Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Then Ailie and Earl, Sally and I, two and two in the wide back seat, each couple turned from the other, absorbed and whispering, drove away into the wide, flat darkness.

  We drove through pine woods heavy with lichen and Spanish moss, and between the fallow cotton fields along a road white as the rim of the world. We parked under the broken shadow of a mill where there was the sound of running water and restive squawky birds and over everything a brightness that tried to filter in anywhere--into the lost nigger cabins, the automobile, the fastnesses of the heart. The South sang to us--I wonder if they remember. I remember--the cool pale faces, the somnolent amorous eyes and the voices:

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Yes; are you?”

  “Are you sure you are?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly we knew it was late and there was nothing more. We turned home.

  Our detachment started for Camp Mills next day, but I didn’t go to France after all. We passed a cold month on Long Island, marched aboard a transport with steel helmets slung at our sides and then marched off again. There wasn’t any more war. I had missed the war. When I came back to Tarleton I tried to get out of the Army, but I had a regular commission and it took most of the winter. But Earl Schoen was one of the first to be demobilized. He wanted to find a good job “while the picking was good.” Ailie was noncommittal, but there was an understanding between them that he’d be back.

  By January the camps, which for two years had dominated the little city, were already fading. There was only the persistent incinerator smell to remind one of all that activity and bustle. What life remained centered bitterly about divisional headquarters building, with the disgruntled regular officers who had also missed the war.

  And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth--some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead, and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores. Only a few uniforms mingled with the dinner coats at the country-club dance.

  Just before Christmas, Bill Knowles arrived unexpectedly one day and left the next--either he gave Ailie an ultimatum or she had made up her mind at last. I saw her sometimes when she wasn’t busy with returned heroes from Savannah and Augusta, but I felt like an outmoded survival--and I was. She was waiting for Earl Schoen with such a vast uncertainty that she didn’t like to talk about it. Three days before I got my final discharge he came.

  I first happened upon them walking down Market Street together, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so sorry for a couple in my life; though I suppose the same situation was repeating itself in every city where there had been camps. Exteriorly Earl had about everything wrong with him that could be imagined. His hat was green, with a radical feather; his suit was slashed and braided in a grotesque fashion that national advertising and the movies have put an end to. Evidently he had been to his old barber, for his hair bloused neatly on his pink, shaved neck. It wasn’t as though he had been shiny and poor, but the background of mill-town dance halls and outing clubs flamed out at you--or rather flamed out at Ailie. For she had never quite imagined the reality; in these clothes even the natural grace of that magnificent body had departed. At first he boasted of his fine job; it would get them along all right until he could “see some easy money.” But from the moment he came back into her world on its own terms he must have known it was hopeless. I don’t know what Ailie said or how much her grief weighed against her stupefaction. She acted quickly--three days after his arrival, Earl and I went North together on the train.

  “Well, that’s the end of that,” he said moodily. “She’s a wonderful girl, but too much of a highbrow for me. I guess she’s got to marry some rich guy that’ll give her a great social position. I can’t see that stuck-up sort of thing.” And then, later: “She said to come back and see her in a year, but I’ll never go back. This aristocrat stuff is all right if you got the money for it, but--”

  “But it wasn’t real,” he meant to finish. The provincial society in which he had moved with so much satisfaction for six months already appeared to him as affected, “dudish” and artificial.

  “Say, did you see what I saw getting on the train?” he asked me after a while. “Two wonderful janes, all alone. What do you say we mosey into the next car and ask them to lunch? I’ll take the one in blue.” Halfway down the car he turned around suddenly. “Say, Andy,” he demanded, frowning; “one thing--how do you suppose she knew I used to command a street car? I never told her that.”

  “Search me.”

  III

  This narrative arrives now at one of the big gaps that stared me in the face when I began. For six years, while I finished at Harvard Law and built commercial aeroplanes and backed a pavement block that went gritty under trucks, Ailie Calhoun was scarcely more than a name on a Christmas card; something that blew a little in my mind on warm nights when I remembered the magnolia flowers. Occasionally an acquaintance of Army days would ask me, “What became of that blond girl who was so popular?” but I didn’t know. I ran into Nancy Lamar at the Montmartre in New York one evening and learned that Ailie had become engaged to a man in Cincinnati, had gone North to visit his family and then broken it off. She was lovely as ever and there was always a heavy beau or two. But neither Bill Knowles nor Earl Schoen had ever come back.

  And somewhere about that time I heard that Bill Knowles had married a girl he met on a boat. There you are--not much of a patch to mend six years with.

