“All the time you’ll be full of horror,” Crenshaw interrupted. “You’ll be like a person just about to go crazy but can’t go crazy. All the time you’ll be thinking that it’s forever and ever.”
“That’s bad,” said the Fiend, shaking his head gloomily. “That’s real bad.”
“Now listen here to me,” went on Crenshaw. “I’ve brought you some books you’re going to read. It’s arranged that you get no books or papers except what I bring you.”
As a beginning Crenshaw had brought half a dozen books which his vagarious curiosity had collected over as many years. They comprised a German doctor’s thousand case histories of sexual abnormality--cases with no cures, no hopes, no prognoses, cases listed cold; a series of sermons by a New England Divine of the Great Revival which pictured the tortures of the damned in hell; a collection of horror stories; and a volume of erotic pieces from each of which the last two pages, containing the consummations, had been torn out; a volume of detective stories mutilated in the same manner. A tome of the Newgate calendar completed the batch. These Crenshaw handed through the bars--the Fiend took them and put them on his iron cot.
This was the first of Crenshaw’s long series of fortnightly visits. Always he brought with him something somber and menacing to say, something dark and terrible to read--save that once when the Fiend had had nothing to read for a long time he brought him four inspiringly titled books--that proved to have nothing but blank paper inside. Another time, pretending to concede a point, he promised to bring newspapers--he brought ten copies of the yellowed journal that had reported the crime and the arrest. Sometimes he obtained medical books that showed in color the red and blue and green ravages of leprosy and skin disease, the mounds of shattered cells, the verminous tissue and brown corrupted blood.
And there was no sewer of the publishing world from which he did not obtain records of all that was gross and vile in man.
Crenshaw could not keep this up indefinitely both because of the expense and because of the exhaustibility of such books. When five years had passed he leaned toward another form of torture. He built up false hopes in the Fiend with protests of his own change of heart and manoeuvres for a pardon, and then dashed the hopes to pieces. Or else he pretended to have a pistol with him, or an inflammatory substance that would make the cell a raging Inferno and consume the Fiend in two minutes--once he threw a dummy bottle into the cell and listened in delight to the screams as the Fiend ran back and forth waiting for the explosion. At other times he would pretend grimly that the legislature had passed a new law which provided that the Fiend would be executed in a few hours.
A decade passed. Crenshaw was gray at forty--he was white at fifty when the alternating routine of his fortnightly visits to the graves of his loved ones and to the penitentiary had become the only part of his life--the long days at Radamacher’s were only a weary dream. Sometimes he went and sat outside the Fiend’s cell, with no word said during the half hour he was allowed to be there. The Fiend too had grown white in twenty years. He was very respectable-looking with his horn-rimmed glasses and his white hair. He seemed to have a great respect for Crenshaw and even when the latter, in a renewal of diminishing vitality, promised him one day that on his very next visit he was going to bring a revolver and end the matter, he nodded gravely as if in agreement, said, “I suppose so. Yes, I suppose you’re perfectly right,” and did not mention the matter to the guards. On the occasion of the next visit he was waiting with his hands on the bars of the cell looking at Crenshaw both hopefully and desperately. At certain tensions and strains death takes on, indeed, the quality of a great adventure as any soldier can testify.
Years passed. Crenshaw was promoted to floor manager at Radamacher’s--there were new generations now that did not know of his tragedy and regarded him as an austere nonentity. He came into a little legacy and bought new stones for the graves of his wife and son. He knew he would soon be retired and while a third decade lapsed through the white winters, the short sweet smoky summers, it became more and more plain to him that the time had come to put an end to the Fiend; to avoid any mischance by which the other would survive him.
The moment he fixed upon came at the exact end of thirty years. Crenshaw had long owned the pistol with which it would be accomplished; he had fingered the shells lovingly and calculated the lodgement of each in the Fiend’s body, so that death would be sure but lingering--he studied the tales of abdominal wounds in the war news and delighted in the agony that made victims pray to be killed.
After that, what happened to him did not matter.
When the day came he had no trouble in smuggling the pistol into the penitentiary. But to his surprise he found the Fiend scrunched up upon his iron cot, instead of waiting for him avidly by the bars.
“I’m sick,” the Fiend said. “My stomach’s been burning me up all morning. They gave me a physic but now it’s worse and nobody comes.”
Crenshaw fancied momentarily that this was a premonition in the man’s bowels of a bullet that would shortly ride ragged through that spot.
“Come up to the bars,” he said mildly.
“I can’t move.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I’m doubled up. All doubled up.”
“Come doubled up then.”
With an effort the Fiend moved himself, only to fall on his side on the cement floor. He groaned and then lay quiet for a minute, after which, still bent in two, he began to drag himself a foot at a time toward the bars.
Suddenly Crenshaw set off at a run toward the end of the corridor.
“I want the prison doctor,” he demanded of the guard, “That man’s sick--sick, I tell you.”
“The doctor has--”
“Get him--get him now!”
The guard hesitated, but Crenshaw had become a tolerated, even privileged person around the prison, and in a moment the guard took down his phone and called the infirmary.
