Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “You’re very nice,” she said. “Were you terribly in love with Amanda?”

  “I thought so, anyhow.”

  “I saw her last week. She’s super-Park Avenue and very busy having Park Avenue babies. She considers me rather disreputable and tells her friends about our magnificent plantation in the old South.”

  “Do you ever go down to Maryland?”

  “Do I though? I’m going Sunday night, and spend two months there saving enough money to come back on. When mother died”--she paused--”I suppose you knew mother died--I came into a little cash, and I’ve still got it, but it has to be stretched, see?”--she pulled her napkin cornerwise--”by tactful investing. I think the next step is a quiet summer on the farm.”

  Lew took her to the theater the next night, oddly excited by the encounter. The wild flush of the times lay upon her; he was conscious of her physical pulse going at some abnormal rate, but most of the young women he knew were being hectic, save the ones caught up tight in domesticity.

  He had no criticism to make--behind that lay the fact that he would not have dared to criticize her. Having climbed from a nether rung of the ladder, he had perforce based his standards on what he could see from where he was at the moment. Far be it from him to tell Jean Gunther how to order her life.

  Getting off the train in Baltimore three weeks later, he stepped into the peculiar heat that usually preceded an electric storm. He passed up the regular taxis and hired a limousine for the long ride out to Carroll County, and as he drove through rich foliage, moribund in midsummer, between the white fences that lined the rolling road, many years fell away and he was again the young man, starved for a home, who had first seen the Gunther house four years ago. Since then he had occupied a twelve-room apartment in New York, rented a summer mansion on Long Island, but his spirit, warped by loneliness and grown gypsy with change, turned back persistently to this house.

  Inevitably it was smaller than he had expected, a small, big house, roomy rather than spacious. There was a rather intangible neglect about it--the color of the house had never been anything but a brown-green relict of the sun; Lew had never known the stable to lean otherwise than as the Tower of Pisa, nor the garden to grow any other way than plebeian and wild.

  Jean was on the porch--not, as she had prophesied, in the role of gingham queen or rural equestrienne, but very Rue-de-la-Paix against the dun cushions of the swinging settee. There was the stout, colored butler whom Lew remembered and who pretended, with racial guile, to remember Lew delightedly. He took the bag to Amanda’s old room, and Lew stared around it a little before he went downstairs. Jean and Bess were waiting over a cocktail on the porch.

  It struck him that Bess had made a leaping change out of childhood into something that was not quite youth. About her beauty there was a detachment, almost an impatience, as though she had not asked for the gift and considered it rather a burden; to a young man, the gravity of her face might have seemed formidable.

  “How is your father?” Lew asked.

  “He won’t be down tonight,” Bess answered. “He’s not well. He’s over seventy, you know. People tire him. When we have guests, he has dinner upstairs.”

  “It would be better if he ate upstairs all the time,” Jean remarked, pouring the cocktails.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Bess contradicted her. “The doctors said it wouldn’t. There’s no question about that.”

  Jean turned in a rush to Lew. “For over a year Bess has hardly left this house. We could--”

  “What junk!” her sister said impatiently. “I ride every morning.”

  “--we could get a nurse who would do just as well.”

  Dinner was formal, with candles on the table and the two young women in evening dresses. Lew saw that much was missing--the feeling that the house was bursting with activity, with expanding life--all this had gone. It was difficult for the diminished clan to do much more than inhabit the house. There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

  Midway through dinner, Lew lifted his head at a pause in the conversation, but what he had confused with a mutter of thunder was a long groan from the floor above, followed by a measured speech, whose words were interrupted by the quick clatter of Bess’ chair.

  “You know what I ordered. Just so long as I am the head of--”

  “It’s father.” Momentarily Jean looked at Lew as if she thought the situation was faintly humorous, but at his concerned face, she continued seriously, “You might as well know. It’s senile dementia. Not dangerous. Sometimes he’s absolutely himself. But it’s hard on Bess.”

