Trimble demurred politely.
“Oh, I can get around.”
“I know it, old boy. Nobody knew this place like you did once--and if Brown tries to explain the horseless carriage just send him back here to me. And you’ll be back yourself by four, won’t you?”
Orrison got his hat.
“You’ve been away ten years?” he asked while they went down in the elevator.
“They’d begun the Empire State Building,” said Trimble. “What does that add up to?”
“About 1928. But as the chief said, you’ve been lucky to miss a lot.” As a feeler he added, “Probably had more interesting things to look at.”
“Can’t say I have.”
They reached the street and the way Trimble’s face tightened at the roar of traffic made Orrison take one more guess.
“You’ve been out of civilization?”
“In a sense.” The words were spoken in such a measured way that Orrison concluded this man wouldn’t talk unless he wanted to--and simultaneously wondered if he could have possibly spent the thirties in a prison or an insane asylum.
“This is the famous 21,” he said. “Do you think you’d rather eat somewhere else?”
Trimble paused, looking carefully at the brownstone house.
“I can remember when the name 21 got to be famous,” he said, “about the same year as Moriarity’s.” Then he continued almost apologetically, “I thought we might walk up Fifth Avenue about five minutes and eat wherever we happened to be. Some place with young people to look at.”
Orrison gave him a quick glance and once again thought of bars and gray walls and bars; he wondered if his duties included introducing Mr. Trimble to complaisant girls. But Mr. Trimble didn’t look as if that was in his mind--the dominant expression was of absolute and deep-seated curiosity and Orrison attempted to connect the name with Admiral Byrd’s hideout at the South Pole or flyers lost in Brazilian jungles. He was, or he had been, quite a fellow--that was obvious. But the only definite clue to his environment--and to Orrison the clue that led nowhere--was his countryman’s obedience to the traffic lights and his predilection for walking on the side next to the shops and not the street. Once he stopped and gazed into a haberdasher’s window.
“Crêpe ties,” he said. “I haven’t seen one since I left college.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Massachusetts Tech.”
“Great place.”
“I’m going to take a look at it next week. Let’s eat somewhere along here--” They were in the upper Fifties “--you choose.”
There was a good restaurant with a little awning just around the corner.
“What do you want to see most?” Orrison asked, as they sat down.
Trimble considered.
“Well--the back of people’s heads,” he suggested. “Their necks--how their heads are joined to their bodies. I’d like to hear what those two little girls are saying to their father. Not exactly what they’re saying but whether the words float or submerge, how their mouths shut when they’ve finished speaking. Just a matter of rhythm--Cole Porter came back to the States in 1928 because he felt that there were new rhythms around.”
Orrison was sure he had his clue now, and with nice delicacy did not pursue it by a millimeter--even suppressing a sudden desire to say there was a fine concert in Carnegie Hall tonight.
“The weight of spoons,” said Trimble, “so light. A little bowl with a stick attached. The cast in that waiter’s eye. I knew him once but he wouldn’t remember me.”
But as they left the restaurant the same waiter looked at Trimble rather puzzled as if he almost knew him. When they were outside Orrison laughed:
“After ten years people will forget.”
“Oh, I had dinner there last May--” He broke off in an abrupt manner.
It was all kind of nutsy, Orrison decided--and changed himself suddenly into a guide.
“From here you get a good candid focus on Rockefeller Center,” he pointed out with spirit “--and the Chrysler Building and the Armistead Building, the daddy of all the new ones.”
“The Armistead Building,” Trimble rubber-necked obediently. “Yes--I designed it.”
Orrison shook his head cheerfully--he was used to going out with all kinds of people. But that stuff about having been in the restaurant last May . . .
He paused by the brass entablature in the cornerstone of the building. “Erected 1928,” it said.
Trimble nodded.
“But I was taken drunk that year--every-which-way drunk. So I never saw it before now.”
“Oh.” Orrison hesitated. “Like to go in now?”
“I’ve been in it--lots of times. But I’ve never seen it. And now it isn’t what I want to see. I wouldn’t ever be able to see it now. I simply want to see how people walk and what their clothes and shoes and hats are made of. And their eyes and hands. Would you mind shaking hands with me?”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Thanks. Thanks. That’s very kind. I suppose it looks strange--but people will think we’re saying good-by. I’m going to walk up the avenue for awhile, so we will say good-by. Tell your office I’ll be in at four.”
Orrison looked after him when he started out, half expecting him to turn into a bar. But there was nothing about him that suggested or ever had suggested drink.
“Jesus,” he said to himself. “Drunk for ten years.”
He felt suddenly of the texture of his own coat and then he reached out and pressed his thumb against the granite of the building by his side.
