Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Somewhat to his annoyance the conversation abruptly ended. Gretchen jumped up and kissed him sketchily and rushed into the kitchen to light the hot water for a bath. With a sigh he carefully deposited his portfolio behind the bookcase--it contained only sketches and layouts for display advertising, but it seemed to him the first thing a burglar would look for. Then he went abstractedly upstairs, dropping into the baby’s room for a casual moist kiss, and began dressing for dinner.

  They had no automobile, so George Tompkins called for them at 6.30. Tompkins was a successful interior decorator, a broad, rosy man with a handsome moustache and a strong odour of jasmine. He and Roger had once roomed side by side in a boarding-house in New York, but they had met only intermittently in the past five years.

  ‘We ought to see each other more,’ he told Roger tonight. ‘You ought to go out more often, old boy. Cocktail?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘No? Well, your fair wife will--won’t you, Gretchen?’

  ‘I love this house,’ she exclaimed, taking the glass and looking admiringly at ship models. Colonial whisky bottles, and other fashionable débris of 1925.

  ‘I like it,’ said Tompkins with satisfaction. ‘I did it to please myself, and I succeeded.’

  Roger stared moodily around the stiff, plain room, wondering if they could have blundered into the kitchen by mistake.

  ‘You look like the devil, Roger,’ said his host. ‘Have a cocktail and cheer up.’

  ‘Have one,’ urged Gretchen.

  ‘What?’ Roger turned around absently. ‘Oh, no, thanks. I’ve got to work after I get home.’

  ‘Work!’ Tompkins smiled. ‘Listen, Roger, you’ll kill yourself with work. Why don’t you bring a little balance into your life--work a little, then play a little?’

  ‘That’s what I tell him,’ said Gretchen.

  ‘Do you know an average business man’s day?’ demanded Tompkins as they went in to dinner. ‘Coffee in the morning, eight hours’ work interrupted by a bolted luncheon, and then home again with dyspepsia and a bad temper to give the wife a pleasant evening.’

  Roger laughed shortly.

  ‘You’ve been going to the movies too much,’ he said dryly.

  ‘What?’ Tompkins looked at him with some irritation. ‘Movies? I’ve hardly ever been to the movies in my life. I think the movies are atrocious. My opinions on life are drawn from my own observations. I believe in a balanced life.’

  ‘What’s that?’ demanded Roger.

  ‘Well’--he hesitated--’probably the best way to tell you would be to describe my own day. Would that seem horribly egotistic?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Gretchen looked at him with interest. ‘I’d love to hear about it.’

  ‘Well, in the morning I get up and go through a series of exercises. I’ve got one room fitted up as a little gymnasium, and I punch the bag and do shadow-boxing and weight-pulling for an hour. Then after a cold bath--There’s a thing now! Do you take a daily cold bath?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Roger, ‘I take a hot bath in the evening three or four times a week.’

  A horrified silence fell. Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance as if something obscene had been said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ broke out Roger, glancing from one to the other in some irritation. ‘You know I don’t take a bath every day--I haven’t got the time.’

  Tompkins gave a prolonged sigh.

  ‘After my bath,’ he continued, drawing a merciful veil of silence over the matter, ‘I have breakfast and drive to my office in New York, where I work until four. Then I lay off, and if it’s summer I hurry out here for nine holes of golf, or if it’s winter I play squash for an hour at my club. Then a good snappy game of bridge until dinner. Dinner is liable to have something to do with business, but in a pleasant way. Perhaps I’ve just finished a house for some customer, and he wants me to be on hand for his first party to see that the lighting is soft enough and all that sort of thing. Or maybe I sit down with a good book of poetry and spend the evening alone. At any rate, I do something every night to get me out of myself.’

  ‘It must be wonderful,’ said Gretchen enthusiastically. ‘I wish we lived like that.’

  Tompkins bent forward earnestly over the table.

  ‘You can,’ he said impressively. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Look here, if Roger’ll play nine holes of golf every day it’ll do wonders for him. He won’t know himself. He’ll do his work better, never get that tired, nervous feeling--What’s the matter?’

