Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (435 page)

“Listen,” said René. “Can you hear? Do you want me to speak in English or French?”

“Either one, daddy.”

“Well, listen to me: Good-by.”

He hung up. Regretting for the first time the lack of a phone at home, he ran up to Main Street and found a taxi, which he urged, with his foot on an imaginary back-seat accelerator, in the direction of home.

The house was locked; the car was gone; the maid was gone; Becky was gone. Where she was gone he had no idea, and the Slocums could give him no information… The notes might be anywhere now, kicked carelessly into the street, crumpled and flung away.

“But Becky will recognize it as a schedule,” he consoled himself. “She would not be so formidable as to throw away our schedule.”

He was by no means sure that it was in the car. On a chance, he had the taxi drive him into the colored district with the idea that he might get some sort of orientation from Aquilla’s brother. René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. He had no idea at first of what he was attempting, but after half an hour the problem assumed respectable dimensions.

“Do you know” — so he would call to dark and puzzled men on the sidewalks — “where I can find the house of Aquilla’s brother, or of Aquilla’s sister — either one?”

“I don’t even know who Aquilla is, boss.”

René tried to think whether it was a first or a last name, and gave up as he realized that he never had known. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother. When he had stated his mission a dozen times, sometimes varying it with hypocritical pleas as to the whereabouts of Aquilla’s sister, he began to feel a little crazy.

It was colder. There was a threat of first winter snow in the air, and at the thought of his notes being kicked out into it, buried beneath it, René abandoned his quest and told the taxi man to drive home, in the hope that Becky had returned. But the house was deserted and cold. With the taxi throbbing outside, he threw coal into the furnace and then drove back into the center of town. It seemed to him that if he stayed on Main Street he would sooner or later run into Becky and the car — there were not an unlimited number of places to pass an afternoon in a regimented community of seven thousand people. Becky had no friends here — it was the first time he had ever thought of that. Literally there was almost no place where she could be.

Aimless, feeling almost as intangible as Aquilla’s brother, he wandered along, glancing into every drug store and eating shop. Young people were always eating. He could not really inquire of anyone if they had seen her, for even Becky was only a shadow here, a person hidden and unknown, a someone to whom he had not yet given reality. Only two things were real — his schedule, for the lack of which he was utterly lost and helpless, and the notes written on its back.

It was colder, minute by minute; a blast of real winter, sweeping out of the walks beside College Hall, made him wonder suddenly if Becky was going to pick up Noël. What had Noël said about being locked out when the school was closed? Not in weather like this. With sudden concern and self-reproach, René took another taxi and drove to the school, but it was closed and dark inside.

“Then, perhaps, she is lost too,” he thought. “Quite possibly she tried to walk herself home by herself and was kidnaped, or got a big chill, or was run over.”

He considered quite seriously stopping at the police station, and only decided against it when he was unable to think what he could possibly report to them with any shred of dignity.

“ —  — that a man of science, has managed, in one afternoon, in this one little town, to lose everything.”

III

Meanwhile, Becky was thoroughly enjoying herself. When Aquilla’s brother returned with the car at noon, he handed over Noël’s schedule with no comment save that he had not been able to give it to Noël because he could not find her. He was finished with European culture for the day, and was already crossing the Mediterranean in his mind while Becky tried to pump further information out of him.

A girl she had met through tennis had wangled the use of one of the club squash courts for the early hours of the afternoon. The squash was good; Becky soaked and sweated in the strange, rather awesome atmosphere of masculinity, and afterward, feeling fine and cool, took out her own schedule to check up on her duties of the afternoon. The schedule said to call for Noël, and Becky set out with all her thoughts in proportion — the one about herself and tennis; the one about Noël, whom she had come to love and learn with the evenings when René was late at the laboratory; the one about René, in whom she recognized the curious secret of power. But when she arrived at the school and found Noël’s penciled note on the gatepost, an epidemic of revolt surged suddenly over her.

Dear Becky:
Had daddy’s schedule and lost it and do not know if you are coming or not. Mrs. Hume told me I could wait at her house, so please pick me up there if you get this?

Noël

If there was one person Becky had no intention of encountering, it was Mrs. Dolores Hume. She knew this very fiercely and she didn’t see how she should be expected to go to Mrs. Hume’s house. She had by no means been drawn to the lady who had inspected her so hostilely in the bathtub — to put it mildly, she was not particular about ever seeing her again.

Her resentment turned against René. Looked at in any light, her position was that of a person of whom he was ashamed. One side of her understood the complications of his position, but in her fine glow of health after exercise, it seemed outrageous that anyone should have the opportunity to think of her in a belittling way. René’s theories were very well, but she would have been a hundred times happier had they announced the engagement long before, even though every curious cat in the community stared at her for a month or two. Becky felt as if she had been kept in the kitchen, and she was developing a sense of inferiority. This, in turn, made her think of the schedule as a sort of tyranny, and several times lately she had wondered how much of herself she was giving up in the complete subservience of every hour of every day to another’s judgment.

“He can call for Noël,” she decided. “I’ve done my best all through. If he’s so wise, he ought not to put me in such a situation.”

An hour later, René was still unable to think where he had put her at all. He had planned the days for her, but he had never really thought before about how she would fill them up. Returning to his laboratory in a state of profound gloom, he increased his pace as he came in sight of the building, cursed with a new anxiety. He had been absent more than three hours, with the barometer steadily falling and three windows open; he could not remember whether he or Charles was to have spoken to the janitor about continuing the heat over the week-end. His jars, the precious water in his jars —  — He ran up the icy stairs of the old building, afraid of what he was going to see.

