Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Her mother sat apart with a friend and thought about Fifi and Fifi’s brother, and about her other daughters, now married, whom she considered to have been even prettier than Fifi. Mrs. Schwartz was a plain woman; she had been a Jewess a long time, and it was a matter of effortless indifference to her what was said by the groups around the room. Another large class who did not care were the young men--dozens of them. They followed Fifi about all day in and out of motorboats, night clubs, inland lakes, automobiles, tea rooms and funiculars, and they said, “Hey, look, Fifi!” and showed off for her, or said, “Kiss me, Fifi,” or even, “Kiss me again, Fifi,” and abused her and tried to be engaged to her.

  Most of them, however, were too young, since this little city, through some illogical reasoning, is supposed to have an admirable atmosphere as an educational center.

  Fifi was not critical, nor was she aware of being criticized herself. Tonight the gallery in the great, crystal, horseshoe room made observations upon her birthday party, being somewhat querulous about Fifi’s entrance. The table had been set in the last of a string of dining rooms, each accessible from the central hall. But Fifi, her black dress shouting and halloing for notice, came in by way of the first dining room, followed by a whole platoon of young men of all possible nationalities and crosses, and at a sort of little run that swayed her lovely hips and tossed her lovely head, led them bumpily through the whole vista, while old men choked on fish bones, old women’s facial muscles sagged, and the protest rose to a roar in the procession’s wake.

  They need not have resented her so much. It was a bad party, because Fifi thought she had to entertain everybody and be a dozen people, so she talked to the entire table and broke up every conversation that started, no matter how far away from her. So no one had a good time, and the people in the hotel needn’t have minded so much that she was young and terribly happy.

  Afterward, in the salon, many of the supernumerary males floated off with a temporary air to other tables. Among these was young Count Stanislas Borowki, with his handsome, shining brown eyes of a stuffed deer, and his black hair already dashed with distinguished streaks like the keyboard of a piano. He went to the table of some people of position named Taylor and sat down with just a faint sigh, which made them smile.

  “Was it ghastly?” he was asked.

  The blond Miss Howard who was traveling with the Taylors was almost as pretty as Fifi and stitched up with more consideration. She had taken pains not to make Miss Schwartz’s acquaintance, although she shared several of the same young men. The Taylors were career people in the diplomatic service and were now on their way to London, after the League Conference at Geneva. They were presenting Miss Howard at court this season. They were very Europeanized Americans; in fact, they had reached a position where they could hardly be said to belong to any nation at all; certainly not to any great power, but perhaps to a sort of Balkanlike state composed of people like themselves. They considered that Fifi was as much of a gratuitous outrage as a new stripe in the flag.

  The tall Englishwoman with the long cigarette holder and the half-paralyzed Pekingese presently got up, announcing to the Taylors that she had an engagement in the bar, and strolled away, carrying her paralyzed Pekingese and causing, as she passed, a chilled lull in the seething baby talk that raged around Fifi’s table.

  About midnight, Mr. Weicker, the assistant manager, looked into the bar, where Fifi’s phonograph roared new German tangoes into the smoke and clatter. He had a small face that looked into things quickly, and lately he had taken a cursory glance into the bar every night. But he had not come to admire Fifi; he was engaged in an inquiry as to why matters were not going well at the Hotel des Trois Mondes this summer.

  There was, of course, the continually sagging American Stock Exchange. With so many hotels begging to be filled, the clients had become finicky, exigent, quick to complain, and Mr. Weicker had had many fine decisions to make recently. One large family had departed because of a night-going phonograph belonging to Lady Capps-Karr. Also there was presumably a thief operating in the hotel; there had been complaints about pocketbooks, cigarette cases, watches and rings. Guests sometimes spoke to Mr. Weicker as if they would have liked to search his pockets. There were empty suites that need not have been empty this summer.

  His glance fell dourly, in passing, upon Count Borowki, who was playing pool with Fifi. Count Borowki had not paid his bill for three weeks. He had told Mr. Weicker that he was expecting his mother, who would arrange everything. Then there was Fifi, who attracted an undesirable crowd--young students living on pensions who often charged drinks, but never paid for them. Lady Capps-Karr, on the contrary, was a grande cliente; one could count three bottles of whisky a day for herself and entourage, and her father in London was good for every drop of it. Mr. Weicker decided to issue an ultimatum about Borowki’s bill this very night, and withdrew. His visit had lasted about ten seconds.