  He broke off. Roger had perceptibly yawned.

  ‘Roger,’ cried Gretchen sharply, ‘there’s no need to be so rude. If you did what George said, you’d be a lot better off.’ She turned indignantly to their host. ‘The latest is that he’s going to work at night for the next six weeks. He says he’s going to pull down the blinds and shut us up like hermits in a cave. He’s been doing it every Sunday for the last year; now he’s going to do it every night for six weeks.’

  Tompkins shook his head sadly.

  ‘At the end of six weeks,’ he remarked, ‘he’ll be starting for the sanatorium. Let me tell you, every private hospital in New York is full of cases like yours. You just strain the human nervous system a little too far, and bang!--you’ve broken something. And in order to save sixty hours you’re laid up sixty weeks for repairs.’ He broke off, changed his tone, and turned to Gretchen with a smile. ‘Not to mention what happens to you. It seems to me it’s the wife rather than the husband who bears the brunt of these insane periods of overwork.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ protested Gretchen loyally.

  ‘Yes, she does,’ said Roger grimly; ‘she minds like the devil. She’s a shortsighted little egg, and she thinks it’s going to be forever until I get started and she can have some new clothes. But it can’t be helped. The saddest thing about women is that, after all, their best trick is to sit down and fold their hands.’

  ‘Your ideas on women are about twenty years out of date,’ said Tompkins pityingly. ‘Women won’t sit down and wait any more.’

  ‘Then they’d better marry men of forty,’ insisted Roger stubbornly. ‘If a girl marries a young man for love she ought to be willing to make any sacrifice within reason, so long as her husband keeps going ahead.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ said Gretchen impatiently. ‘Please, Roger, let’s have a good time just this once.’

  When Tompkins dropped them in front of their house at eleven Roger and Gretchen stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking at the winter moon. There was a fine, damp, dusty snow in the air, and Roger drew a long breath of it and put his arm around Gretchen exultantly.

  ‘I can make more money than he can,’ he said tensely. ‘And I’ll be doing it in just forty days.’

  ‘Forty days,’ she sighed. ‘It seems such a long time--when everybody else is always having fun. If I could only sleep for forty days.’

  ‘Why don’t you, honey? Just take forty winks, and when you wake up everything’ll be fine.’

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘Roger,’ she asked thoughtfully, ‘do you think George meant what he said about taking me horseback riding on Sunday?’

  Roger frowned.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not--I hope to Heaven he didn’t.’ He hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, he made me sort of sore tonight--all that junk about his cold bath.’

  With their arms about each other, they started up the walk to the house.

  ‘I’ll bet he doesn’t take a cold bath every morning,’ continued Roger ruminatively; ‘or three times a week, either.’ He fumbled in his pocket for the key and inserted it in the lock with savage precision. Then he turned around defiantly. ‘I’ll bet he hasn’t had a bath for a month.’

  II

  After a fortnight of intensive work, Roger Halsey’s days blurred into each other and passed by in blocks of twos and threes and fours. From eight until 5.30 he was in his office. Then a half-hour on the commuting train, w
here he scrawled notes on the backs of envelopes under the dull yellow light. By 7.30 his crayons, shears, and sheets of white cardboard were spread over the living-room table, and he laboured there with much grunting and sighing until midnight, while Gretchen lay on the sofa with a book, and the doorbell tinkled occasionally behind the drawn blinds. At twelve there was always an argument as to whether he would come to bed. He would agree to come after he had cleared up everything; but as he was invariably sidetracked by half a dozen new ideas, he usually found Gretchen sound asleep when he tiptoed upstairs.

  Sometimes it was three o’clock before Roger squashed his last cigarette into the overloaded ash-tray, and he would undress in the dark, disembodied with fatigue, but with a sense of triumph that he had lasted out another day.

  Christmas came and went and he scarcely noticed that it was gone. He remembered it afterwards as the day he completed the window-cards for Garrod’s shoes. This was one of the eight large accounts for which he was pointing in January--if he got half of them he was assured a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of business during the year.