All that afternoon Crenshaw waited in the bare area inside the gates, walking up and down with his hands behind his back. From time to time he went to the front entrance and demanded of the guard:
“Any news?”
“Nothing yet. They’ll call me when there’s anything.”
Late in the afternoon the Warden appeared at the door, looked about and spotted Crenshaw. The latter, all alert, hastened over.
“He’s dead,” the Warden said. “His appendix burst. They did everything they could.”
“Dead,” Crenshaw repeated.
“I’m sorry to bring you this news. I know how--”
“It’s all right,” said Crenshaw, and licking his lips. “So he’s dead.”
The Warden lit a cigarette.
“While you’re here, Mr. Engels, I wonder if you can let me have that pass that was issued to you--I can turn it in to the office. That is--I suppose you won’t need it any more.”
Crenshaw took the blue card from his wallet and handed it over. The Warden shook hands with him.
“One thing more,” Crenshaw demanded as the Warden turned away. “Which is the--the window of the infirmary?”
“It’s on the interior court, you can’t see it from here.”
“Oh.”
When the Warden had gone Crenshaw still stood there a long time, the tears running out down his face. He could not collect his thoughts and he began by trying to remember what day it was; Saturday, the day, every other week, on which he came to see the Fiend.
He would not see the Fiend two weeks from now.
In a misery of solitude and despair he muttered aloud: “So he is dead. He has left me.” And then with a long sigh of mingled grief and fear, “So I have lost him--my only friend--now I am alone.”
He was still saying that to himself as he passed through the outer gate, and as his coat caught in the great swing of the outer door the guard opened up to release it, he heard a reiteration of the words:
“I’m alone. At last--at last I am alone.”
Once more he
called on the Fiend, after many weeks.
“But he’s dead,” the Warden told him kindly.
“Oh, yes,” Crenshaw said. “I guess I must have forgotten.”
And he set off back home, his boots sinking deep into the white diamond surface of the flats.
BABYLON REVISITED
“And where’s Mr. Campbell?” Charlie asked.
“Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie inquired.
“Back in America, gone to work.”
“And where is the Snow Bird?”
“He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in Paris.”
Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.
“If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.”
He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more--he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour, gossiping with a chasseur by the servants’ entrance.
Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in the once-clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he travelled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car--disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house today and Alix giving him information.
“No, no more,” Charlie said, “I’m going slow these days.”
Alix congratulated him: “You were going pretty strong a couple of years ago.”
“I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now.”
“How do you find conditions in America?”
“I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague, representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there.”
Alix smiled.
“Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here?” said Charlie. “By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?”
Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to pay, he gave him a bad check.”
Alix shook his head sadly.
“I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up--” He made a plump apple of his hands.
Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves in a corner.
“Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf or work, but they go on forever.” The place oppressed him. He called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.
“Here for long, Mr. Wales?”
“I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.”
“Oh-h! You have a little girl?”
Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.
Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.
As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”
He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his brother-in-law’s bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly. From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine who shrieked “Daddy!” and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.
“My old pie,” he said.
“Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!”
She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and girl his daughter’s age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or dislike, but her response was more frankly tepid, though she minimized her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her regard toward his child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly way and Lincoln Peters rested his for a moment on Charlie’s shoulder.
The room was warm and comfortably American. The three children moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs that led to other rooms; the cheer of six o’clock spoke in the eager smacks of the fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen. But Charlie did not relax; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and he drew confidence from his daughter, who from time to time came close to him, holding in her arms the doll he had brought.
“Really extremely well,” he declared in answer to Lincoln’s question. “There’s a lot of business there that isn’t moving at all, but we’re doing even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I’m bringing my sister over from America next month to keep house for me. My income last year was bigger than it was when I had money. You see, the Czechs--”
His boasting was for a specific purpose; but after a moment, seeing a faint restiveness in Lincoln’s eye, he changed the subject:
“Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners.”
“We think Honoria’s a great little girl too.”
Marion Peters came back from the kitchen. She was a tall woman with worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveliness. Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised when people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there had been an instinctive antipathy between them.
“Well, how do you find Honoria?” she asked.
“Wonderful. I was astonished how much she’s grown in ten months. All the children are looking well.”
“We haven’t had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back in Paris?”
“It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.”
“I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”
“But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon”--he stumbled, seeing his mistake--”there wasn’t a man I knew.”
She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of bars.”
“I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and no more.”
“Don’t you want a cocktail before dinner?” Lincoln asked.
“I take only one drink every afternoon, and I’ve had that.”
“I hope you keep to it,” said Marion.
Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness gave him an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted them to initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him to Paris.
At dinner he couldn’t decide whether Honoria was most like him or her mother. Fortunate if she didn’t combine the traits of both that had brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went over him. He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.
He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.
After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d’hôtel swooped toward him, crying, “Crowd just arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.
“You have to be damn drunk,” he thought.
Zelli’s was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local, colloquial French crowd. The Poet’s Cave had disappeared, but the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned--even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus--a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who glanced at him with frightened eyes.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 234