  Oddly enough, a girl seen at twilight in a small Indiana station started me thinking about going South. The girl, in stiff pink organdie, threw her arms about a man who got off our train and hurried him to a waiting car, and I felt a sort of pang. It seemed to me that she was bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties, where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets. I suppose that poetry is a Northern man’s dream of the South. But it was months later that I sent off a wire to Ailie, and immediately followed it to Tarleton.

  It was July. The Jefferson Hotel seemed strangely shabby and stuffy--a boosters’ club burst into intermittent song in the dining room that my memory had long dedicated to officers and girls. I recognized the taxi driver who took me up to Ailie’s house, but his “Sure, I do, lieutenant,” was unconvincing. I was only one of twenty thousand.

  It was a curious three days. I suppose some of Ailie’s first young lustre must have gone the way of such mortal shining, but I can’t bear witness to it. She was still so physically appealing that you wanted to touch the personality that trembled on her lips. No--the change was more profound than that.

  At once I saw she had a different line. The modulations of pride, the vocal hints that she knew the secrets of a brighter, finer ante-bellum day, were gone from her voice; there was no time for them now as it rambled on in the half-laughing, half-desperate banter of the newer South. And everything was swept into this banter in order to make it go on and leave no time for thinking--the present, the future, herself, me. We went to a rowdy party at the house of some young married people, and she was the nervous, glowing center of it. After all, she wasn’t eighteen, and she was as attractive in her rôle of reckless clown as she had ever been in her life.

  “Have you heard anything from Earl Schoen?” I asked her the second night, on our way to the country-club dance.

  “No.” She was serious for a moment. “I often think of him. He was the--” She hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  “I was going to say the man I loved most, but that wouldn’t be true. I never exactly loved him, or I’d have married him any old how, wouldn’t I?” She looked at me questioningly. “At least I wouldn’t have treated him like that.”

  “It was impossible.”

  “Of course,” she agreed uncertainly. Her mood changed; she beca
me flippant: “How the Yankees did deceive us poor little Southern girls. Ah, me!”

  When we reached the country club she melted like a chameleon into the--to me--unfamiliar crowd. There was a new generation upon the floor, with less dignity than the ones I had known, but none of them were more a part of its lazy, feverish essence than Ailie. Possibly she had perceived that in her initial longing to escape from Tarleton’s provincialism she had been walking alone, following a generation which was doomed to have no successors. Just where she lost the battle, waged behind the white pillars of her veranda, I don’t know. But she had guessed wrong, missed out somewhere. Her wild animation, which even now called enough men around her to rival the entourage of the youngest and freshest, was an admission of defeat.

  I left her house, as I had so often left it that vanished June, in a mood of vague dissatisfaction. It was hours later, tossing about my bed in the hotel, that I realized what was the matter, what had always been the matter--I was deeply and incurably in love with her. In spite of every incompatibility, she was still, she would always be to me, the most attractive girl I had ever known. I told her so next afternoon. It was one of those hot days I knew so well, and Ailie sat beside me on a couch in the darkened library.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t marry you,” she said, almost frightened; “I don’t love you that way at all. . . . I never did. And you don’t love me. I didn’t mean to tell you now, but next month I’m going to marry another man. We’re not even announcing it, because I’ve done that twice before.” Suddenly it occurred to her that I might be hurt: “Andy, you just had a silly idea, didn’t you? You know I couldn’t ever marry a Northern man.”

  “Who is he?” I demanded.

  “A man from Savannah.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “Of course I am.” We both smiled. “Of course I am! What are you trying to make me say?”

  There were no doubts, as there had been with other men. She couldn’t afford to let herself have doubts. I knew this because she had long ago stopped making any pretensions with me. This very naturalness, I realized, was because she didn’t consider me as a suitor. Beneath her mask of an instinctive thoroughbred she had always been on to herself, and she couldn’t believe that anyone not taken in to the point of uncritical worship could really love her. That was what she called being “sincere”; she felt most security with men like Canby and Earl Schoen, who were incapable of passing judgments on the ostensibly aristocratic heart.

  “All right,” I said, as if she had asked my permission to marry. “Now, would you do something for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “Ride out to camp.”

  “But there’s nothing left there, honey.”

  “I don’t care.”

  We walked downtown. The taxi driver in front of the hotel repeated her objection: “Nothing there now, cap.”

  “Never mind. Go there anyhow.”

  Twenty minutes later he stopped on a wide unfamiliar plain powdered with new cotton fields and marked with isolated clumps of pine.

  “Like to drive over yonder where you see the smoke?” asked the driver. “That’s the new state prison.”

  “No. Just drive along this road. I want to find where I used to live.”

  An old race course, inconspicuous in the camp’s day of glory, had reared its dilapidated grandstand in the desolation. I tried in vain to orient myself.

