“Did he go inside?” I asked.
They looked at one another in that cagy way; a wink passed between them, and after a perceptible pause, one said:
“Who go inside?”
“I don’t know his name.”
There was another wink. Annoyed and determined, I walked past them and into the pool room. There were a few people at a lunch counter along one side and a few more playing billiards, but he was not among them.
Again I hesitated. If his idea was to lead me into any blind part of the establishment--there were some half-open doors farther back--I wanted more support. I went up to the man at the desk.
“What became of the fellow who just walked in here?”
Was he on his guard immediately, or was that my imagination?
“What fellow?”
“Thin face--derby hat.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh--a minute.”
He shook his head again. “Didn’t see him,” he said.
I waited. The three men from outside had come in and were lined up beside me at the counter. I felt that all of them were looking at me in a peculiar way. Feeling helpless and increasingly uneasy, I turned suddenly and went out. A little way down the street I turned again and took a good look at the place, so I’d know it and could find it again. On the next corner I broke impulsively into a run, found a taxicab in front of the hotel and drove back up the hill.
Ellen wasn’t home. Mrs. Baker came downstairs and talked to me. She seemed entirely cheerful and proud of Ellen’s beauty, and ignorant of anything being amiss or of anything unusual having taken place the night before. She was glad that vacation was almost over--it was a strain and Ellen wasn’t very strong. Then she said something that relieved my mind enormously. She was glad that I had come in, for of course Ellen would want to see me, and the time was so short. She was going back at half-past eight tonight.
“Tonight!” I exclaimed. “I thought it was the day after tomorrow.”
“She’s going to visit the Brokaws in Chicago,” Mrs. Baker said. “They want her for some party. We just decided it today. She’s leaving with the Ingersoll girls tonight.”
I was so glad I could barely restrain myself from shaking her hand. Ellen was safe. It had been nothing all along but a moment of the most casual adventure. I felt like an idiot, but I realized how much I cared about Ellen and how little I could endure anything terrible happening to her.
“She’ll be in soon?”
“Any minute now. She just phoned from the University Club.”
I said I’d be over later--I lived almost next door and I wanted to be alone. Outside I remembered I didn’t have a key, so I started up the Bakers’ driveway to take the old cut we used in childhood through the intervening yard. It was still snowing, but the flakes were bigger now against the darkness, and trying to locate the buried walk I noticed that the Bakers’ back door was ajar.
I scarcely know why I turned and walked into that kitchen. There was a time when I would have known the Bakers’ servants by name. That wasn’t true now, but they knew me, and I was aware of a sudden suspension as I came in--not only a suspension of talk but of some mood or expectation that had filled them. They began to go to work too quickly; they made unnecessary movements and clamor--those three. The parlor maid looked at me in a frightened way and I suddenly guessed she was waiting to deliver another message. I beckoned her into the pantry.
“I know all about this,” I said. “It’s a very serious business. Shall I go to Mrs. Baker now, or will you shut and lock that back door?”
“Don’t tell Mrs. Baker, Mr. Stinson!”
“Then I don’t want Miss Ellen disturbed. If she is--and if she is I’ll know of it--” I delivered some outrageous threat about going to all the employment agencies and seeing she never got another job in the city. She was thoroughly intimidated when I went out; it wasn’t a minute before the back door was locked and bolted behind me.
Simultaneously I heard a big car drive up in front, chains crunching on the soft snow; it was bringing Ellen home, and I went in to say good-by.
Joe Jelke and two other boys were along, and none of the three could manage to take their eyes off her, even to say hello to me. She had one of those exquisite rose skins frequent in our part of the country, and beautiful until the little veins begin to break at about forty; now, flushed with the cold, it was a riot of lovely delicate pinks like many carnations. She and Joe had reached some sort of reconciliation, or at least he was too far gone in love to remember last night; but I saw that though she laughed a lot she wasn’t really paying any attention to him or any of them. She wanted them to go, so that there’d be a message from the kitchen, but I knew that the message wasn’t coming--that she was safe. There was talk of the Pump and Slipper dance at New Haven and of the Princeton Prom, and then, in various moods, we four left and separated quickly outside. I walked home with a certain depression of spirit and lay for an hour in a hot bath thinking that vacation was all over for me now that she was gone; feeling, even more deeply than I had yesterday, that she was out of my life.
And something eluded me, some one more thing to do, something that I had lost amid the events of the afternoon, promising myself to go back and pick it up, only to find that it had escaped me. I associated it vaguely with Mrs. Baker, and now I seemed to recall that it had poked up its head somewhere in the stream of conversation with her. In my relief about Ellen I had forgotten to ask her a question regarding something she had said.
The Brokaws--that was it--where Ellen was to visit. I knew Bill Brokaw well; he was in my class at Yale. Then I remembered and sat bolt upright in the tub--the Brokaws weren’t in Chicago this Christmas; they were at Palm Beach!
Dripping I sprang out of the tub, threw an insufficient union suit around my shoulders and sprang for the phone in my room. I got the connection quick, but Miss Ellen had already started for the train.
