Necessarily, the domestic part of the day receded in importance. It was nice to know that his girls were safe and well occupied, that there would be two faces waiting for him eagerly at home. But for the moment he could not divert any more energy to his family. Becky had tennis and a reading list she had asked him for. She wanted to be a fine wife to René; she knew that he was trying to rear some structure of solidity in which they could all dwell together, and she guessed that it was the strain of the present situation that made him often seem to put undue emphasis on minor matters. When he began to substitute moments of severe strictness with Noël for the time he would have liked to devote to her, especially to her lessons — which were coming back marked “careless” — Becky protested. Whereupon René insisted that his intensity of feeling about Noël’s manners was an attempt to save her trouble, to conserve her real energies for real efforts and not let them be spent to restore the esteem of her fellows, lost in a moment of carelessness or vanity. “Either one learns politeness at home,” René said, “or the world teaches it with a whip — and many young people in America are ruined in that process. How do I care whether Noël ‘adores’ me or not, as they say? I am not bringing her up to be my wife.”
Still, and in spite of everything, the method was not working. His private life was beginning to interfere with it. If he had been able to spend another half an hour in the laboratory that day when he knew Becky was waiting discreetly a little way down the road, or even if he could have sent an overt message to her, saying that he was delayed thereby, then the tap would not have been left on and a quantity of new water would not have run into the water already separated according to its isotope, thus necessitating starting over. Work, love, his child — his demands did not seem to him exorbitant; he had had forethought and had made a schedule which anticipated all minor difficulties.
“Let us reconsider,” he said, assembling his girls again. “Let us consider that we have a method, embodied in this schedule. A method is better and bigger than a man.”
“Not always,” said Becky.
“How do you mean, not always, little one?”
“Cars really do act up like ours did the other day, René. We can’t stand before them and read them the schedule.”
“No, my darling,” he said excitedly. “It is to ourselves we read the schedule. We foresee — we have the motor examined, we have the tank filled.”
“Well, we’ll try to do better,” said Becky. “Won’t we, Noël? You and I — and the car.”
“You are joking, but I am serious.”
She came close to him.
“I’m not joking, darling. I love you with all my heart and I’m trying to do everything you say — even play tennis: though I’d rather run over and keep your house a little cleaner for you.”
“My house?” he stared around vaguely. “Why, my house is very clean. Aquilla’s sister comes in every other Friday.”
He had cause to remember this one Sunday afternoon a week later, when he had a visit from his chief assistant, Charles Hume, and his wife. They were old friends, and he perceived immediately the light of old friends bent on friendship in their eyes. And how was little Noël? They had had Noël in their house for a week the previous summer.
René called upstairs for Noël, but got no answer.
“She is in the fields somewhere.” He waved his hand vaguely. “All around, it is country.”
“All very well while the days are long,” said Dolores Hume. “But remember, there are such things as kidnapings.”
René shut his mind swiftly against a new anxiety.
“How are you, René?” Dolores asked. “Charles thinks you’ve been overdoing things.”
“Now, dear,” Charles protested, “I — — “
“You be still. I’ve known René longer than you have. You two men fuss and fume over those jars all day and then René has his hands full with Noël all evening.”
Did René’s eyes deceive him, or did she look closely to see how he was taking this?
“Charles says this is an easy stage of things, so we wondered if we could help you by taking Noël while you went for a week’s rest.”
Annoyed, René answered abruptly: “I don’t need a rest and I can’t go away.” This sounded rude; René was fond of his assistant. “Not that Charles couldn’t carry on quite as well as I.”
“It’s really poor little Noël I’m thinking of as much as you. Any child needs personal attention.”
His wrath rising, René merely nodded blandly.
“If you won’t consider that,” Dolores pursued, “I wonder you don’t get a little colored girl to keep an eye on Noël in the afternoon. She could help with the cleaning. I’ve noticed that Frenchmen may be more orderly than American men, but not a bit cleaner.”
She drew her hand experimentally along the woodwork.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed, awed. Her hand was black, a particularly greasy, moldy, creepy black, with age-old furniture oil in it and far-drifted grime.
“What a catastrophe!” cried René. Only last week he had refused to let Becky clean the house. “I beg a thousand pardons. Let me get you — — “
“It serves me right,” she admitted, “and don’t you do anything about it. I know this house like my pocket.”
When she had gone, Charles Hume said:
“I feel I ought to apologize to you for Dolores. She’s a strange woman, René, and she has no damn business butting into your affairs like this!”
He stopped. His wife was suddenly in the room again, and the men had an instant sense of something gone awry. Her face was shocked and hurt, stricken, as if she had been let down in some peculiarly personal way.
“You might not have let me go upstairs,” she said to René. “Your private affairs are your own, but if it was anybody but you, René, I’d think it was a rather bad joke.”
