straining her ears she heard only the intense crowded stillness of three o’clock. She wondered where Knowleton slept, remembered that his bedroom was over in the other wing just beyond his mother’s. She was alone over here — or was she?

With a little gasp she slid down into bed again and lay listening. Not since childhood had she been afraid of the dark, but the unforeseen presence of someone next door startled her and sent her imagination racing through a host of mystery stories that at one time or another had whiled away a long afternoon.

She heard the clock strike four and found she was very tired. A curtain drifted slowly down in front of her imagination, and changing her position she fell suddenly to sleep.

Next morning, walking with Knowleton under starry frosted bushes in one of the bare gardens, she grew quite light-hearted and wondered at her depression of the night before. Probably all families seemed odd when one visited them for the first time in such an intimate capacity. Yet her determination that she and Knowleton were going to live elsewhere than with the white dogs and the jumpy little man was not abated. And if the near-by Westchester County society was typified by the chilly crowd she had met at the dance —  —

“The family,” said Knowleton, “must seem rather unusual. I’ve been brought up in an odd atmosphere, I suppose, but mother is really quite normal outside of her penchant for poodles in great quantities, and father in spite of his eccentricities seems to hold a secure position in Wall Street.”

“Knowleton,” she demanded suddenly, “who lives in the room next door to me?”

Did he start and flush slightly — or was that her imagination?

“Because,” she went on deliberately, “I’m almost sure I heard someone crying in there during the night. It sounded like a child Knowleton.”

“There’s no one in there,” he said decidedly. “It was either your imagination or something you ate. Or possibly one of the maids was sick.”

Seeming to dismiss the matter without effort he changed the subject.

The day passed quickly. At lunch Mr. Whitney seemed to have forgotten his temper of the previous night; he was as nervously enthusiastic as ever; and watching him Myra again had that impression that she had seen him somewhere before. She and Knowleton paid another visit to Mrs. Whitney — and again the poodles stirred uneasily and set up a barking, to be summarily silenced by the harsh throaty voice. The conversation was short and of inquisitional flavor. It was terminated as before by the lady’s drowsy eyelids and a p’an of farewell from the dogs.

In the evening she found that Mr. Whitney had insisted on organizing an informal neighborhood vaudeville. A stage had been erected in the ballroom and Myra sat beside Knowleton in the front row and watched proceedings curiously. Two slim and haughty ladies sang, a man performed some ancient card tricks, a girl gave impersonations, and then to Myra’s astonishment Mr. Whitney appeared and did a rather effective buck-and-wing dance. There was something inexpressibly weird in the motion of the well-known financier flitting solemnly back and forth across the stag on his tiny feet. Yet he danced well, with an effortless grace and an unexpected suppleness, and he was rewarded with a storm of applause.

In the half dark the lady on her left suddenly spoke to her.

“Mr. Whitney is passing the word along that he wants to see you behind the scenes.”

Puzzled, Myra rose and ascended the side flight of stairs that led to the raised platform. Her host was waiting for her anxiously.

“Ah,” he chuckled, “splendid!”

He held out his hand, and wonderingly she took it. Before she realized his intention he had half led, half drawn her out on to the stage. The spotlight’s glare bathed them, and the ripple of conversation washing the audience ceased. The faces before her were pallid splotches on the gloom and she felt her ears burning as she waited for Mr. Whitney to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “most of you know Miss Myra Harper. You had the honor of meeting her last night. She is a delicious girl, I assure you. I am in a position to know. She intends to become the wife of my son.”

He paused and nodded and began clapping his hands. The audience immediately took up the clapping and Myra stood there in motionless horror, overcome by the most violent confusion of her life.

The piping voice went on: “Miss Harper is not only beautiful but talented. Last night she confided to me that she sang. I asked whether she preferred the opera, the ballad or the popular song, and she confessed that her taste ran to the latter. Miss Harper will now favor us with a popular song.”

And then Myra was standing alone on the stage, rigid with embarrassment. She fancied that on the faces in front of her she saw critical expectation, boredom, ironic disapproval. Surely this was the height of bad form — to drop a guest unprepared into such a situation.