  Count Borowki put away his cue and came close to Fifi, whispering something. She seized his hand and pulled him to a dark corner near the phonograph.

  “My American dream girl,” he said. “We must have you painted in Budapest the way you are tonight. You will hang with the portraits of my ancestors in my castle in Transylvania.”

  One would suppose that a normal American girl, who had been to an average number of moving pictures, would have detected a vague ring of familiarity in Count Borowki’s persistent wooing. But the Hotel des Trois Mondes was full of people who were actually rich and noble, people who did fine embroidery or took cocaine in closed apartments and meanwhile laid claim to European thrones and half a dozen mediatized German principalities, and Fifi did not choose to doubt the one who paid court to her beauty. Tonight she was surprised at nothing: not even his precipitate proposal that they get married this very week.

  “Mamma doesn’t want that I should get married for a year. I only said I’d be engaged to you.”

  “But my mother wants me to marry. She is hard-boiling, as you Americans say; she brings pressure to bear that I marry Princess This and Countess That.”

  Meanwhile Lady Capps-Karr was having a reunion across the room. A tall, stooped Englishman, dusty with travel, had just opened the door of the bar, and Lady Capps-Karr, with a caw of “Bopes!” had flung herself upon him: “Bopes, I say!”

  “Capps, darling. Hi, there, Rafe--” this to her companion. “Fancy running into you, Capps.”

  “Bopes! Bopes!”

  Their exclamations and laughter filled the room, and the bartender whispered to an inquisitive American that the new arrival was the Marquis Kinkallow.

  Bopes stretched himself out in several chairs and a sofa and called for the barman. He announced that he had driven from Paris without a stop and was leaving next morning to meet the only woman he had ever loved, in Milan. He did not look in a condition to meet anyone.

  “Oh, Bopes, I’ve been so blind,” said Lady Capps-Karr pathetically. “Day after day after day. I flew here from Cannes, meaning to stay one day, and I ran into Rafe here and some other Americans I knew, and it’s been two weeks, and now all my tickets to Malta are void. Stay here and save me! Oh, Bopes! Bopes! Bopes!”

  The Marquis Kinkallow glanced with tired eyes about the bar.

  “Ah, who is that?” he demanded. “The lovely Jewess? And who is that item with her?”

  “She’s an American,” said the daughter of a hundred earls. “The man is a scoundrel of some sort, but apparently he’s a cat of the stripe; he’s a great pal of Schenzi, in Vienna. I sat up till five the other night playing two-handed chemin de fer with him here in the bar and he owes me a mille Swiss.”

  “Have to have a word with that wench,” said Bopes twenty minutes later. “You arrange it for me, Rafe, that’s a good chap.”

  Ralph Berry had met Miss Schwartz, and, as the opportunity for the introduction now presented itself, he rose obligingly. The opportunity was that a chasseur had just requested Count Borowki’s presence in the office; he managed to b
eat two or three young men to her side.

  “The Marquis Kinkallow is so anxious to meet you. Can’t you come and join us?”

  Fifi looked across the room, her fine brow wrinkling a little. Something warned her that her evening was full enough already. Lady Capps-Karr had never spoken to her; Fifi believed she was jealous of her clothes.

  “Can’t you bring him over here?”

  A minute later Bopes sat down beside Fifi with a shadow of fine tolerance settling on his face. This was nothing he could help; in fact, he constantly struggled against it, but it was something that happened to his expression when he met Americans. “The whole thing is too much for me,” it seemed to say. “Compare my confidence with your uncertainty, my sophistication with your naïveté, and yet the whole world has slid into your power.” Of later years he found that his tone, unless carefully guarded, held a smoldering resentment.

  Fifi eyed him brightly and told him about her glamorous future.