  Bess did not come down again; after dinner, Lew and Jean went into the garden, splattered with faint drops before the approaching rain. Through the vivid green twilight Lew followed her long dress, spotted with bright red roses--it was the first of that fashion he had ever seen; in the tense hush he had an illusion of intimacy with her, as though they shared the secrets of many years and, when she caught at his arm suddenly at a rumble of thunder, he drew her around slowly with his other arm and kissed her shaped, proud mouth.

  “Well, at least you’ve kissed one Gunther girl,” Jean said lightly. “How was it? And don’t you think you’re taking advantage of us, being unprotected out here in the country?”

  He looked at her to see if she were joking, and with a swift laugh she seized his arm again. It was raining in earnest, and they fled toward the house--to find Bess on her knees in the library, setting light to an open fire.

  “Father’s all right,” she assured them. “I don’t like to give him the medicine till the last minute. He’s worrying about some man that lent him twenty dollars in 1892.” She lingered, conscious of being a third party, and yet impelled to play her mother’s role and impart an initial solidarity before she retired. The storm broke, shrieking in white at the windows, and Bess took the opportunity to fly to the windows upstairs, calling down after a moment:

  “The telephone’s trying to ring. Do you think it’s safe to answer it?”

  “Perfectly,” Jean called back, “or else they wouldn’t ring.” She came close to Lewis in the center of the room, away from the white, quivering windows.

  “It’s strange having you here right now. I don’t mind saying I’m glad you’re here. But if you weren’t, I suppose we’d get along just as well.”

  “Shall I help Bess close the windows?” Lew asked.

  Simultaneously, Bess called downstairs:

  “Nobody seemed to be on the phone, and I don’t like holding it.”

  A ripping crash of thunder shook the house and Jean moved into Lew’s arm, breaking away as Bess came running down the stairs with a yelp of dismay.

  “The lights are out up there,” she said. “I never used to mind storms when I was little. Father used to make us sit on the porch sometimes, remember?”

  There was a dazzle of light around all the windows of the first floor, reflecting itself back and forth in mirrors, so that every room was pervaded with a white glare; there followed a sound as of a million matches struck at once, so loud and terrible that the thunder rolling down seemed secondary; then a splintering noise separated itself out, and Bess’ voice:

  “That struck!”

  Once again came the sickening lightning, and through a rolling pandemonium of sound they groped from window to window till Jean cried: “It’s William’s room! There’s a tree on it!”

  In a moment, Lew had flung wide the kitchen door and saw, in the next glare, what had happened: The great tree, in falling, had divided the lean-to from the house proper.

  “Is William there?” he demanded.

  “Probably. He should be.”

  Gathering up his courage, Lew dashed across the twenty feet of new marsh, and with a waffle iron smashed in the nearest window. Inundated with sheet rain and thunder, he yet realized that the storm had moved off from overhead, and his voice was strong as he called: “William!
You all right?”

  No answer.

  “William!”

  He paused and there came a quiet answer:

  “Who dere?”

  “You all right?”

  “I wanna know who dere.”

  “The tree fell on you. Are you hurt?”

  There was a sudden peal of laughter from the shack as William emerged mentally from dark and atavistic suspicions of his own. Again and again the pealing laughter rang out.

  “Hurt? Not me hurt. Nothin’ hurt me. I’m never better, as they say. Nothin’ hurt me.”

  Irritated by his melting clothes, Lew said brusquely:

  “Well, whether you know it or not, you’re penned up in there. You’ve got to try and get out this window. That tree’s too big to push off tonight.”

  Half an hour later, in his room, Lew shed the wet pulp of his clothing by the light of a single candle. Lying naked on the bed, he regretted that he was in poor condition, unnecessarily fatigued with the exertion of pulling a fat man out a window. Then, over the dull rumble of the thunder he heard the phone again in the hall, and Bess’ voice, “I can’t hear a word. You’ll have to get a better connection,” and for thirty seconds he dozed, to wake with a jerk at the sound of his door opening.

