Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (66 page)

But the grotesque, the unbelievable, the histrionic incident is about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. PARAMORE has been trying to emulate GLORIA, and as the commotion reaches its height he begins to spin round and round, more and more dizzily — he staggers, recovers, staggers again and then falls in the direction of the hall … almost into the arms of old ADAM PATCH, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in the room.

ADAM PATCH is very white. He leans upon a stick. The man with him is EDWARD SHUTTLEWORTH, and it is he who seizes PARAMORE by the shoulder and deflects the course of his fall away from the venerable philanthropist.

The time required for quiet to descend upon the room like a monstrous pall may be estimated at two minutes, though for a short period after that the phonograph gags and the notes of the Japanese train song dribble from the end of TANA’S flute. Of the nine people only BARNES, PARAMORE, and TANA are unaware of the late-comer’s identity. Of the nine not one is aware that ADAM PATCH has that morning made a contribution of fifty thousand dollars to the cause of national prohibition.

It is given to PARAMORE to break the gathering silence; the high tide of his life’s depravity is reached in his incredible remark.)

PARAMORE: (Crawling rapidly toward the kitchen on his hands and knees)
I’m not a guest here — I work here.

(Again silence falls — so deep now, so weighted with intolerably contagious apprehension, that RACHAEL gives a nervous little giggle, and DICK finds himself telling over and over a line from Swinburne, grotesquely appropriate to the scene:

“One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.”

… Out of the hush the voice of ANTHONY, sober and strained, saying something to ADAM PATCH; then this, too, dies away.)

SHUTTLEWORTH: (Passionately) Your grandfather thought he would motor over to see your house. I phoned from Rye and left a message.

(A series of little gasps, emanating, apparently, from nowhere, from no one, fall into the next pause. ANTHONY is the color of chalk. GLORIA’S lips are parted and her level gaze at the old man is tense and frightened. There is not one smile in the room. Not one? Or does CROSS PATCH’S drawn mouth tremble slightly open, to expose the even rows of his thin teeth? He speaks — five mild and simple words.)

ADAM PATCH: We’ll go back now, Shuttleworth — (And that is all. He turns, and assisted by his cane goes out through the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentousness his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the August moon.)

RETROSPECT

In this extremity they were like two goldfish in a bowl from which all the water had been drawn; they could not even swim across to each other.

Gloria would be twenty-six in May. There was nothing, she had said, that she wanted, except to be young and beautiful for a long time, to be gay and happy, and to have money and love. She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately. She had been married over two years. At first there had been days of serene understanding, rising to ecstasies of proprietorship and pride. Alternating with these periods had occurred sporadic hates, enduring a short hour, and forgetfulnesses lasting no longer than an afternoon. That had been for half a year.

Then the serenity, the content, had become less jubilant, had become, gray — very rarely, with the spur of jealousy or forced separation, the ancient ecstasies returned, the apparent communion of soul and soul, the emotional excitement. It was possible for her to hate Anthony for as much as a full day, to be carelessly incensed at him for as long as a week. Recrimination had displaced affection as an indulgence, almost as an entertainment, and there were nights when they would go to sleep trying to remember who was angry and who should be reserved next morning. And as the second year waned there had entered two new elements. Gloria realized that Anthony had become capable of utter indifference toward her, a temporary indifference, more than half lethargic, but one from which she could no longer stir him by a whispered word, or a certain intimate smile. There were days when her caresses affected him as a sort of suffocation. She was conscious of these things; she never entirely admitted them to herself.

It was only recently that she perceived that in spite of her adoration of him, her jealousy, her servitude, her pride, she fundamentally despised him — and her contempt blended indistinguishably with her other emotions…. All this was her love — the vital and feminine illusion that had directed itself toward him one April night, many months before.

On Anthony’s part she was, in spite of these qualifications, his sole preoccupation. Had he lost her he would have been a broken man, wretchedly and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder of life. He seldom took pleasure in an entire day spent alone with her — except on occasions he preferred to have a third person with them. There were times when he felt that if he were not left absolutely alone he would go mad — there were a few times when he definitely hated her. In his cups he was capable of short attractions toward other women, the hitherto-suppressed outcroppings of an experimental temperament.