One closed jar went with a cracking plop as he stood panting inside the door. One thousand of them glistened in tense rows through three long rooms, and he held his breath, waiting for them to go off together, almost hearing the crackling, despairing sound they would make. He saw that another one was broken, and then another in a far row. The room was like ice, with a blizzard seeping through eight corners of every window; there was ice formed on the faucet.

On tiptoe, lest even a faint movement precipitate the nine hundred and ninety-seven catastrophes, he retreated to the hall; then his heart beat again as he heard the dull, reassuring rumble of the janitor’s shovel in the cellar.

“Fire it up as far as you can!” he called down, and then descended another flight so as to be sure he was understood. “Make it as hot a blaze as possible, even if it is all” — he could not think of the word for kindling — “even if it is all small wood.”

He hurried back to the laboratory, entering again on tiptoe. As he entered, two jars beside a north window cracked, but his hand, brushing the radiator, felt just the beginning of a faint and tepid warmth. He took off his overcoat, and then his coat, and tucked them in across one window, dragged out an emergency electric heater, and then turned on every electric appliance in the room. From moment to moment, he stopped and listened ominously, but there were no more of the short, disastrous dying cries. By the time he had isolated the five broken jars and checked up on the amount of ice in the others, there was a definite pulse of heat coming off the radiators.

As he still fussed mechanically around the room, his hands shaking, he heard Noël’s voice in a lower hall, and she came upstairs with Dolores Hume, both of them bundled to the ears against the cold.

“Here you are, René,” Dolores said cheerfully. “We’ve phoned here three times and all over town. We wanted Noël to stay to dinner, but she keeps thinking you’d be worried. What is all this about a schedule? Are you all catching trains?”

“What is what?” he answered dazedly. “You realize, Dolores, what has happened here in this room?”

“It’s got very cold.”

“The water in our jars froze. We almost lost them all!”

He heard the furnace door close, and then the janitor coming upstairs.

Furious at what seemed the indifference of the world, he repeated:

“We nearly lost them all!”

“Well, as long as you didn’t —  — “ Dolores fixed her eyes upon a vague spot far down the late battlefield of gleaming jars. “Since we’re here, René, I want to say something to you — a thing that seems to me quite as important as your jars. There is something very beautiful about a widower being left alone with a little daughter to care for and to protect and to guide. It doesn’t seem to me that anything so beautiful should be lightly destroyed.”

For the second time that day, René started to throw his hands up in the air, but he had stretched his wrists a little the last time, and in his profound agitation he was not at all sure that he could catch them.

“There is no answer,” he groaned. “Listen, Dolores; you must come to my laboratory often. There is something very beautiful in a platinum electrode.”

“I am thinking only of Noël,” said Dolores serenely.

At this point, the janitor, effectually concealed beneath a thick mask of coal dust, came into the room. It was Noël who first divined the fact that the janitor was Becky Snyder.

IV

Under those thoroughly unmethodical circumstances, the engagement of René and Becky was announced to the world — the world as personified and represented by Dolores Hume. But for René even that event was overshadowed by his astonishment at learning that the first jar had burst at the moment Becky came into his laboratory; that she had remembered that water expanded as it froze and guessed at the danger; that she had been working for three-quarters of an hour to start the furnace before he had arrived; and, finally, that she had taken care of the furnace for two years back in Bingham — “because there was nothing much else to do.”

Dolores took it nicely, though she saw fit to remind Becky that she would be somewhat difficult to recognize if constantly observed under such extremely contrary conditions.

“I suppose it all has something to do with this schedule I hear so much about.”

“I started the fire with the schedule,” remarked Becky, and then amended herself when René jumped up with a suddenly agonized expression: “Not the one with the notes on it — that was behind the cushions of the car.”

“It’s too much for me,” Dolores admitted. “I suppose you’ll all end by sleeping here tonight — probably in the jars.”

Noël bent double with laughter.

“Why don’t we? Look on the schedule, daddy, and see if that’s the thing to do.”

THE PASSIONATE ESKIMO

Pan-e-troon crawled out of the igloo, pushing away the nose of an inquisitive dog, and uttered in Lapp the equivalent of” Scram!” to the rest of the pack. He looked to see if the line of fish was safely out of their reach and then proceeded a hundred yards over the white surface to his father’s hut.

The old man, his face the color of rawhide, looked at him imperturbably.

“Are you packed and ready?” he asked.

“All packed and ready.”

“Good. We leave early in the morning. Most of the others are on the point of departure.”

It was true. As far as the eye could reach, there were signs of dismantling and preparation, and the bustle and excitement that accompany it.

Pan-e-troon gazed for a moment with an expression of regret that confined itself, however, to his slitlike purple eyes. He was a small youth, but supple and well made — and the contours of his round nose and chin and cheeks gave him a perpetually cheerful expression. He gazed about him for a long time — he had come to like this locality.

“Old Wise One,” he said to his father,” I want to go into Chicago.”

His father started. “What?”

“For one last look.”

“But by yourself?” demanded his father anxiously.

“Yes, Old Wise One. I can find my way around. I speak a lot of American now and if I get lost I only have to say, ‘World’s Fair.’”

The old man grunted.

“I don’t like it. When we have a guide and are together, all right, but alone you’ll get hurt, get lost.”

“Old Wise One, I
must
go,” said Pan-e-troon. “Here is the last chance before we start for our home. Home is very fine, doubtless — “

“Of course it is!” said his father indignantly.

Pan-e-troon bowed slightly and finished his sentence: “ — and often in these hot months I have wished to be fishing through the ice, or hunting bear, or eating well cooked blubber. But — “

“But what?”

“I should like to carry back more memories of this great village. I should like to walk along the street not regarding what the guides tell us to regard but noticing for myself what I wish. I should like to go into a trading post and put down money and say, ‘ Here-give me that exchange for this’; and I should like to say to people, ‘ Which way, please? Much ‘blige.’”