  But the world outside his business became a chaotic dream. He was aware that on two cool December Sundays George Tompkins had taken Gretchen horseback riding, and that another time she had gone out with him in his automobile to spend the afternoon skiing on the country-club hill. A picture of Tompkins, in an expensive frame, had appeared one morning on their bedroom wall. And one night he was shocked into a startled protest when Gretchen went to the theatre with Tompkins in town.

  But his work was almost done. Daily now his layouts arrived from the printers until seven of them were piled and docketed in his office safe. He knew how good they were. Money alone couldn’t buy such work; more than he realized himself, it had been a labour of love.

  December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar. There was an agonizing week when he had to give up coffee because it made his heart pound so. If he could hold on now for four days--three days--

  On Thursday afternoon H. G. Garrod was to arrive in New York. On Wednesday evening Roger came home at seven to find Gretchen poring over the December bills with a strange expression in her eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She nodded at the bills. He ran through them, his brow wrinkling in a frown.

  ‘Gosh!’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘They’re terrible.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t marry you because you were a wonderful housekeeper. I’ll manage about the bills some way. Don’t worry your little head over it.’

  She regarded him coldly.

  ‘You talk as if I were a child.’

  ‘I have to,’ he said with sudden irritation.

  ‘Well, at least I’m not a piece of bric-à-brac that you can just put somewhere and forget.’

  He knelt down by her quickly, and took her arms in his hands.

  ‘Gretchen, listen!’ he said breathlessly. ‘For God’s sake, don’t go to pieces now! We’re both all stored up with malice and reproach, and if we had a quarrel it’d be terrible. I love you, Gretchen. Say you love me--quick!’

  ‘You know I love you.’

  The quarrel was averted, but there was an unnatural tenseness all through dinner. It came to a climax afterwards when he began to spread his working materials on the table.

  ‘Oh, Roger,’ she protested, ‘I thought you didn’t have to work tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d have to, but something came up.’

  ‘I’ve invited George Tompkins over.’

  ‘Oh, gosh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I’m sorry, honey, but you’ll have to phone him not to come.’

  ‘He’s left,’ she said. ‘He’s coming straight from town. He’ll be here any minute now.’

  Roger groaned. It occurred to him to send them both to the movies, but somehow the suggestion stuck on his lips. He did not want her at the movies; he wanted her here, where he could look up and know she was by his side.

  George Tompkins arrived breezily at eight o’clock. ‘Aha!’ he cried reprovingly, coming into the room. ‘Still at it.’

  Roger agreed coolly that he was.

  ‘Better quit--better quit before you have to.’ He sat down with a long sigh of physical comfort and lit a cigarette. ‘Take it from a fellow who’s looked into the question scientifically. We can stand so much, and then--bang!’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me’--Roger made his voice as polite as possible--’I’m going upstairs and finish this work.’

  ‘Just as you like, Roger.’ George waved his hand carelessly. ‘It isn’t that I mind. I’m the friend of the family and I’d just as soon see the missus as the mister.’ He smiled playfully. ‘But if I were you, old boy, I’d put away my work and get a good night’s sleep.’

  When Roger had spread out his materials on the bed upstairs he found that he could still hear the rumble and murmur of their voices through the thin floor. He began wondering what they found to talk about. As he plunged deeper into his work his mind had a tendency to revert sharply to his question, and several times he arose and paced nervously up and down the room.

  The bed was ill adapted to his work. Several times the paper slipped from the board on which it rested, and the pencil punched through. Everything was wrong tonight. Letters and figures blurred before his eyes, and as an accompaniment to the beating of his temples came those persistent murmuring voices.

  At ten he realized that he had done nothing for more than an hour, and with a sudden exclamation he gathered together his papers, replaced them in his portfolio, and went downstairs. They were sitting together on the sofa when he came in.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ cried Gretchen, rather unnecessarily, he thought. ‘We were just discussing you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he answered ironically. ‘What particular part of my anatomy was under the scalpel?’