That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon future happiness — how they were to travel from summer land to summer land, returning eventually to a gorgeous estate and possible idyllic children, then entering diplomacy or politics, to accomplish, for a while, beautiful and important things, until finally as a white-haired (beautifully, silkily, white-haired) couple they were to loll about in serene glory, worshipped by the bourgeoisie of the land…. These times were to begin “when we get our money”; it was on such dreams rather than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested. On gray mornings when the jests of the night before had shrunk to ribaldries without wit or dignity, they could, after a fashion, bring out this batch of common hopes and count them over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of clinching the matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism of Gloria’s defiant “I don’t care!”

Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement — not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born something that she had hitherto never needed — the skeleton, incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself was coincidental with the slow decline of her physical courage.

Then, on the August morning after Adam Patch’s unexpected call, they awoke, nauseated and tired, dispirited with life, capable only of one pervasive emotion — fear.

PANIC

“Well?” Anthony sat up in bed and looked down at her. The corners of his lips were drooping with depression, his voice was strained and hollow.

Her reply was to raise her hand to her mouth and begin a slow, precise nibbling at her finger.

“We’ve done it,” he said after a pause; then, as she was still silent, he became exasperated. “Why don’t you say something?”

“What on earth do you want me to say?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Then stop biting your finger!”

Ensued a short confused discussion of whether or not she had been thinking. It seemed essential to Anthony that she should muse aloud upon last night’s disaster. Her silence was a method of settling the responsibility on him. For her part she saw no necessity for speech — the moment required that she should gnaw at her finger like a nervous child.

“I’ve got to fix up this damn mess with my grandfather,” he said with uneasy conviction. A faint newborn respect was indicated by his use of “my grandfather” instead of “grampa.”

“You can’t,” she affirmed abruptly. “You can’t — ever. He’ll never forgive you as long as he lives.”

“Perhaps not,” agreed Anthony miserably. “Still — I might possibly square myself by some sort of reformation and all that sort of thing — “

“He looked sick,” she interrupted, “pale as flour.”

“He is sick. I told you that three months ago.”

“I wish he’d died last week!” she said petulantly. “Inconsiderate old fool!”

Neither of them laughed.

“But just let me say,” she added quietly, “the next time I see you acting with any woman like you did with Rachael Barnes last night, I’ll leave you — just — like — that! I’m simply not going to stand it!”

Anthony quailed.

“Oh, don’t be absurd,” he protested. “You know there’s no woman in the world for me except you — none, dearest.”

His attempt at a tender note failed miserably — the more imminent danger stalked back into the foreground.

“If I went to him,” suggested Anthony, “and said with appropriate biblical quotations that I’d walked too long in the way of unrighteousness and at last seen the light — “ He broke off and glanced with a whimsical expression at his wife. “I wonder what he’d do?”

“I don’t know.”

She was speculating as to whether or not their guests would have the acumen to leave directly after breakfast.

Not for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The prospect was revolting and left alone he would have been incapable of making the trip — but if his will had deteriorated in these past three years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his grandfather’s violent animosity time to cool — but to wait longer would be an error — it would give it a chance to harden.

He went, in trepidation … and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said Shuttleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no one was to see him. Before the ex-”gin-physician’s” vindictive eye Anthony’s front wilted. He walked out to his taxicab with what was almost a slink — recovering only a little of his self-respect as he boarded the train; glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind.

Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced his way in? That was what she would have done!

Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered.

Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the gray house, which had seen the flower of their love. Four trunks and three monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote, languorous, content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new brown dress edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony walked nervously to and fro smoking, as they waited for the truck that would take their things to the city.

“What are those?” she demanded, pointing to some books piled upon one of the crates.

“That’s my old stamp collection,” he confessed sheepishly. “I forgot to pack it.”

“Anthony, it’s so silly to carry it around.”

“Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last spring, and I decided not to store it.”

“Can’t you sell it? Haven’t we enough junk?”

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly.

With a thunderous rattling the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls.

“I’m so glad to go!” she cried, “so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!”

So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled — her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed.

“Don’t be cross,” begged Anthony piteously. “We’ve got nothing but each other, after all.”

“We haven’t even that, most of the time,” cried Gloria.

“When haven’t we?”

“A lot of times — beginning with one occasion on the station platform at
Redgate.”

“You don’t mean to say that — “

“No,” she interrupted coolly, “I don’t brood over it. It came and went — and when it went it took something with it.”

She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one — otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string.

The Bronx — the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home — the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry.