“He doesn’t like me,” said Ellsworth lightly. “I invited his girl to dance.”
“She didn’t want to dance with you!” shouted the other. “You think you’re so damn smart — ask her if she wanted to dance with you.”
The girl murmured indistinguishable words and disclaimed all responsibility by beginning to cry.
“You’re too fresh, that’s the trouble!” continued her defender. “I know what you said to her when you danced with her before. What do you think these girls are? They’re just as good as anybody, see?”
Al Fitzpatrick moved in closer.
“Let’s put ‘em all off the boat,” he suggested, stubborn and ashamed. “They haven’t got any business butting in here.”
A mild protest went up from the crowd, especially from the girls, and Abbot put his hand conciliatingly on the husky’s shoulder. But it was too late.
“You’ll put me off?” Ellsworth was saying coldly. “If you try to lay your hands on me I’ll rearrange your whole face.”
“Shut up, Ellie!” snapped Bill. “No use getting disagreeable. They don’t want us; we’d better go.” He stepped close to Mae, and whispered, “Good night. Don’t forget what I said. I’ll drive over and see you Sunday afternoon.”
As he pressed her hand quickly and turned away he saw the argumentative boy swing suddenly at Ames, who caught the blow with his left arm. In a moment they were slugging and panting, knee to knee in the small space left by the gathering crowd. Simultaneously Bill felt a hand pluck at his sleeve and he turned to face Al Fitzpatrick. Then the deck was in an uproar. Abbot’s attempt to separate Ames and his antagonist was misinterpreted; instantly he was involved in a battle of his own, cannonading against the other pairs, slipping on the smooth deck, bumping against noncombatants and scurrying girls who sent up shrill cries. He saw Al Fitzpatrick slap the deck suddenly with his whole body, not to rise again. He heard calls of “Get Mr. McVitty!” and then his own opponent was dropped by a blow he did not strike, and Bill’s voice said: “Come on to the boat!”
The next few minutes streaked by in wild confusion. Avoiding Bill, whose hammerlike arms had felled their two champions, the high-school boys tried to pull down Ham and Ellie, and the harassed group edged and revolved toward the stern rail.
“Hidden-ball stuff!” Bill panted. “Save it for Haughton. I’m G-Gardner, you’re Bradlee and Mahan — hip!”
Mr. McVitty’s alarmed face appeared above the combat, and his high voice, ineffectual at first, finally pierced the heat of battle.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves! Bob — Cecil — George Roberg! Let go, I say!”
Abruptly the battle was over and the combatants, breathing hard, eyed one another impassively in the moonlight.
Ellie laughed and held out a pack of cigarettes. Bill untied the motor boat and walked forward with the painter to bring it alongside.
“They claim you insulted one of the girls,” said Mr. McVitty uncertainly. “Now that’s no way to behave after we took you aboard.”
“That’s nonsense,” snapped Ellie, between gasps. “I only told her I’d like to bite her neck.”
“Do you think that was a very gentlemanly thing to say?” demanded Mr. McVitty heatedly.
“Come on, Ellie!” Bill cried. “Good-by, everybody! Sorry there was such a row!”
They were already shadows of the past as they slipped one by one over the rail. The girls were turning cautiously back to their own men, and not one of them answered, and not one of them waved farewell.
“A bunch of meanies,” remarked Ellie ironically. “I wish all you ladies had one neck so I could bite it all at once. I’m a glutton for ladies’ necks.”
Feeble retorts went up here and there like muffled pistol shots.
“Good night, ladies,” Ham sang, as Bill shoved away from the side:
Good night, ladies,
Good night, ladies,
We’re going to leave you now-ow-ow.
The boat moved up the river through the summer night, while the launch, touched by its swell, rocked to and fro gently in the wide path of the moon.
