As I went in I nodded to him and he acknowledged my presence with one of those terrible soundless laughs of his. But this time it was prolonged, it seemed to go on forever, and mostly to cut it short, I asked: “Where are you from?” in a voice I tried to make casual.
He stopped laughing and looked at me narrowly, wondering what my game was. When he decided to answer, his voice was muffled as though he were speaking through a silk scarf, and it seemed to come from a long way off.
“I’m from St. Paul, Jack.”
“Been making a trip home?”
He nodded. Then he took a long breath and spoke in a hard, menacing voice:
“You better get off at Fort Wayne, Jack.”
He was dead. He was dead as hell--he had been dead all along, but what force had flowed through him, like blood in his veins, out to St. Paul and back, was leaving him now. A new outline--the outline of him dead--was coming through the palpable figure that had knocked down Joe Jelke.
He spoke again, with a sort of jerking effort:
“You get off at Fort Wayne, Jack, or I’m going to wipe you out.” He moved his hand in his coat pocket and showed me the outline of a revolver.
I shook my head. “You can’t touch me,” I answered. “You see, I know.” His terrible eyes shifted over me quickly, trying to determine whether or not I did know. Then he gave a snarl and made as though he were going to jump to his feet.
“You climb off here or else I’m going to get you, Jack!” he cried hoarsely. The train was slowing up for Fort Wayne and his voice rang loud in the comparative quiet, but he didn’t move from his chair--he was too weak, I think--and we sat staring at each other while workmen passed up and down outside the window banging the brakes and wheels, and the engine gave out loud mournful pants up ahead. No one got into our car. After a while the porter closed the vestibule door and passed back along the corridor, and we slid out of the murky yellow station light and into the long darkness.
What I remember next must have extended over a space of five or six hours, though it comes back to me as something without any existence in time--something that might have taken five minutes or a year. There began a slow, calculated assault on me, wordless and terrible. I felt what I can only call a strangeness stealing over me--akin to the strangeness I had felt all afternoon, but deeper and more intensified. It was like nothing so much as the sensation of drifting away, and I gripped the arms of the chair convulsively, as if to hang onto a piece in the living world. Sometimes I felt myself going out with a rush. There would be almost a warm relief about it, a sense of not caring; then, with a violent wrench of the will, I’d pull myself back into the room.
Suddenly I realized that from a while back I had stopped hating him, stopped feeling violently alien to him, and with the realization, I went cold and sweat broke out all over my head. He was getting around my abhorrence, as he had got around Ellen coming West on the train; and it was just that strength he drew from preying on people that had brought him up to the point of concrete violence in St. Paul, and that, fading and flickering out, still kept him fighting now.
He must have seen that faltering in my heart, for he spoke at once, in a low, even, almost gentle voice: “You better go now.”
“Oh, I’m not going,” I forced myself to say.
“Suit yourself, Jack.”
He was my friend, he implied. He knew how it was with me and he wanted to help. He pitied me. I’d better go away before it was too late. The rhythm of his attack was soothing as a song: I’d better go away--and let him get at Ellen. With a little cry I sat bolt upright.
“What do you want of this girl?” I said, my voice shaking. “To make a sort of walking hell of her.”
His glance held a quality of dumb surprise, as if I were punishing an animal for a fault of which he was not conscious. For an instant I faltered; then I went on blindly:
“You’ve lost her; she’s put her trust in me.”
His countenance went suddenly black with evil, and he cried: “You’re a liar!” in a voice that was like cold hands.
“She trusts me,” I said. “You can’t touch her. She’s safe!”
He controlled himself. His face grew bland, and I felt that curious weakness and indifference begin again inside me. What was the use of all this? What was the use?
“You haven’t got much time left,” I forced myself to say, and then, in a flash of intuition, I jumped at the truth. “You died, or you were killed, not far from here!”--Then I saw what I had not seen before--that his forehead was drilled with a small round hole like a larger picture nail leaves when it’s pulled from a plaster wall. “And now you’re sinking. You’ve only got a few hours. The trip home is over!”
His face contorted, lost all semblance of humanity, living or dead. Simultaneously the room was full of cold air and with a noise that was something between a paroxysm of coughing and a burst of horrible laughter, he was on his feet, reeking of shame and blasphemy.
“Come and look!” he cried. “I’ll show you--”
He took a step toward me, then another and it was exactly as if a door stood open behind him, a door yawning out to an inconceivable abyss of darkness and corruption. There was a scream of mortal agony, from him or from somewhere behind, and abruptly the strength went out of him in a long husky sigh and he wilted to the floor. . . .
How long I sat there, dazed with terror and exhaustion, I don’t know. The next thing I remember is the sleepy porter shining shoes across the room from me, and outside the window the steel fires of Pittsburgh breaking the flat perspective also--something too faint for a man, too heavy for a shadow, of the night. There was something extended on the bench. Even as I perceived it it faded off and away.