In the first hush she considered a word or two explaining that Mr. Whitney had been under a misapprehension — then anger came to her assistance. She tossed her head and those in front saw her lips close together sharply.

Advancing to the platform’s edge she said succinctly to the orchestra leader: “Have you got ‘Wave That Wishbone’?”

“Lemme see. Yes, we got it.”

“All right. Let’s go!”

She hurriedly reviewed the words, which she had learned quite by accident at a dull house party the previous summer. It was perhaps not the song she would have chosen for her first public appearance, but it would have to do. She smiled radiantly, nodded at the orchestra leader and began the verse in a light clear alto.

As she sang a spirit of ironic humor slowly took possession of her — a desire to give them all a run for their money. And she did. She injected an East Side snarl into every word of slang; she ragged; she shimmied, she did a tickle-toe step she had learned once in an amateur musical comedy; and in a burst of inspiration finished up in an Al Jolson position, on her knees with her arms stretched out to her audience in syncopated appeal.

Then she rose, bowed and left the stage.

For an instant there was silence, the silence of a cold tomb; then perhaps half a dozen hands joined in a faint, perfunctory applause that in a second had died completely away.

“Heavens!” thought Myra. “Was it as bad as all that? Or did I shock ‘em?”

Mr. Whitney, however, seemed delighted. He was waiting for her in the wings and seizing her hand shook it enthusiastically.

“Quite wonderful!” he chuckled. “You are a delightful little actress — and you’ll be a valuable addition to our little plays. Would you like to give an encore?”

“No!” said Myra shortly, and turned away.

In a shadowy corner she waited until the crowd had filed out with an angry unwillingness to face them immediately after their rejection of her effort.

When the ballroom was quite empty she walked slowly up the stairs, and there she came upon Knowleton and Mr. Whitney alone in the dark hall, evidently engaged in a heated argument.

They ceased when she appeared and looked toward her eagerly.

“Myra,” said Mr. Whitney, “Knowleton wants to talk to you.”

“Father,” said Knowleton intensely, “I ask you —  — “

“Silence!” cried his father, his voice ascending testily. “You’ll do your duty — now.”

Knowleton cast one more appealing glance at him, but Mr. Whitney only shook his head excitedly and, turning, disappeared phantomlike up the stairs.

Knowleton stood silent a moment and finally with a look of dogged determination took her hand and led her toward a room that opened off the hall at the back. The yellow light fell through the door after them and she found herself in a dark wide chamber where she could just distinguish on the walls great square shapes which she took to be frames. Knowleton pressed a button, and immediately forty portraits sprang into life — old gallants from colonial days, ladies with floppity Gainsborough hats, fat women with ruffs and placid clasped hands.

She turned to Knowleton inquiringly, but he led her forward to a row of pictures on the side.

“Myra,” he said slowly and painfully, “there’s something I have to tell you. These” — he indicated the pictures with his hand — “are family portraits.”

There were seven of them, three men and three women, all of them of the period just before the Civil War. The one in the middle however, was hidden by crimson-velvet curtains.

“Ironic as it may seem,” continued Knowleton steadily, “that frame contains a picture of my great-grandmother.”

Reaching out, he pulled a little silken cord and the curtains parted, to expose a portrait of a lady dressed as a European but with the unmistakable features of a Chinese.

“My great-grandfather, you see, was an Australian tea importer. He met his future wife in Hong-Kong.”

Myra’s brain was whirling. She had a sudden vision of Mr. Whitney’s yellowish face, peculiar eyebrows and tiny hands and feet — she remembered ghastly tales she had heard of reversions to type — of Chinese babies — and then with a final surge of horror she thought of that sudden hushed cry in the night. She gasped, her knees seemed to crumple up and she sank slowly to the floor.

In a second Knowleton’s arms were round her.

“Dearest, dearest!” he cried. “I shouldn’t have told you! I shouldn’t have told you!”