  “Next I’m going to Paris,” she said, announcing the fall of Rome, “to, maybe, study at the Sorbonne. Then, maybe, I’ll get married; you can’t tell. I’m only eighteen. I had eighteen candles on my birthday cake tonight. I wish you could have been here. . . . I’ve had marvelous offers to go on the stage, but of course a girl on the stage gets talked about so.”

  “What are you doing tonight?” asked Bopes.

  “Oh, lots more boys are coming in later. Stay around and join the party.”

  “I thought you and I might do something. I’m going to Milan tomorrow.”

  Across the room, Lady Capps-Karr was tense with displeasure at the desertion.

  “After all,” she protested, “a chep’s a chep, and a chum’s a chum, but there are certain things that one simply doesn’t do. I never saw Bopes in such frightful condition.”

  She stared at the dialogue across the room.

  “Come along to Milan with me,” the marquis was saying. “Come to Tibet or Hindustan. We’ll see them crown the King of Ethiopia. Anyhow, let’s go for a drive right now.”

  “I got too many guests here. Besides, I don’t go out to ride with people the first time I meet them. I’m supposed to be engaged. To a Hungarian count. He’d be furious and would probably challenge you to a duel.”

  Mrs. Schwartz, with an apologetic expression, came across the room to Fifi.

  “John’s gone,” she announced. “He’s up there again.”

  Fifi gave a yelp of annoyance. “He gave me his word of honor he would not go.”

  “Anyhow, he went. I looked in his room and his hat’s gone. It was that champagne at dinner.” She turned to the marquis. “John is not a vicious boy, but vurry, vurry weak.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to go after him,” said Fifi resignedly.

  “I hate to spoil your good time tonight, but I don’t know what else. Maybe this gentleman would go with you. You see, Fifi is the only one that can handle him. His father is dead and it really takes a man to handle a boy.”

  “Quite,” said Bopes.

  “Can you take me?” Fifi asked. “It’s just up in town to a café.”

  He agreed with alacrity. Out in the September night, with her fragrance seeping through an ermine cape, she explained further:

  “Some Russian woman’s got hold of him; she claims to be a countess, but she’s only got one silver-fox fur, that she wears with everything. My brother’s just nineteen, so whenever he’s had a couple glasses champagne he says he’s going to marry her, and mother worries.”

  Bopes’ arm dropped impatiently around her shoulder as they started up the hill to the town.

  Fifteen minutes later the car stopped at a point several blocks beyond the café and Fifi stepped out. The marquis’ face was now decorated by a long, irregular finger-nail scratch that ran diagonally across his cheek, traversed his nose in a few sketchy lines and finished in a sort of grand terminal of tracks upon his lower jaw.

  “I don’t like to have anybody get so foolish,” Fifi explained. “You needn’t wait. We can get a taxi.”

  “Wait!” cried the marquis furiously. “For a common little person like you? They tell me you’re the laughingstock of the hotel, and I quite understand why.”

  Fifi hurried along the street and into the café, pausing in the door until she saw her brother. He was a reproduction of Fifi without her high warmth; at the moment he was sitting at a table with a frail exile from the Caucasus and two Serbian consumptives. Fifi waited for her temper to rise to an executive pitch; then she crossed the dance floor, conspicuous as a thundercloud in her bright black dress.

  “Mamma sent me after you, John. Get your coat.”

  “Oh, what’s biting her?” he demanded, with a vague eye.

  “Mamma says you should come along.”

  He got up unwillingly. The two Serbians rose also; the countess never moved; her eyes, sunk deep in Mongol cheek bones, never left Fifi’s face; her head crouched in the silver-fox fur which Fifi knew represented her brother’s last month’s allowance. As John Schwartz stood there swaying unsteadily the orchestra launched into Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss. Diving into the confusion of the table, Fifi emerged with her brother’s arm, marched him to the coat room and then out toward the taxi stand.

  It was late, the evening was over, her birthday was over, and driving back to the hotel, with John slumped against her shoulder, Fifi felt a sudden depression. By virtue of her fine health she had never been a worrier, and certainly the Schwartz family had lived so long against similar backgrounds that Fifi felt no insufficiency in the Hotel des Trois Mondes as cloud and community--and yet the evening was suddenly all wrong. Didn’t evenings sometimes end on a high note and not fade out vaguely in bars? After ten o’clock every night she felt she was the only real being in a colony of ghosts, that she was surrounded by utterly intangible figures who retreated whenever she stretched out her hand.