II
On the following Sunday afternoon Bill Frothington drove over from Truro to the isolated rural slum known as Wheatly Village. He had stolen away from a house full of guests, assembled for his sister’s wedding, to pursue what his mother would have called an “unworthy affair.” But behind him lay an extremely successful career at Harvard and a youth somewhat more austere than the average, and this fall he would disappear for life into the banking house of Read, Hoppe and Company in Boston. He felt that the summer was his own. And had the purity of his intentions toward Mae Purley been questioned he would have defended himself with righteous anger. He had been thinking of her for five days. She attracted him violently, and he was following the attraction with eyes that did not ask to see.
Mae lived in the less offensive quarter of town on the third floor of its only apartment house, an unsuccessful relic of those more prosperous days of New England textile weaving that ended twenty years ago. Her father was a timekeeper who had fallen out of the white-collar class; Mae’s two older brothers were working at the loom, and Bill’s only impression as he entered the dingy flat was one of hopeless decay. The mountainous, soiled mother, at once suspicious and deferential, and the anaemic, beaten Anglo-Saxon asleep on the couch after his Sunday dinner were no more than shadows against the poor walls. But Mae was clean and fresh. No breath of squalor touched her. The pale pure youth of her cheeks, and her thin childish body shining through a new organdie dress, measured up full to the summer day.
“Where you going to take my little girl?” Mrs. Purley asked anxiously.
“I’m going to run away with her,” he said, laughing.
“Not with my little girl.”
“Oh, yes, I am. I don’t see why she hasn’t been run away with before.”
“Not my little girl.”
They held hands going downstairs, but not for an hour did the feeling of being intimate strangers pass. When the first promise of evening blew into the air at five o’clock and the light changed from white to yellow, their eyes met once in a certain way and Bill knew that it was time. They turned up a side road and down a wagon track, and in a moment the spell was around them again — the equal and opposite urge that drew them together. They talked about each other and then their voices grew quiet and they kissed, while chestnut blossoms slid in white diagonals through the air and fell across the car. After a long while an instinct told her that they had stayed long enough. He drove her home.
It went on like that for two months. He would come for her in the late afternoon and they would go for dinner to the shore. Afterward they would drive around until they found the center of the summer night and park there while the enchanted silence spread over them like leaves over the babes in the wood. Some day, naturally, they were going to marry. For the present it was impossible; he must go to work in the fall. Vaguely and with more than a touch of sadness both of them realized that this wasn’t true; that if Mae had been of another class an engagement would have been arranged at once. She knew that he lived in a great country house with a park and a caretaker’s lodge, that there were stables full of cars and horses, and that house parties and dances took place there all summer. Once they had driven past the gate and Mae’s heart was leaden in her breast as she saw that those wide acres would lie between them all her life.
On his part Bill knew that it was impossible to marry Mae Purley. He was an only son and he wore one of those New England names that are carried with one always. Eventually he broached the subject to his mother.
“It isn’t her poverty and ignorance,” his mother said, among other things. “It’s her lack of any standards — common women are common for life. You’d see her impressed by cheap and shallow people, by cheap and shallow things.”
“But, mother, this isn’t 1850. It isn’t as if she were marrying into the royal family.”
“If it
were, it wouldn’t matter. But you have a name that for many generations has stood for leadership and self-control. People who have given up less and taken fewer responsibilities have had nothing to say aloud when men like your father and your Uncle George and your Great-grandfather Frothington held their heads high. Toss your pride away and see what you’ve left at thirty-five to take you through the rest of your life.”
“But you can only live once,” he protested — knowing, nevertheless, that what she said was, for him, right. His youth had been pointed to make him understand that exposition of superiority. He knew what it was to be the best, at home, at school, at Harvard. In his senior year he had known men to dodge behind a building and wait in order to walk with him across the Harvard Yard, not to be seen with him out of mere poor snobbishness, but to get something intangible, something he carried within him of the less obvious, less articulate experience of the race.
Several days later he went to see Mae and met her coming out of the flat. They sat on the stairs in the half darkness.