  “Who’s that?” he demanded, pulling the quilt up over himself.

  The door opened slowly.

  “Who’s that?”

  There was a chuckle; a last pulse of lightning showed him three tense, blue-veined fingers, and then a man’s voice whispered: “I only wanted to know whether you were in for the night, dear. I worry--I worry.”

  The door closed cautiously, and Lew realized that old Gunther was on some nocturnal round of his own. Aroused, he slipped into his sole change of clothes, listening to Bess for the third time at the phone.

  “--in the morning,” she said. “Can’t it wait? We’ve got to get a connection ourselves.”

  Downstairs he found Jean surprisingly spritely before the fire. She made a sign to him, and he went and stood above her, indifferent suddenly to her invitation to kiss her. Trying to decide how he felt, he brushed his hand lightly along her shoulder.

  “Your father’s wandering around. He came in my room. Don’t you think you ought to--”

  “Always does it,” Jean said. “Makes the nightly call to see if we’re in bed.”

  Lew stared at her sharply; a suspicion that had been taking place in his subconscious assumed tangible form. A bland, beautiful expression stared back at him; but his ears lifted suddenly up the stairs to Bess still struggling with the phone.

  “All right. I’ll try to take it that way. . . . P-ay-double ess-ee-dee--’p-a-s-s-e-d.’ All right; ay-double you-ay-wy. ‘Passed away?’“ Her voice, as she put the phrase together, shook with sudden panic. “What did you say--’Amanda Gunther passed away’?”

  Jean looked at Lew with funny eyes.

  “Why does Bess try to take that message now? Why not--”

  “Shut up!” he ordered. “This is something serious.”

  “I don’t see--”

  Alarmed by the silence that seeped down the stairs, Lew ran up and found Bess sitting beside the telephone table holding the receiver in her lap, just breathing and staring, breathing and staring. He took the receiver and got the message:

  “Amanda passed away quietly, giving life to a little boy.”

  Lew tried to raise Bess from the chair, but she sank back, full of dry sobbing.

  “Don’t tell father tonight.”

  How did it matter if this was added to that old store of confused memories? It mattered to Bess, though.

  “Go away,” she whispered. “Go tell Jean.”

  Some premonition had reached Jean, and she was at the foot of the stairs while he descended.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He guided her gently back into the library.

  “Amanda is dead,” he said, still holding her.

  She gathered up her forces and began to wail, but he put his hand over her mouth.

  “You’ve been drinking!” he said. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You can’t put anything more on your sister.”

  Jean pulled herself together visibly--first her proud mouth and then her whole body--but what might have seemed heroic under other conditions seemed to Lew only reptilian, a fine animal effort--all he had begun to feel about her went out in a few ticks of the clock.

  In two hours the house was quiet under the simple ministrations of a retired cook whom Bess had sent for; Jean was put to sleep with a sedative by a physician from Ellicott City. It was only when Lew was in bed at last that he thought really of Amanda, and broke suddenly, and only for a moment. She was gone out of the world, his second--no, his third love--killed in single combat. He thought rather of the dripping garden outside, and nature so suddenly innocent in the clearing night. If he had not been so tired he would have dressed and walked through the long-stemmed, clinging ferns, and looked once more impersonally at the house and its inhabitants--the broken old, the youth breaking and growing old with it, the other youth escaping into dissipation. Walking through broken dreams, he came in his imagination to where the falling tree had divided William’s bedroom from the house, and paused there in the dark shadow, trying to piece together what he thought about the Gunthers.

  “It’s degenerate business,” he decided--”all this hanging on to the past. I’ve been wrong. Some of us are going ahead, and these people and the roof over them are just push-overs for time. I’ll be glad to leave it for good and get back to something fresh and new and clean in Wall Street tomorrow.”