Luckily our car was in, and while I squirmed, still damp, into my clothes, the chauffeur brought it around to the door. The night was cold and dry, and we made good time to the station through the hard, crusty snow. I felt queer and insecure starting out this way, but somehow more confident as the station loomed up bright and new against the dark, cold air. For fifty years my family had owned the land on which it was built and that made my temerity seem all right somehow. There was always a possibility that I was rushing in where angels feared to tread, but that sense of having a solid foothold in the past made me willing to make a fool of myself. This business was all wrong--terribly wrong. Any idea I had entertained that it was harmless dropped away now; between Ellen and some vague overwhelming catastrophe there stood me, or else the police and a scandal. I’m no moralist--there was another element here, dark and frightening, and I didn’t want Ellen to go through it alone.
There are three competing trains from St. Paul to Chicago that all leave within a few minutes of half-past eight. Hers was the Burlington, and as I ran across the station I saw the grating being pulled over and the light above it go out. I knew, though, that she had a drawing-room with the Ingersoll girls, because her mother had mentioned buying the ticket, so she was, literally speaking, tucked in until tomorrow.
The C., M. & St. P. gate was down at the other end and I raced for it and made it. I had forgotten one thing, though, and that was enough to keep me awake and worried half the night. This train got into Chicago ten minutes after the other. Ellen had that much time to disappear into one of the largest cities in the world.
I gave the porter a wire to my family to send from Milwaukee, and at eight o’clock next morning I pushed violently by a whole line of passengers, clamoring over their bags parked in the vestibule, and shot out of the door with a sort of scramble over the porter’s back. For a moment the confusion of a great station, the voluminous sounds and echoes and cross-currents of bells and smoke struck me helpless. Then I dashed for the exit and toward the only chance I knew of finding her.
I had guessed rig
ht. She was standing at the telegraph counter, sending off heaven knows what black lie to her mother, and her expression when she saw me had a sort of terror mixed up with its surprise. There was cunning in it too. She was thinking quickly--she would have liked to walk away from me as if I weren’t there, and go about her own business, but she couldn’t. I was too matter-of-fact a thing in her life. So we stood silently watching each other and each thinking hard.
“The Brokaws are in Florida,” I said after a minute.
“It was nice of you to take such a long trip to tell me that.”
“Since you’ve found it out, don’t you think you’d better go on to school?”
“Please let me alone, Eddie,” she said.
“I’ll go as far as New York with you. I’ve decided to go back early myself.”
“You’d better let me alone.” Her lovely eyes narrowed and her face took on a look of dumb-animal-like resistance. She made a visible effort, the cunning flickered back into it, then both were gone, and in their stead was a cheerful reassuring smile that all but convinced me.
“Eddie, you silly child, don’t you think I’m old enough to take care of myself?” I didn’t answer. “I’m going to meet a man, you understand. I just want to see him today. I’ve got my ticket East on the five o’clock train. If you don’t believe it, here it is in my bag.”
“I believe you.”
“The man isn’t anybody that you know and--frankly, I think you’re being awfully fresh and impossible.”
“I know who the man is.”
Again she lost control of her face. That terrible expression came back into it and she spoke with almost a snarl:
“You’d better let me alone.”
I took the blank out of her hand and wrote out an explanatory telegram to her mother. Then I turned to Ellen and said a little roughly:
“We’ll take the five o’clock train East together. Meanwhile you’re going to spend the day with me.”
The mere sound of my own voice saying this so emphatically encouraged me, and I think it impressed her too; at any rate, she submitted--at least temporarily--and came along without protest while I bought my ticket.
When I start to piece together the fragments of that day a sort of confusion begins, as if my memory didn’t want to yield up any of it, or my consciousness let any of it pass through. There was a bright, fierce morning during which we rode about in a taxicab and went to a department store where Ellen said she wanted to buy something and then tried to slip away from me by a back way. I had the feeling, for an hour, that someone was following us along Lake Shore Drive in a taxicab, and I would try to catch them by turning quickly or looking suddenly into the chauffeur’s mirror; but I could find no one, and when I turned back I could see that Ellen’s face was contorted with mirthless, unnatural laughter.
All morning there was a raw, bleak wind off the lake, but when we went to the Blackstone for lunch a light snow came down past the windows and we talked almost naturally about our friends, and about casual things. Suddenly her tone changed; she grew serious and looked me in the eye, straight and sincere.
“Eddie, you’re the oldest friend I have,” she said, “and you oughtn’t to find it too hard to trust me. If I promise you faithfully on my word of honor to catch that five o’clock train, will you let me alone a few hours this afternoon?”
“Why?”
“Well”--she hesitated and hung her head a little--”I guess everybody has a right to say--good-by.”
“You want to say good-by to that--”
“Yes, yes,” she said hastily; “just a few hours, Eddie, and I promise faithfully that I’ll be on that train.”
“Well, I suppose no great harm could be done in two hours. If you really want to say good-by--”
I looked up suddenly, and surprised a look of such tense cunning in her face that I winced before it. Her lip was curled up and her eyes were slits again; there wasn’t the faintest touch of fairness and sincerity in her whole face.