LOVE IN THE NIGHT
Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1925)
The words thrilled Val. They had come into his mind sometime during the fresh gold April afternoon and he kept repeating them to himself over and over: “Love in the night; love in the night.” He tried them in three languages--Russian, French and English--and decided that they were best in English. In each language they meant a different sort of love and a different sort of night--the English night seemed the warmest and softest with a thinnest and most crystalline sprinkling of stars. The English love seemed the most fragile and romantic--a white dress and a dim face above it and eyes that were pools of light. And when I add that it was a French night he was thinking about, after all, I see I must go back and begin over.
Val was half Russian and half American. His mother was the daughter of that Morris Hasylton who helped finance the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, and his father was--see the Almanach de Gotha, issue of 1910--Prince Paul Serge Boris Rostoff, son of Prince Vladimir Rostoff, grandson of a grand duke--’Jimber-jawed Serge’--and third-cousin-once-removed to the czar. It was all very impressive, you see, on that side--house in St. Petersburg, shooting lodge near Riga, and swollen villa, more like a palace, overlooking the Mediterranean. It was at this villa in Cannes that the Rostoffs passed the winter--and it wasn’t at all the thing to remind Princess Rostoff that this Riviera villa, from the marble fountain--after Bernini--to the gold cordial glasses--after dinner--was paid for with American gold.
The Russians, of course, were gay people on the Continent in the gala days before the war. Of the three races that used Southern France for a pleasure ground they were easily the most adept at the grand manner. The English were too practical, and the Americans, though they spent freely, had no tradition of romantic conduct. But the Russians--there was a people as gallant as the Latins, and rich besides! When the Rostoffs arrived at Cannes late in January the restaurateurs telegraphed north for the Prince’s favorite labels to paste on their champagne, and the jewelers put incredibly gorgeous articles aside to show to him--but not to the princess--and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that the Prince might beg orthodox forgiveness for his sins. Even the Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine color in the spring evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered exquisitely offshore.
In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit of him and h
is family. It was a privileged paradise, this white little city on the water, in which he was free to do what he liked because he was rich and young and the blood of Peter the Great ran indigo in his veins. He was only seventeen in 1914, when this history begins, but he had already fought a duel with a young man four years his senior, and he had a small hairless scar to show for it on top of his handsome head.
But the question of love in the night was the thing nearest his heart. It was a vague pleasant dream he had, something that was going to happen to him some day that would be unique and incomparable. He could have told no more about it than that there was a lovely unknown girl concerned in it, and that it ought to take place beneath the Riviera moon.
The odd thing about all this was not that he had this excited and yet almost spiritual hope of romance, for all boys of any imagination have just such hopes, but that it actually came true. And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a jumble of impressions and emotions, of curious phrases that sprang to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were here, were lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all. Perhaps its very vagueness preserved it in his heart and made him forever unable to forget.
There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring--his father’s loves, for instance, which were many and indiscreet, and which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing the gossip of servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother unexpectedly one afternoon, to find her storming hysterically at his father’s picture on the salon wall. In the picture his father wore a white uniform with a furred dolman and looked back impassively at his wife as if to say “Were you under the impression, my dear, that you were marrying into a family of clergymen?”
Val tiptoed away, surprised, confused--and excited. It didn’t shock him as it would have shocked an American boy of his age. He had known for years what life was among the Continental rich, and he condemned his father only for making his mother cry.
Love went on around him--reproachless love and illicit love alike. As he strolled along the seaside promenade at nine o’clock, when the stars were bright enough to compete with the bright lamps, he was aware of love on every side. From the open-air cafés, vivid with dresses just down from Paris, came a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes--and mingled with them all he caught another scent, the mysterious thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jewel-sparkling hands upon the white tables. Gay dresses and white shirt fronts swayed together, and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow-lighting cigarettes. On the other side of the boulevard lovers less fashionable, young Frenchmen who worked in the stores of Cannes, sauntered with their fiancées under the dim trees, but Val’s young eyes seldom turned that way. The luxury of music and bright colors and low voices--they were all part of his dream. They were the essential trappings of Love in the night.
But assume as he might the rather fierce expression that was expected from a young Russian gentleman who walked the streets alone, Val was beginning to be unhappy. April twilight had succeeded March twilight, the season was almost over, and he had found no use to make of the warm spring evenings. The girls of sixteen and seventeen whom he knew, were chaperoned with care between dusk and bedtime--this, remember, was before the war--and the others who might gladly have walked beside him were an affront to his romantic desire. So April passed by--one week, two weeks, three weeks--
He had played tennis until seven and loitered at the courts for another hour, so it was half-past eight when a tired cab horse accomplished the hill on which gleamed the façade of the Rostoff villa. The lights of his mother’s limousine were yellow in the drive, and the princess, buttoning her gloves, was just coming out the glowing door. Val tossed two francs to the cabman and went to kiss her on the cheek.
“Don’t touch me,” she said quickly. “You’ve been handling money.”
“But not in my mouth, mother,” he protested humorously.