For a moment René was bewildered. Then he half understood, but before he could speak Dolores continued coldly:
“Of course I thought it was Noël in the tub, and I walked right in.”
René was all gestures now; he took a long, slow, audible breath; raising his hands slowly to his eyes, he shook his head in time to a quick “tck, tck, tck, tck.” Then, laying his cards on the table with a sudden downward movement of his arms, he tried to explain. The girl was the niece of a neighbor — he knew, even in the midst of his evasive words, that it was no use. Dolores was just a year or so older than that war generation which took most things for granted. He knew that previous to her marriage she had been a little in love with him, and he saw the story going out into the world of the college town. He knew this even when she pretended to believe him at the last, and when Charles gave him a look of understanding and a tacit promise with his eyes that he’d shut her up, as they went out the door.
“I feel so terrible,” mourned Becky.
“It was the one day the water at the Slocums’ wouldn’t run at all, and I was so hot and sticky I thought I’d just jump in for two seconds. That woman’s face when it came in the door! ‘Oh, it’s not Noël,’ she said, and what could I say? From the way she stared at me, she ought to have seen.”
*****
It was November and the campus was riotous once a week with violets and chrysanthemums, hot dogs and football badges, and all the countryside was a red-and-yellow tunnel of leaves around the flow of many cars. Usually René went to the games, but not this year. Instead he attended upon the activities of the precious water that was not water, that was a heavenlike, mysterious fluid that might cure mental diseases in the Phacochoerus, or perhaps only grow hair on eggs — or else he played valet to his catalyst, wound in five thousand dollars’ worth of platinum wire and gleaming dully at him every morning from its quartz prison.
He took Becky and Noël up there one day because it was unusually early. He was slightly disappointed because Noël was absorbed in an inspection of her schedule while he explained the experiments. The tense, sunny room seemed romantic t
o Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.
“Daddy, can I look at your schedule one minute?” Noël asked. “There’s one dumb word that I never know what it means.”
He handed it toward her vaguely, for a change in the caliber and quality of the sound in the room made him aware that something was happening. He knelt down beside the quartz vessel with a fountain pen in his hand.
He had changed the conditions of his experiment yesterday, and now he noted quickly:
Flow of 500 c.c. per minute, temperature 255°C. Changed gas mixture to 2 vol. oxygen and 1.56 vol. nitrogen. Slight reaction, about 1 per cent. Changing to 2 vol. 0 and 1.76 vol. N. Temperature 283°C. platinum filament is now red-hot.
He worked quickly, noting the pressure gauge. Ten minutes passed; the filament glowed and faded, and René put down figure after figure. When he arose, with a rather far-away expression, he seemed almost surprised to see Becky and Noël still there.
“Well, now; that was luck,” he said.
“We’re going to be late to school,” Becky told him, and then added apologetically: “What happened, René?”
“It is too long to explain.”
“Of course you see, daddy,” said Noël reprovingly, “that we have to keep the schedule.”
“Of course, of course. Go along.” He kissed them each hungrily on the nape of the neck, watching them with pride and joy, yet putting them aside for a while as he walked around the laboratory with some of the unworldliness of an altar boy. The electrolysis also seemed to be going better. Both of his experiments, like a recalcitrant team, had suddenly decided to function, realizing the persistence they were up against.
He heard Charles Hume coming in, but he reserved his news about the catalyst while they concentrated upon the water. It was noon before he had occasion to turn to his notes — realized with a shock that he had no notes. The back of the schedule on which he had taken them was astonishingly, inexplicably blank; it was as if he had written in vanishing ink or under the spell of an illusion. Then he saw what had happened — he had made the notes on Noël’s schedule and she had taken it to school. When Aquilla’s brother arrived with a registered package, he dispatched him to the school with the schedule to make the exchange. The data he had observed seemed irreplaceable, the more so as — despite his hopeful “Look! Look! Come here, Charles, now, and look!” — the catalyst failed entirely to act up.
He wondered what was delaying Aquilla’s brother and felt a touch of anxiety as he and Charles walked up to Main Street for lunch. Afterward Charles left, to jack up a chemistry-supply firm in town.
“Don’t worry too hard,” he said. “Open the windows — the room’s full of nitrogen-chloride.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Well — — “ Charles hesitated. “I didn’t agree with Dolores’ attitude the other day, but I think you’re trying to do too much.”
“Not at all,” René protested. “Only, I am anxious to get possession of my notes again. It might be months or never, before I would blunder on that same set of conditions again.”
He was hardly alone before a small voice on the telephone developed as Noël calling up from school:
“Daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Can you understand French or English better on the phone?”
“What? I can understand anything.”
“Well, it’s about my schedule.”
“I am quite aware of that. You took away my schedule. How do you explain that?”
Noël’s voice was hesitant: “But I didn’t, daddy. You handed me your schedule with a whole lot of dumb things on the back.”
