Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  In Europe this summer it would be easier. Minna and the children would be parked here and there, in Paris and on the Riviera, and he would make business trips with Catherine. It was a willful, daring arrangement but he was twice a man in every way. Life certainly owed him two women.

  The day passed — once he saw Catherine Denzer, passing her in an empty corridor. She kept her bargain, all except for her lovely pale head which yearned toward him momentarily as they passed and made his throat warm, made him want to turn and go after her. But he kept himself in control — they would be in Cherbourg in fifty hours.

  Another day passed — there was a brokerage office on board and he spent the time there, putting in a few orders, using the ship-to-shore telephone once, sending a few code wires.

  That evening he left Minna talking to the college professor in the adjoining deck chair, and strolled restlessly around the ship, continually playing with the idea of going to Catherine Denzer, but only as a form of mental indulgence because it was twenty-four hours now to Paris and the situation was well in hand.

  But he walked the halls of her deck, sometimes glancing casually down the little branch corridors to the staterooms. And so, entirely by accident, in one of these corridors he saw his wife Minna and the professor. They were in each other’s arms embracing, with all abandon. No mistake.

  II

  Cautiously Scheer backed away from the corridor. His first thought was very simple: it jumped over several steps — over fury, hot jealousy and amazement — it was that his entire plan for the summer was ruined. His next thought was that Minna must sweat blood for this and then he jumped a few more steps. He was what is known medically as a “schizoid” — in his business dealings, too, he left out intermediate steps, surprising competitors by arriving quickly at an extreme position without any discoverable logic. He had arrived at one of these extreme positions now and was not even surprised to find himself there.

  An hour later there was a knock on the door of Mr. O’Kane’s cabin and Professor Dollard of the faculty of Weston Technical College came into the room. He was a thin quiet man of forty, wearing a loose tweed suit.

  “Oh yes,” said O’Kane. “Come in. Sit down.”

  “Thank you,” said Dollard. “What do you want to see me about?”

  “Have a cigarette.”

  “No thanks. I’m on my way to bed, but tell me, what’s it about?”

  O’Kane coughed pointedly — whereupon Cates, the swimming-pool steward, came out of the private bathroom behind Dollard and went to the corridor door, locking it and standing in front of it. At the same time Gaston T. Scheer came out of the bathroom and Dollard stood up, blushing suddenly dark as he recognized him.

  “Oh, hello — “ he said, “ — Mr. Scheer. What’s the idea of this?” He took off his glasses with the thought that Scheer was going to hit him.

  “What are you a professor of, Professor?”

  “Mathematics, Mr. Scheer — I told you that. What’s the idea of asking me down here?”

  “You ought to stick to your job,” said Scheer. “You ought to stick there in the college and teach it and not mess around with decent people.”

  “I’m not messing around with anybody.”

  “You oughtn’t to fool around with people that could buy you out ten thousand times — and not know they spent a nickel.”

  Dollard stood up.

  “You’re out of your class,” said Scheer. “You’re a school teacher that’s promoted himself out of his class.”

  Cates, the steward, stirred impatiently. He had left the two hundred pounds in cash in his locker and he wanted to have this over with and get back and hide it better.

  “I don’t know yet what I’ve done,” Dollard said. But he knew all right. It was too bad. A long time ago he had decided to avoid rich people and here he was tangled up with the very worst type.

  “You stepped out of your class,” said Scheer thickly, “but you’re not going to do it any more. You’re going to feed the fishes out there, see?”

  Mr. O’Kane, who had bucked himself with whiskey, kept imagining that it was Claud Hanson who was about to die for Mr. Scheer — instead of Professor Dollard who had not offered himself for a sacrifice. There was still a moment when Dollard could have cried out for help but because he was guilty he could not bring himself to cry out. Then he was engrossed in a struggle to keep breathing, a struggle that he lost without a sigh.

  III

  Minna Scheer waited on the front of the promenade deck, walking in the chalked numbers of the shuffle-board game. She was excited and happy. Her feet as she placed them in the squares felt young and barefoot and desperate. She could play too — whatever it was they played. She had been a good girl so long, but now almost everybody she knew was raising the devil and it was a thrilling discovery to find that she could join in with such pleasure. The man was late but that made it all the more tense and unbearably lovely, and from time to time she raised her eyes in delight and looked off into the white hot wake of the steamer.