As he said this Myra knew definitely and unmistakably that she could never marry him, and when she realized it she cast at him a wild pitiful look, and for the first time in her life fainted dead away.

IV

When she next recovered full consciousness she was in bed. She imagined a maid had undressed her, for on turning up the reading lamp she saw that her clothes had been neatly put away. For a minute she lay there, listening idly while the hall clock struck two, and then her overwrought nerves jumped in terror as she heard again that child’s cry from the room next door. The morning seemed suddenly infinitely far away. There was some shadowy secret near her — her feverish imagination pictured a Chinese child brought up there in the half dark.

In a quick panic she crept into a negligee and, throwing open the door, slipped down the corridor toward Knowleton’s room. It was very dark in the other wing, but when she pushed open his door she could see by the faint hall light that his bed was empty and had not been slept in. Her terror increased. What could take him out at this hour of the night? She started for Mrs. Whitney’s room, but at the thought of the dogs and her bare ankles she gave a little discouraged cry and passed by the door.

Then she suddenly heard the sound of Knowleton’s voice issuing from a faint crack of light far down the corridor, and with a glow of joy she fled toward it. When she was within a foot of the door she found she could see through the crack — and after one glance all thought of entering left her.

Before an open fire, his head bowed in an attitude of great dejection, stood Knowleton, and in the corner, feet perched on the table, sat Mr. Whitney in his shirt sleeves, very quiet and calm, and pulling contentedly on a huge black pipe. Seated on the table was a part of Mrs. Whitney — that is, Mrs. Whitney without any hair. Out of the familiar great bust projected Mrs. Whitney’s head, but she was bald; on her cheeks was the faint stubble of a beard, and in her mouth was a large black cigar, which she was puffing with obvious enjoyment.

“A thousand,” groaned Knowleton as if in answer to a question. “Say twenty-five hundred and you’ll be nearer the truth. I got a bill from the Graham Kennels to-day for those poodle dogs. They’re soaking me two hundred and saying that they’ve got to have ‘em back tomorrow.”

“Well.” said Mrs. Whitney in a low barytone voice, “send ‘em back. We’re through with ‘em.”

“That’s a mere item,” continued Knowleton glumly. “Including your salary, and Appleton’s here, and that fellow who did the chauffeur, and seventy supes for two nights, and an orchestra — that’s nearly twelve hundred, and then there’s the rent on the costumes and that darn Chinese portrait and the bribes to the servants. Lord! There’ll probably be bills for one thing or another coming in for the next month.”

“Well, then,” said Appleton, “for pity’s sake pull yourself together and carry it through to the end. Take my word for it, that girl will be out of the house by twelve noon.”

Knowleton sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

“Oh —  — “

“Brace up! It’s all over. I thought for a minute there in the hall that you were going to balk at that Chinese business.”

“It was the vaudeville that knocked the spots out of me,” groaned Knowleton. “It was about the meanest trick ever pulled on any girl, and she was so darned game about it!”

“She had to be,” said Mrs. Whitney cynically.

“Oh, Kelly, if you could have seen the girl look at me to-night just before she fainted in front of that picture. Lord, I believe she loves me! Oh, if you could have seen her!”

Outside Myra flushed crimson. She leaned closer to the door, biting her lip until she could taste the faintly bitter savor of blood.

“If there was anything I could do now,” continued Knowleton — “anything in the world that would smooth it over I believe I’d do it.”

Kelly crossed ponderously over, his bald shiny head ludicrous above his feminine negligee, and put his hand on Knowleton’s shoulder.

“See here, my boy — your trouble is just nerves. Look at it this way: You undertook somep’n to get yourself out of an awful mess. It’s a cinch the girl was after your money — now you’ve beat her at her own game an’ saved yourself an unhappy marriage and your family a lot of suffering. Ain’t that so, Appleton?”

“Absolutely!” said Appleton emphatically. “Go through with it.”

“Well” said Knowleton with a dismal attempt to be righteous, “if she really loved me she wouldn’t have let it all affect her this much. She’s not marrying my family.”