  ‘Your health,’ said Tompkins jovially.

  ‘My health’s all right,’ answered Roger shortly.

  ‘But you look at it so selfishly, old fella,’ cried Tompkins. ‘You only consider yourself in the matter. Don’t you think Gretchen has any rights? If you were working on a wonderful sonnet or a--a portrait of some madonna or something’--he glanced at Gretchen’s Titian hair--’why, then I’d say go ahead. But you’re not. It’s just some silly advertisement about how to sell Nobald’s hair tonic, and if all the hair tonic ever made was dumped into the ocean tomorrow the world wouldn’t be one bit the worse for it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Roger angrily: ‘that’s not quite fair. I’m not kidding myself about the importance of my work--it’s just as useless as the stuff you do. But to Gretchen and me it’s just about the most important thing in the world.’

  ‘Are you implying that my work is useless?’ demanded Tompkins incredulously.

  ‘No; not if it brings happiness to some poor sucker of a pants manufacturer who doesn’t know how to spend his money.’

  Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance.

  ‘Oh-h-h!’ exclaimed Tompkins ironically. ‘I didn’t realize that all these years I’ve just been wasting my time.’

  ‘You’re a loafer,’ said Roger rudely.

  ‘Me?’ cried Tompkins angrily. ‘You call me a loafer because I have a little balance in my life and find time to do interesting things? Because I play hard as well as work hard and don’t let myself get to be a dull, tiresome drudge?’

  Both men were angry now, and their voices had risen, though on Tompkins’ face there still remained the semblance of a smile.

  ‘What I object to,’ said Roger steadily, ‘is that for the last six weeks you seem to have done all your playing around here.’

  ‘Roger!’ cried Gretchen. ‘What do you mean by talking like that?’

  ‘Just what I said.’

  ‘You’ve just lost your temper.’ Tompkins lit a cigarette with ostentatious coolness. ‘You’re so nervous from overwork you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re on the verge of a nervous break
--’

  ‘You get out of here!’ cried Roger fiercely. ‘You get out of here right now--before I throw you out!’

  Tompkins got angrily to his feet.

  ‘You--you throw me out?’ he cried incredulously.

  They were actually moving towards each other when Gretchen stepped between them, and grabbing Tompkins’ arm urged him towards the door.

  ‘He’s acting like a fool, George, but you better get out,’ she cried, groping in the hall for his hat.

  ‘He insulted me!’ shouted Tompkins. ‘He threatened to throw me out!’

  ‘Never mind, George,’ pleaded Gretchen. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Please go! I’ll see you at ten o’clock tomorrow.’

  She opened the door.

  ‘You won’t see him at ten o’clock tomorrow,’ said Roger steadily. ‘He’s not coming to this house any more.’

  Tompkins turned to Gretchen.

  ‘It’s his house,’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps we’d better meet at mine.’

  Then he was gone, and Gretchen had shut the door behind him. Her eyes were full of angry tears.

  ‘See what you’ve done!’ she sobbed. ‘The only friend I had, the only person in the world who liked me enough to treat me decently, is insulted by my husband in my own house.’

  She threw herself on the sofa and began to cry passionately into the pillows.

  ‘He brought it on himself,’ said Roger stubbornly, ‘I’ve stood as much as my self-respect will allow. I don’t want you going out with him any more.’

  ‘I will go out with him!’ cried Gretchen wildly. ‘I’ll go out with him all I want! Do you think it’s any fun living here with you?’

  ‘Gretchen,’ he said coldly, ‘get up and put on your hat and coat and go out that door and never come back!’

  Her mouth fell slightly ajar.

  ‘But I don’t want to get out,’ she said dazedly.

  ‘Well, then, behave yourself.’ And he added in a gentler voice: ‘I thought you were going to sleep for this forty days.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she cried bitterly, ‘easy enough to say! But I’m tired of sleeping.’ She got up, faced him defiantly. ‘And what’s more, I’m going riding with George Tompkins tomorrow.’