“Just think of these stairs,” he said huskily. “Think how many times you’ve kissed me on these stairs. At night when I’ve brought you home. On every landing. Last month when we walked up and down together five times before we could say good night.”
“I hate these stairs. I wish I never had to go up them any more.”
“Oh, Mae, what are we going to do?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. “I’ve been thinking a lot these last three days,” she said. “I don’t think it’s fair to myself to go on like this — or to Al.”
“To Al,” he said startled. “Have you been seeing Al?”
“We had a long talk last night.”
“All” he repeated incredulously.
“He wants to get married. He isn’t mad any more.”
Bill tried suddenly to face the situation he had been dodging for two months, but the situation, with practiced facility, slid around the corner. He moved up a step till he was beside Mae, and put his arm around her.
“Oh, let’s get married!” she cried desperately. “You can. If you want to, you can.”
“I do want to.”
“Then why can’t we?”
“We can, but not yet.”
“Oh, God, you’ve said that before.”
For a tragic week they quarreled and came together over the bodies of unresolved arguments and irreconcilable facts. They parted finally on a trivial question as to whether he had once kept her waiting half an hour.
Bill went to Europe on the first possible boat and enlisted in an ambulance unit. When America went into the war he transferred to the aviation and Mae’s pale face and burning lips faded off, faded out, against the wild dark background of the war.
III
In 1919 Bill fell romantically in love with a girl of his own set. He met her on the Lido and wooed her on golf courses and in fashionable speak-easies and in cars parked at night, loving her much more from the first than he had ever loved Mae. She was a better person, prettier and more intelligent and with a kindlier heart. She loved him; they had much the same tastes and more than ample money.
There was a child, after a while there were four children, then only three again. Bill grew a little stout after thirty, as athletes will. He was always going to take up something strenuous and get into real condition. He worked hard and drank a little too freely every weekend. Later he inherited the country house and lived there in the summer.
When he and Stella had been married eight years they felt safe for each other, safe from the catastrophes that had overtaken the majority of their friends. To Stella this brought relief; Bill, once he had accepted the idea of their safety, was conscious of a certain discontent, a sort of chemical restlessness. With a feeling of disloyalty to Stella, he shyly sounded his friends on the subject and found that in men of his age the symptoms were almost universal. Some blamed it on the war: “There’ll never be anything like the war.”
It was not variety of woman that he wanted. The mere idea appalled him. There were always women around. If he took a fancy to someone Stella invited her for a week-end, and men who liked Stella fraternally, or even somewhat sentimentally, were as often in the house. But the feeling persisted and grew stronger. Sometimes it would steal over him at dinner — a vast nostalgia — and the people at table would fade out and odd memories of his youth would come back to him. Sometimes a familiar taste or a smell would give him this sensation. Chiefly it had to do with the summer night.
One evening, walking down the lawn with Stella after dinner, the feeling seemed so close that he could almost grasp it. It was in the rustle of the pines, in the wind, in the gardener’s radio down behind the tennis court.
“Tomorrow,” Stella said; “there’ll be a full moon.”
She had stopped in a broad path of moonlight and was looking at him. Her hair was pale and lovely in the gentle light. She regarded him for a moment oddly, and he took a step forward as if to put his arms around her; then he stopped, unresponsive and dissatisfied. Stella’s expression changed slightly and they walked on.
“That’s too bad,” he said suddenly. “Because tomorrow I’ve got to go away.”
“Where?”
“To New York. Meeting of the trustees of school. Now that the kids are entered I feel I should.”
“You’ll be back Sunday?”
“Unless something comes up and I telephone.”
“Ad Haughton’s coming Sunday, and maybe the Ameses.”
“I’m glad you won’t be alone.”