Some minutes later I opened the door of Ellen’s compartment. She was asleep where I had left her. Her lovely cheeks were white and wan, but she lay naturally--her hands relaxed and her breathing regular and clear. What had possessed her had gone out of her, leaving her exhausted but her own dear self again.
I made her a little more comfortable, tucked a blanket around her, extinguished the light and went out.
III
When I came home for Easter vacation, almost my first act was to go down to the billiard parlor near Seven Corners. The man at the cash register quite naturally didn’t remember my hurried visit of three months before.
“I’m trying to locate a certain party who, I think, came here a lot some time ago.”
I described the man rather accurately, and when I had finished, the cashier called to a little jockeylike fellow who was sitting near with an air of having something very important to do that he couldn’t quite remember.
“Hey, Shorty, talk to this guy, will you? I think he’s looking for Joe Varland.”
The little man gave me a tribal look of suspicion. I went and sat near him.
“Joe Varland’s dead, fella,” he said grudgingly. “He died last winter.”
I described him again--his overcoat, his laugh, the habitual expression of his eyes.
“That’s Joe Varland you’re looking for all right, but he’s dead.”
“I want to find out something about him.”
“What you want to find out?”
“What did he do, for instance?”
“How should I know?”
“Look here! I’m not a policeman. I just want some kind of information about his habits. He’s dead now and it can’t hurt him. And it won’t go beyond me.”
“Well”--he hesitated, looking me over--”he was a great one for travelling. He got in a row in the station in Pittsburgh and a dick got him.”
I nodded. Broken pieces of the puzzle began to assemble in my head.
“Why was he a lot on trains?”
“How should I know, fella?”
“If you can use ten dollars, I’d like to know anything you may have heard on the subject.”
“Well,” said Shorty reluctantly, “all I know is they used to say he worked the trains.”
> “Worked the trains?”
“He had some racket of his own he’d never loosen up about. He used to work the girls travelling alone on the trains. Nobody ever knew much about it--he was a pretty smooth guy--but sometimes he’d turn up here with a lot of dough and he let ‘em know it was the janes he got it off of.”
I thanked him and gave him the ten dollars and went out, very thoughtful, without mentioning that part of Joe Varland had made a last trip home.
Ellen wasn’t West for Easter, and even if she had been I wouldn’t have gone to her with the information, either--at least I’ve seen her almost every day this summer and we’ve managed to talk about everything else. Sometimes, though, she gets silent about nothing and wants to be very close to me, and I know what’s in her mind.
Of course she’s coming out this fall, and I have two more years at New Haven; still, things don’t look so impossible as they did a few months ago. She belongs to me in a way--even if I lose her she belongs to me. Who knows? Anyhow, I’ll always be there.
ONE INTERNE
I
Traditionally, the Coccidian Club show is given on the hottest night of spring, and that year was no exception. Two hundred doctors and students sweltered in the reception rooms of the old narrow house and another two hundred students pressed in at the doors, effectually sealing out any breezes from the Maryland night. The entertainment reached these latter clients only dimly, but refreshment was relayed back to them by a busy bucket brigade. Down cellar, the janitor made his annual guess that the sagging floors would hold up one more time.
Bill Tulliver was the coolest man in the hall. For no special reason he wore a light tunic and carried a crook during the only number in which he took part, the rendition of the witty, scurrilous and interminable song which described the failings and eccentricities of the medical faculty. He sat in comparative comfort on the platform and looked out over the hot sea of faces. The most important doctors were in front--Doctor Ruff, the ophthalmologist; Doctor Lane, the brain surgeon; Doctor Georgi, the stomach specialist; Doctor Barnett, the alchemist of internal medicine; and on the end of the row, with his saintlike face undisturbed by the rivulets of perspiration that poured down the long dome of his head, Doctor Norton, the diagnostician.
Like most young men who had sat under Norton, Bill Tulliver followed him with the intuition of the belly, but with a difference. He knelt to him selfishly as a sort of great giver of life. He wanted less to win his approval than to compel it. Engrossed in his own career, which would begin in earnest when he entered the hospital as an interne in July, his whole life was pointed toward the day when his own guess would be right and Doctor Norton’s would be wrong. In that moment he would emancipate himself--he need not base himself on the adding machine-calculating machine-probability machine-St. Francis of Assisi machine any longer.
Bill Tulliver had not arrived unprovoked at this pitch of egotism. He was the fifth in an unbroken series of Dr. William Tullivers who had practised with distinction in the city. His father died last winter; it was not unnatural that even from the womb of school this last scion of a medical tradition should clamor for “self-expression.”
The faculty song, immemorially popular, went on and on. There was a verse about the sanguinary Doctor Lane, about the new names Doctor Brune made up for the new diseases he invented, about the personal idiosyncrasies of Doctor Schwartze and the domestic embroilments of Doctor Gillespie. Doctor Norton, as one of the most popular men on the staff, got off easy. There were some new verses--several that Bill had written himself:
“Herpes Zigler, sad and tired,
Will flunk you out or kill ya,
If you forget Alfonso wired
For dope on hæmophilia.
Bumtiddy-bum-bum,
Tiddy-bum-bum.