  “Go along this road past that clump of trees, and then turn right--no, turn left.”

  He obeyed, with professional disgust.

  “You won’t find a single thing, darling,” said Ailie. “The contractors took it all down.”

  We rode slowly along the margin of the fields. It might have been here--

  “All right. I want to get out,” I said suddenly.

  I left Ailie sitting in the car, looking very beautiful with the warm breeze stirring her long, curly bob.

  It might have been here. That would make the company streets down there and the mess shack, where we dined that night, just over the way.

  The taxi driver regarded me indulgently while I stumbled here and there in the knee-deep underbrush, looking for my youth in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can. I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees.

  “They’re going to fix up the old race course,” Ailie called from the car. “Tarleton’s getting quite doggy in its old age.”

  No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me forever.

  MAJESTY

  The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

  One of my conceits is that no one has ever disappointed me since I turned eighteen and could tell a real quality from a gift for sleight of hand, and even many of the merely showy people in my past seem to go on being blatantly and successfully showy to the end.

  Emily Castleton was born in Harrisburg in a medium-sized house, moved to New York at sixteen to a big house, went to the Briarly School, moved to an enormous house, moved to a mansion at Tuxedo Park, moved abroad, where she did various fashionable things and was in all the papers. Back in her debutante year one of those French artists who are so dogmatic about American beauties, included her with eleven other public and semipublic celebrities as one of America’s perfect types. At the time numerous men agreed with him.

  She was just faintly tall, with fine, rather large features, eyes with such an expanse of blue in them that you were really aware of it whenever you looked at her, and a good deal of thick blond hair--arresting and bright. Her mother and father did not know very much about the new world they had commandeered so Emily had to learn everything for herself, and she became involved in various situations and some of the first bloom wore off. However, there was bloom to spare. There were engagements and semi-engagements, short passionate attractions, and then a big affair at twenty-two that embittered her and sent her wandering the continents looking for happiness. She became “artistic” as most wealthy unmarried girls do at that age, because artistic people seem to have some secret, some inner refuge, some escape. But most of her friends were married now, and her life was a great disappointment to her father; so, at twenty-four, with marriage in her head if not in her heart, Emily came home.

  This was a low point in her career and Emily was aware of it. She had not done well. She was one of the most popular, most beautiful girls of her generation with charm, money and a sort of fame, but her generation was moving into new fields. At the first note of condescension from a former schoolmate, now a young “matron,” she went to Newport and was won by William Brevoort Blair. Immediately she was again the incomparable Emily Castleton. The ghost of the French artist walked once more in the newspapers; the most-talked-of leisure-class event of October was her wedding day.

  Splendor to mark society nuptials. . . . Harold Castleton sets out a series of five-thousand-dollar pavilions arranged like the interconnecting tents of a circus, in which the reception, the wedding supper and the ball will be held. . . . Nearly a thousand guests, many of them leaders in business, will mingle with those who dominate the social world. . . . The wedding gifts are estimated to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. . . .

  An hour before the ceremony, which was to be solemnized at St. Bartholomew’s, Emily sat before a dressing-table and gazed at her face in the glass. She was a little tired of her face at that moment and the depressing thought suddenly assailed her that it would require more and more looking after in the next fifty years.

  “I ought to be happy,” she
said aloud, “but every thought that comes into my head is sad.”

  Her cousin, Olive Mercy, sitting on the side of the bed, nodded. “All brides are sad.”

  “It’s such a waste,” Emily said.

  Olive frowned impatiently.

  “Waste of what? Women are incomplete unless they’re married and have children.”

  For a moment Emily didn’t answer. Then she said slowly, “Yes, but whose children?”

  For the first time in her life, Olive, who worshipped Emily, almost hated her. Not a girl in the wedding party but would have been glad of Brevoort Blair--Olive among the others.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re so lucky you don’t even know it. You ought to be paddled for talking like that.”

  “I shall learn to love him,” announced Emily facetiously. “Love will come with marriage. Now, isn’t that a hell of a prospect?”

  “Why so deliberately unromantic?”

  “On the contrary, I’m the most romantic person I’ve ever met in my life. Do you know what I think when he puts his arms around me? I think that if I look up I’ll see Garland Kane’s eyes.”

  “But why, then--”

  “Getting into his plane the other day I could only remember Captain Marchbanks and the little two-seater we flew over the Channel in, just breaking our hearts for each other and never saying a word about it because of his wife. I don’t regret those men; I just regret the part of me that went into caring. There’s only the sweepings to hand to Brevoort in a pink waste-basket. There should have been something more; I thought even when I was most carried away that I was saving something for the one. But apparently I wasn’t.” She broke off and then added: “And yet I wonder.”