“They are not dumb things!” he exclaimed. “They are very valuable things. That is why I sent Aquilla’s brother to exchange the schedules. Has that been done?”
“I was gone to French when he came, so he went away — I guess on account of that day he was so dumb and waited. So I haven’t got any schedule and I don’t know whether Becky is coming for me after play hour or whether I’m to ride out with the Sheridans and walk home from there.”
“You haven’t got any schedule at all?” he demanded, his world breaking up around him.
“I don’t know what became of it. Maybe I left it in the car.”
“Maybe you left it in the car?”
“It wasn’t mine.”
He set down the receiver because he needed both hands now for the gesture he was under compulsion to make. He threw them up so high that it seemed as if they left his wrists and were caught again on their descent. Then he seized the phone again.
“ — — because school closes at four o’clock, and if I wait for Becky and she doesn’t come, then I’ll have to be locked out.”
“Listen,” said René. “Can you hear? Do you want me to speak in English or French?”
“Either one, daddy.”
“Well, listen to me: Good-by.”
He hung up. Regretting for the first time the lack of a phone at home, he ran up to Main Street and found a taxi, which he urged, with his foot on an imaginary back-seat accelerator, in the direction of home.
The house was locked; the car was gone; the maid was gone; Becky was gone. Where she was gone he had no idea, and the Slocums could give him no information… The notes might be anywhere now, kicked carelessly into the street, crumpled and flung away.
“But Becky will recognize it as a schedule,” he consoled himself. “She would not be so formidable as to throw away our schedule.”
He was by no means sure that it was in the car. On a chance, he had the taxi drive him into the colored district with the idea that he might get some sort of orientation from Aquilla’s brother. René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. He had no idea at first of what he was attempting, but after half an hour the problem assumed respectable dimensions.
“Do you know” — so he would call to dark and puzzled men on the sidewalks — “where I can find the house of Aquilla’s brother, or of Aquilla’s sister — either one?”
“I don’t even know who Aquilla is, boss.”
René tried to think whether it was a first or a last name, and gave up as he realized that he never had known. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother. When he had stated his mission a dozen times, sometimes varying it with hypocritical pleas as to the whereabouts of Aquilla’s sister, he began to feel a little crazy.
It was colder. There was a threat of first winter snow in the air, and at the thought of his notes being kicked out into it, buried beneath it, René abandoned his quest and told the taxi man to drive home, in the hope that Becky had returned. But the house was deserted and cold. With the taxi throbbing outside, he threw coal into the furnace and then drove back into the center of town. It seemed to him that if he stayed on Main Street he would sooner or later run into Becky and the car — there were not an unlimited number of places to pass an afternoon in a regimented community of seven thousand people. Becky had no friends here — it was the first time he had ever thought of that. Literally there was almost no place where she could be.
Aimless, feeling almost as intangible as Aquilla’s brother, he wandered along, glancing into every drug store and eating shop. Young people were always eating. He could not really inquire of anyone if they had seen her, for even Becky was only a shadow here, a person hidden and unknown, a someone to whom he had not yet given reality. Only two things were real — his schedule, for the lack of which he was utterly lost and helpless, and the notes written on its back.
It was colder, minute by minute; a blast of real winter, sweeping out of the walks beside College Hall, made him wonder suddenly if Becky was going to pick up Noël. What had Noël said about being locked out when the school was closed? Not
in weather like this. With sudden concern and self-reproach, René took another taxi and drove to the school, but it was closed and dark inside.
“Then, perhaps, she is lost too,” he thought. “Quite possibly she tried to walk herself home by herself and was kidnaped, or got a big chill, or was run over.”
He considered quite seriously stopping at the police station, and only decided against it when he was unable to think what he could possibly report to them with any shred of dignity.
“ — — that a man of science, has managed, in one afternoon, in this one little town, to lose everything.”
III
Meanwhile, Becky was thoroughly enjoying herself. When Aquilla’s brother returned with the car at noon, he handed over Noël’s schedule with no comment save that he had not been able to give it to Noël because he could not find her. He was finished with European culture for the day, and was already crossing the Mediterranean in his mind while Becky tried to pump further information out of him.
A girl she had met through tennis had wangled the use of one of the club squash courts for the early hours of the afternoon. The squash was good; Becky soaked and sweated in the strange, rather awesome atmosphere of masculinity, and afterward, feeling fine and cool, took out her own schedule to check up on her duties of the afternoon. The schedule said to call for Noël, and Becky set out with all her thoughts in proportion — the one about herself and tennis; the one about Noël, whom she had come to love and learn with the evenings when René was late at the laboratory; the one about René, in whom she recognized the curious secret of power. But when she arrived at the school and found Noël’s penciled note on the gatepost, an epidemic of revolt surged suddenly over her.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 344