We argued. The argument was vague on her part and somewhat hard and reticent on mine. I wasn’t going to be cajoled again into any weakness or be infected with any--and there was a contagion of evil in the air. She kept trying to imply, without any convincing evidence to bring forward, that everything was all right. Yet she was too full of the thing itself--whatever it was--to build up a real story, and she wanted to catch at any credulous and acquiescent train of thought that might start in my head, and work that for all it was worth. After every reassuring suggestion she threw out, she stared at me eagerly, as if she hoped I’d launch into a comfortable moral lecture with the customary sweet at the end--which in this case would be her liberty. But I was wearing her away a little. Two or three times it needed just a touch of pressure to bring her to the point of tears--which, of course, was what I wanted--but I couldn’t seem to manage it. Almost I had her--almost possessed her interior attention--then she would slip away.
I bullied her remorselessly into a taxi about four o’clock and started for the station. The wind was raw again, with a sting of snow in it, and the people in the streets, waiting for busses and street cars too small to take them all in, looked cold and disturbed and unhappy. I tried to think how lucky we were to be comfortably off and taken care of, but all the warm, respectable world I had been part of yesterday had dropped away from me. There was something we carried with us now that was the enemy and the opposite of all that; it was in the cabs beside us, the streets we passed through. With a touch of panic, I wondered if I wasn’t slipping almost imperceptibly into Ellen’s attitude of mind. The column of passengers waiting to go aboard the train were as remote from me as people from another world, but it was I that was drifting away and leaving them behind.
My lower was in the same car with her compartment. It was an old-fashioned car, its lights somewhat dim, its carpets and upholstery full of the dust of another generation. There were half a dozen other travellers, but they made no special impression on me, except that they shared the unreality that I was beginning to feel everywhere around me. We went into Ellen’s compartment, shut the door and sat down.
Suddenly I put my arms around her and drew her over to me, just as tenderly as I knew how--as if she were a little girl--as she was. She resisted a little, but after a moment she submitted and lay tense and rigid in my arms.
“Ellen,” I said helplessly, “you asked me to trust you. You have much more reason to trust me. Wouldn’t it help to get rid of all this, if you told me a little?”
“I can’t,” she said, very low--”I mean, there’s nothing to tell.”
“You met this man on the train coming home and you fell in love with him, isn’t that true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me, Ellen. You fell in love with him?”
“I don’t know. Please let me alone.”
“Call it anything you want,” I went on, “he has some sort of hold over you. He’s trying to use you; he’s trying to get something from you. He’s not in love with you.”
“What does that matter?” she said in a weak voice.
“It does matter. Instead of trying to fight this--this thing--you’re trying to fight me. And I love you, Ellen. Do you hear? I’m telling you all of a sudden, but it isn’t new with me. I love you.”
She looked at me with a sneer on her gentle face; it was an expression I had seen on men who were tight and didn’t want to be taken home. But it was human. I was reaching her, faintly and from far away, but more than before.
“Ellen, I want you to answer me one question. Is he going to be on this train?”
She hesitated; then, an instant too late, she shook her head.
“Be careful, Ellen. Now I’m going to ask you one thing more, and I wish you’d try very hard to answer. Coming West, when did this man get on the train?”
“I don’t know,” she said with an effort.
Just at that moment I became aware, with the unquestionable knowledge reserved for facts, that he was j
ust outside the door. She knew it, too; the blood left her face and that expression of low-animal perspicacity came creeping back. I lowered my face into my hands and tried to think.
We must have sat there, with scarcely a word, for well over an hour. I was conscious that the lights of Chicago, then of Englewood and of endless suburbs, were moving by, and then there were no more lights and we were out on the dark flatness of Illinois. The train seemed to draw in upon itself; it took on an air of being alone. The porter knocked at the door and asked if he could make up the berth, but I said no and he went away.
After a while I convinced myself that the struggle inevitably coming wasn’t beyond what remained of my sanity, my faith in the essential all-rightness of things and people. That this person’s purpose was what we call “criminal,” I took for granted, but there was no need of ascribing to him an intelligence that belonged to a higher plane of human, or inhuman, endeavor. It was still as a man that I considered him, and tried to get at his essence, his self-interest--what took the place in him of a comprehensible heart--but I suppose I more than half knew what I would find when I opened the door.
When I stood up Ellen didn’t seem to see me at all. She was hunched into the corner staring straight ahead with a sort of film over her eyes, as if she were in a state of suspended animation of body and mind. I lifted her and put two pillows under her head and threw my fur coat over her knees. Then I knelt beside her and kissed her two hands, opened the door and went out into the hall.
I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it for a minute. The car was dark save for the corridor lights at each end. There was no sound except the groaning of the couplers, the even click-a-click of the rails and someone’s loud sleeping breath farther down the car. I became aware after a moment that the figure of a man was standing by the water cooler just outside the men’s smoking room, his derby hat on his head, his coat collar turned up around his neck as if he were cold, his hands in his coat pockets. When I saw him, he turned and went into the smoking room, and I followed. He was sitting in the far corner of the long leather bench; I took the single armchair beside the door.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 230