Suddenly Bill had remembered the boat floating down the river and Mae Purley on the deck under the summer moon. The image became a symbol of his youth, his introduction to life. Not only did he remember the deep excitement of that night but felt it again, her face against his, the rush of air about them as they stood by the lifeboat and the feel of its canvas cover to his hand.
When his car dropped him at Wheatly Village next afternoon he experienced a sensation of fright. Eleven years — she might be dead; quite possibly she had moved away. Any moment he might pass her on the street, a tired, already faded woman pushing a baby carriage and leading an extra child.
“I’m looking for a Miss Mae Purley,” he said to a taxi driver. “It might be Fitzpatrick now.”
“Fitzpatrick up at the works?”
Inquiries within the station established the fact that Mae Purley was indeed Mrs. Fitzpatrick. They lived just outside of town.
Ten minutes later the taxi stopped before a white Colonial house.
“They made it over from a barn,” volunteered the taxi man. “There was a picture of it in one of them magazines.”
Bill saw that someone was regarding him from behind the screen door. It was Mae. The door opened slowly and she stood in the hall, unchanged, slender as of old. Instinctively he raised his arms and then, as he took another step forward, instinctively he lowered them.
“Mae.”
“Bill.”
She was there. For a moment he possessed her, her frailty, her thin smoldering beauty; then he had lost her again. He could no more have embraced her than he could have embraced a stranger.
On the sun porch they stared at each other. “You haven’t changed,” they said together.
It was gone from her. Words, casual, trivial, and insincere, poured from her mouth as if to fill the sudden vacancy in his heart:
“Imagine seeing you — know you anywhere — thought you’d forgotten me — talking about you only the other night.”
Suddenly he was without any inspiration. His mind became an utter blank, and try as he might, he could summon up no attitude to fill it.
“It’s a nice place you have here,” he said stupidly.
“We like it. You’d never guess it, but we made it out of an old barn.”
“The taxi driver told me.”
“ — — stood here for a hundred years empty — got it for almost nothing — pictures of it before and after in Home and Country
Side.”
Without warning his mind went blank again. What was the matter? Was he sick? He had even forgotten why he was here.
He knew only that he was smiling benevolently and that he must hang on to that smile, for if it passed he could never re-create it. What did it mean when one’s mind went blank? He must see a doctor tomorrow.
“ — — since Al’s done so well. Of course Mr. Kohlsatt leans on him, so he don’t get away much. I get away to New York sometimes. Sometimes we both get away together.”
“Well, you certainly have a nice place here,” he said desperately. He must see a doctor in the morning. Doctor Flynn or Doctor Keyes or Doctor Given who was at Harvard with him. Or perhaps that specialist who was recommended to him by that woman at the Ameses’; or Doctor Gross or Doctor Studeford or Doctor de Martel — —
“ — — I never touch it, but Al always keeps something in the house. Al’s gone to Boston, but I think I can find the key.”
— — or Doctor Ramsay or old Doctor Ogden, who had brought him into the world. He hadn’t realized that he knew so many doctors. He must make a list.
“ — — you’re just exactly the same.”
Suddenly Bill put both hands on his stomach, gave a short coarse laugh and said “Not here.” His own act startled and surprised him, but it dissipated the blankness for a moment and he began to gather up the pieces of his afternoon. From her chatter he discovered her to be under the impression that in some vague and sentimental past she had thrown him over. Perhaps she was right. Who was she anyhow — this hard, commonplace article wearing Mae’s body for a mask of life? Defiance rose in him.
“Mae, I’ve been thinking about that boat,” he said desperately.
“What boat?”
“The steamboat on the Thames, Mae. I don’t think we should let ourselves get old. Get your hat, Mae. Let’s go for a boat ride tonight.”
“But I don’t see the point,” she protested. “Do you think just riding on a boat keeps people young? Maybe if it was salt water — — “
“Don’t you remember that night on the boat?” he said, as if he were talking to a child. “That’s how we met. Two months later you threw me over and married Al Fitzpatrick.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 326