Three thousand years ago,
Three thousand years ago.”
He watched Doctor Zigler and saw the wince that puckered up under the laugh. Bill wondered how soon there would be a verse about him, Bill Tulliver, and he tentatively composed one as the chorus thundered on.
After the show the older men departed, the floors were sloshed with beer and the traditional roughhouse usurped the evening. But Bill had fallen solemn and, donning his linen suit, he watched for ten minutes and then left the hot hall. There was a group on the front steps, breathing the sparse air, and another group singing around the lamp-post at the corner. Across the street arose the great bulk of the hospital about which his life revolved. Between the Michael’s Clinic and the Ward’s Dispensary arose a round full moon.
The girl--she was hurrying--reached the loiterers at the lamppost at the same moment as Bill. She wore a dark dress and a dark, flopping hat, but Bill got an impression that there was a gayety of cut, if not of color, about her clothes. The whole thing happened in less than a minute; the man turning about--Bill saw that he was not a member of the grand confraternity--and was simply hurling himself into her arms, like a child at its mother.
The girl staggered backward with a frightened cry; and everyone in the group acted at once.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yes,” she gasped. “I think he just passed out and didn’t realize he was grabbing at a girl.”
“We’ll take him over to the emergency ward and see if he can swallow a stomach pump.”
Bill Tulliver found himself walking along beside the girl.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yes.” She was still breathing hard; her bosom rose, putting out its eternal promises, as if the breath she had taken in were the last breather left in the world.
“Oh, catch it--oh, catch it and take it--oh, catch it,” she sighed. “I realized right away that they were students. I shouldn’t have gone by there tonight.”
Her hair, dark and drawn back to her ears, brushed her shoulders. She laughed uncontrollably.
“He was so helpless,” she said. “Lord knows I’ve seen men helpless--hundreds of them just helpless--but I’ll never forget the expression in his face when he decided to--to lean on me.”
Her dark eyes shone with mirth and Bill saw that she was really self-reliant. He stared at her, and the impression of her beauty grew until, uncommitted by a word, by even a formal introduction, he felt himself going out toward her, watching the turn of her lips and the shifting of her cheeks when she smiled . . .
All this was in the three or four minutes that he walked beside her; not till afterward did he realize how profound the impression had been.
As they passed the church-like bulk of the administration building, an open cabriolet slowed down beside them and a man of about thirty-five jumped out. The girl ran toward him.
“Howard!” she cried with excited gayety. “I was attacked. There were some students in front of the Coccidian Club building--”
The man swung sharply and menacingly toward Bill Tulliver.
“Is this one of them?” he demanded.
“No, no; he’s all right.”
Simultaneously Bill recognized him--it was Dr. Howard Durfee, brilliant among the younger surgeons, heartbreaker and swashbuckler of the staff.
“You haven’t been bothering Miss--”
She stopped him, but not before Bill had answered angrily:
“I don’t bother people.”
Unappeased, as if Bill were in some way responsible, Doctor Durfee got into his car; the girl got in beside him.
“So long,” she said. “And thanks.” Her eyes shone at Bill with friendly interest, and then, just before the car shot away, she did something else with them--narrowed them a little and then widened them, recognizing by this sign the uniqueness of their relationship. “I see you,” it seemed to say. “You registered. Everything’s possible.”
With the faint fanfare of a new motor, she vanished back into the spring night.
II
Bill was to enter the hospital in July with the first contingent of newly created doctors. He passed the intervening
months at Martha’s Vineyard, swimming and fishing with Schoatze, his classmate, and returned tense with health and enthusiasm to begin his work.
The red square broiled under the Maryland sun. Bill went in through the administration building where a gigantic Christ gestured in marble pity over the entrance hall. It was by this same portal that Bill’s father had entered on his interneship thirty years before.
Suddenly Bill was in a condition of shock, his tranquility was rent asunder, he could not have given a rational account as to why he was where he was. A dark-haired girl with great, luminous eyes had started up from the very shadow of the statue, stared at him just long enough to effect this damage, and then with an explosive “Hello!” vanished into one of the offices.
He was still gazing after her, stricken, haywire, scattered and dissolved--when Doctor Norton hailed him:
“I believe I’m addressing William Tulliver the fifth--”
Bill was glad to be reminded who he was.
“--looking somewhat interested in Doctor Durfee’s girl,” continued Norton.
“Is she?” Bill asked sharply. Then: “Oh, howdedo, Doctor?”
Dr. Norton decided to exercise his wit, of which he had plenty. “In fact we know they spend their days together, and gossip adds the evenings.”
“Their days? I should think he’d be too busy.”
“He is. As a matter of fact, Miss Singleton induces the state of coma during which he performs his internal sculpture. She’s an anaesthetist.”
“I see. Then they are--thrown together all day.”
“If you regard that as a romantic situation.” Doctor Norton looked at him closely. “Are you settled yet? Can you do something for me right now?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I know you don’t go on the ward till tomorrow, but I’d like you to go to East Michael and take a P. E. and a history.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 231