  The doorman assisted her brother to the elevator. Stepping in, Fifi saw, too late, that there were two other people inside. Before she could pull John out again, they had both brushed past her as if in fear of contamination. Fifi heard “Mercy!” from Mrs. Taylor and “How revolting!” from Miss Howard. The elevator mounted. Fifi held her breath until it stopped at her floor.

  It was, perhaps, the impact of this last encounter that caused her to stand very still just inside the door of the dark apartment. Then she had the sense that someone else was there in the blackness ahead of her, and after her brother had stumbled forward and thrown himself on a sofa, she still waited.

  “Mamma,” she called, but there was no answer; only a sound fainter than a rustle, like a shoe scraped along the floor.

  A few minutes later, when her mother came upstairs, they called the valet de chambre and went through the rooms together, but there was no one. Then they stood side by side in the open door to their balcony and looked out on the lake with the bright cluster of Evian on the French shore and the white caps of snow on the mountains.

  “I think we’ve been here long enough,” said Mrs. Schwartz suddenly. “I think I’ll take John back to the States this fall.”

  Fifi was aghast. “But I thought John and I were going to the Sorbonne in Paris?”

  “How can I trust him in Paris? And how could I leave you behind alone there?”

  “But we’re used to living in Europe now. Why did I learn to talk French? Why, mamma, we don’t even know any people back home any more.”

  “We can always meet people. We always have.”

  “But you know it’s different; everybody is so bigoted there. A girl hasn’t the chance to meet the same sort of men, even if there were any. Everybody just watches everything you do.”

  “So they do here,” said her mother. “That Mr. Weicker just stopped me in the hall; he saw you come in with John, and he talked to me about how you must keep out of the bar, you were so young. I told him you only took lemonade, but he said it didn’t matter; scenes like tonight made people leave the hotel.”

  “Oh, how pe
rfectly mean!”

  “So I think we better go back home.”

  The empty word rang desolately in Fifi’s ears. She put her arms around her mother’s waist, realizing that it was she and not her mother, with her mother’s clear grip on the past, who was completely lost in the universe. On the sofa her brother snored, having already entered the world of the weak, of the leaners together, and found its fetid and mercurial warmth sufficient. But Fifi kept looking at the alien sky, knowing that she could pierce it and find her own way through envy and corruption. For the first time she seriously considered marrying Borowki immediately.

  “Do you want to go downstairs and say good night to the boys?” suggested her mother. “There’s lots of them still there asking where you are.”

  But the Furies were after Fifi now--after her childish complacency and her innocence, even after her beauty--out to break it all down and drag it in any convenient mud. When she shook her head and walked sullenly into her bedroom, they had already taken something from her forever.

  II

  The following morning Mrs. Schwartz went to Mr. Weicker’s office to report the loss of two hundred dollars in American money. She had left the sum on her chiffonier upon retiring; when she awoke, it was gone. The door of the apartment had been bolted, but in the morning the bolt was found drawn, and yet neither of her children was awake. Fortunately, she had taken her jewels to bed with her in a chamois sack.

  Mr. Weicker decided that the situation must be handled with care. There were not a few guests in the hotel who were in straitened circumstances and inclined to desperate remedies, but he must move slowly. In America one has money or hasn’t; in Europe the heir to a fortune may be unable to stand himself a haircut until the collapse of a fifth cousin, yet be a sure risk and not to be lightly offended. Opening the office copy of the Almanack de Gotha, Mr. Weicker found Stanislas Karl Joseph Borowki hooked firmly on to the end of a line older than the crown of St. Stephen. This morning, in riding clothes that were smart as a hussar’s uniform, he had gone riding with the utterly correct Miss Howard. On the other hand, there was no doubt as to who had been robbed, and Mr. Weicker’s indignation began to concentrate on Fifi and her family, who might have saved him this trouble by taking themselves off some time ago. It was even conceivable that the dissipated son, John, had nipped the money.