  Only once was he wakened in the night, when he heard the old man quavering querulously about the twenty dollars that he had borrowed in ‘92. He heard Bess’ voice soothing him, and then, just before he went to sleep, the voice of the old Negress blotting out both voices.

  III

  Lew’s business took him frequently to Baltimore, but with the years it seemed to change back into the Baltimore that he had known before he met the Gunthers. He thought of them often, but after the night of Amanda’s death he never went there. By 1933, the role that the family had played in his life seemed so remote--except for the unforgettable fact that they had formed his ideas about how life was lived--that he could drive along the Frederick Road to where it dips into Carroll County before a feeling of recognition crept over him. Impelled by a formless motive, he stopped his car.

  It was deep summer; a rabbit crossed the road ahead of him and a squirrel did acrobatics on an arched branch. The Gunther house was up the next crossroad and five minutes away--in half an hour he could satisfy his curiosity about the family; yet he hesitated. With painful consequences, he had once tried to repeat the past, and now, in normal times, he would have driven on with a feeling of leaving the past well behind him; but he had come to realize recently that life was not always a progress, nor a search for new horizons, nor a going away. The Gunthers were part of him; he would not be able to bring to new friends the exact things that he had brought to the Gunthers. If the memory of them became extinct, then something in himself became extinct also.

  The squirrel’s flight on the branch, the wind nudging at the leaves, the cock splitting distant air, the creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, lulled him into an adolescent trance, and he sprawled back against the leather for a moment without problems. He loafed for ten minutes before the “k-dup, k-dup, k-dup” of a walking horse came around the next bend of the road. The horse bore a girl in Jodhpur breeches, and bending forward, Lew recognized Bess Gunther.

  He scrambled from the car. The horse shied as Bess recognized Lew and pulled up. “Why, Mr. Lowrie! . . . Hey! Hoo-oo there, girl! . . . Where did you arrive from? Did you break down?”

  It was a lovely face, and a sad face, but it seemed to Lew that some new quality made it younger--as if she had finally abandoned the cosmic sense of responsibility which had made her seem older than her age four years ago.

  “I
was thinking about you all,” he said. “Thinking of paying you a visit.” Detecting a doubtful shadow in her face, he jumped to a conclusion and laughed. “I don’t mean a visit; I mean a call. I’m solvent--sometimes you have to add that these days.”

  She laughed too: “I was only thinking the house was full and where would we put you.”

  “I’m bound for Baltimore anyhow. Why not get off your rocking horse and sit in my car a minute.”

  She tied the mare to a tree and got in beside him.

  He had not realized that flashing fairness could last so far into the twenties--only when she didn’t smile, he saw from three small thoughtful lines that she was always a grave girl--he had a quick recollection of Amanda on an August afternoon, and looking at Bess, he recognized all that he remembered of Amanda.

  “How’s your father?”

  “Father died last year. He was bedridden a year before he died.” Her voice was in the singsong of something often repeated. “It was just as well.”

  “I’m sorry. How about Jean? Where is she?”

  “Jean married a Chinaman--I mean she married a man who lives in China. I’ve never seen him.”

  “Do you live alone, then?”

  “No, there’s my aunt.” She hesitated. “Anyhow, I’m getting married next week.”

  Inexplicably, he had the old sense of loss in his diaphragm.

  “Congratulations! Who’s the unfortunate--”

  “From Philadelphia. The whole party went over to the races this afternoon. I wanted to have a last ride with Juniper.”

  “Will you live in Philadelphia?”

  “Not sure. We’re thinking of building another house on the place, tear down the old one. Of course, we might remodel it.”

  “Would that be worth doing?”

  “Why not?” she said hastily. “We could use some of it, the architects think.”

  “You’re fond of it, aren’t you?”

  Bess considered.

  “I wouldn’t say it was just my idea of modernity. But I’m a sort of a home girl.” She accentuated the words ironically. “I never went over very big in Baltimore, you know--the family failure. I never had the sort of thing Amanda and Jean had.”