The princess looked at him impatiently.
“I’m angry,” she said. “Why must you be so late tonight? We’re dining on a yacht and you were to have come along too.”
“What yacht?”
“Americans.” There was always a faint irony in her voice when she mentioned the land of her nativity. Her America was the Chicago of the nineties which she still thought of as the vast upstairs to a butcher shop. Even the irregularities of Prince Paul were not too high a price to have paid for her escape.
“Two yachts,” she continued; “in fact we don’t know which one. The note was very indefinite. Very careless indeed.”
Americans. Val’s mother had taught him to look down on Americans, but she hadn’t succeeded in making him dislike them. American men noticed you, even if you were seventeen. He liked Americans. Although he was thoroughly Russian he wasn’t immaculately so--the exact proportion, like that of a celebrated soap, was about ninety-nine and three-quarters per cent.
“I want to come,” he said, “I’ll hurry up, mother. I’ll--”
“We’re late now.” The princess turned as her husband appeared in the door. “Now Val says he wants to come.”
“He can’t,” said Prince Paul shortly. “He’s too outrageously late.”
Val nodded. Russian aristocrats, however indulgent about themselves, were always admirably Spartan with their children. There were no arguments.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Prince Paul grunted. The footman, in red and silver livery, opened the limousine door. But the grunt decided the matter for Val, because Princess Rostoff at that day and hour had certain grievances against her husband which gave her command of the domestic situation.
“On second thought you’d better come, Val,” she announced coolly. “It’s too late now, but come after dinner. The yacht is either the Minnehaha or the Privateer.” She got into the limousine. “The one to come to will be the gayer one, I suppose--the Jacksons’ yacht--”
“Find got sense,” muttered the Prince cryptically, conveying that Val would find it if he had any sense. “Have my man take a look at you ‘fore you start. Wear tie of mine ‘stead of that outrageous string you affected in Vienna. Grow up. High time.”
As the limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive Val’s face was burning.
II
It was dark in Cannes harbor, rather it seemed dark after the brightness of the promenade that Val had just left behind. Three frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats heaped like shells along the beach. Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor. Occasionally there was a swish! creak! drip! as a rowboat moved about in the shallows, and its blurred shape threaded the labyrinth of hobbled fishing skiffs and launches. Val, descending the velvet slope of sand, stumbled over a sleeping boatman and caught the rank savor of garlic and plain wine. Taking the man by the shoulders he shook open his startled eyes.
“Do you know where the Minnehaha is anchored, and the Privateer?”
As they slid out into the bay he lay back in the stern and stared with vague discontent at the Riviera moon. That was the right moon, all right. Frequently, five nights out of seven, there was the right moon. And here was the soft air, aching with enchantment, and here was the music, many strains of music from many orchestras, drifting out from the shore. Eastward lay the dark Cape of Antibes, and then Nice, and beyond that Monte Carlo, where the night rang chinking full of gold. Some day he would enjoy all that, too, know its every pleasure and success--when he was too old and wise to care.
But tonight--tonight, that stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon; those soft romantic lights of Cannes behind him, the irresistible ineffable love in this air--that was to be wasted forever.
“Which one?” asked the boatman suddenly.
“Which what?” demanded Val, sitting up.<
br />
“Which boat?”
He pointed. Val turned; above hovered the gray, sword-like prow of a yacht. During the sustained longing of his wish they had covered half a mile.
He read the brass letters over his head. It was the Privateer, but there were only dim lights on board, and no music and no voices, only a murmurous k-plash at intervals as the small waves leaped at the sides.
“The other one,” said Val; “the Minnehaha.”
“Don’t go yet.”
Val started. The voice, low and soft, had dropped down from the darkness overhead.
“What’s the hurry?” said the soft voice. “Thought maybe somebody was coming to see me, and have suffered terrible disappointment.”
The boatman lifted his oars and looked hesitatingly at Val. But Val was silent, so the man let the blades fall into the water and swept the boat out into the moonlight.
“Wait a minute!” cried Val sharply.
“Good-by,” said the voice. “Come again when you can stay longer.”
“But I am going to stay now,” he answered breathlessly.
He gave the necessary order and the rowboat swung back to the foot of the small companionway. Someone young, someone in a misty white dress, someone with a lovely low voice, had actually called to him out of the velvet dark. “If she has eyes!” Val murmured to himself. He liked the romantic sound of it and repeated it under his breath--”If she has eyes.”
“What are you?” She was directly above him now; she was looking down and he was looking up as he climbed the ladder, and as their eyes met they both began to laugh.
She was very young, slim, almost frail, with a dress that accentuated her youth by its blanched simplicity. Two wan dark spots on her cheeks marked where the color was by day.
“What are you?” she repeated, moving back and laughing again as his head appeared on the level of the deck. “I’m frightened now and I want to know.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 280