  “On an Ocean Wave,” written in the summer of 1940, was the only Fitzgerald story published under a pseudonym. The disguise was his idea, and he originally proposed it to Arnold Gingrich in February 1940 for “Three Hours Between Planes”: “Why don’t you publish it under a pseudonym — say, John Darcy? I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow, as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it, and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason. In other words it would fascinate me to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely and see if there is a response.” It is likely that the real reason was Fitzgerald’s suspicion that the Pat Hobby stories had typed him. Moreover, he wanted to accelerate publication of the stories Esquire was holding until the Hobby series was completed. Although “On an Ocean Wave” was published posthumously, it had been scheduled before Fitzgerald died and appeared in the same issue as “Fun in an Artist’s Studio.”

  “On an Ocean Wave” was not a new departure for Fitzgerald. The treatment of Scheer is uncharacteristically hard-boiled; but the style is recognizable, as in the final paragraph which might have been written for one of Fitzgerald’s Twenties stories. Published in Esquire, February 1941.

  DEARLY BELOVED

  O, my Beauty Boy — reading Plato so divine! O, dark, oh fair, colored golf champion of Chicago. Over the rails he goes at night, steward of the club car, and afterwards in the dim smoke by the one light and the smell of stale spittoons, writing west to the Rosecrucian Brotherhood. Seeking ever.

  O Beauty Boy here is your girl, not one to soar like you, but a clean swift serpent who will travel as fast on land and look toward you in the sky.

  Lilymary loved him, oft invited him and they were married in St. Jarvis’ church in North Englewood. For years they bettered themselves, running along the tread-mill of their reach, becoming only a little older and no better than before. He was loaned the Communist Manifesto by the wife of the advertising manager of a Chicago Daily but for preference give him Plato — the Phaedo and the Apologia, or else the Rosecrucian Brotherhood of Sacramento, California, which burned in his ears as the rails clicked past Alton, Springfield Burlington in the dark.

  Bronze lovers, never never canst thou have thy bronze child — or so it seemed for years. Then the clock struck, the gong rang and Dr. Edwin Bruch of South Michigan Avenue agreed to handle the whole thing for $200. They looked so nice — so delicately nice, neither of them over hurting the other and graciously expert in the avoidance. Beauty Boy took fine care of her in her pregnancy — paid his sister to watch with her while he did double work on the road and served for caterers in the city; and one day the bronze baby was born.

  O Beauty Boy, Lilymary said, here is your beauty boy. She lay in a four bed ward in the hospital with the wives of a prize fighter, an undertaker and a doctor. Beauty Boy’s face was so twisted with radiance; his teeth shining so in his smil
e and his eyes so kind that it seemed that nothing and nothing could ever.

  Beauty Boy sad beside her bed when she slept and read Thoreau’s Walden for the third time. Then the nurse told him he must leave. He went on the road that night and in Alton going to mail her a letter for a passenger he slipped under the moving train and his leg was off above the knee.

  Beauty Boy lay in the hospital and a year passed. Lilymary went back to work again cooking. Things were tough, there was even trouble about his workman’s compensation, but he found lines in his books that helped them along for awhile when all the human beings seemed away.

  The little baby flourished but he was not beautiful like his parents; not as they had expected in those golden dreams. They had only spare-time love to give the child so the sister more and more and more took care of him. For they wanted to get back where they were, they wanted Beauty Boy’s leg to grow again so it would all be like it was before. So that he could find delight in his books again and Lilymary could find delight in hoping for a little baby.

  Some years passed. They were so far back on the treadmill that they would never catch up. Beauty Boy was a night-watchman now but he had six operations on his stump and each new artificial limb gave him constant pain. Lilymary worked fairly steadily as a cook. Now they had become just ordinary people. Even the sister had long since forgotten that Beauty Boy was formerly colored golf champion of Chicago. Once in cleaning the closet she threw out all his books — the Apologia and the Phaedo of Plate, and the Thoreau and the Emerson and all the leaflets and correspondence with the Roosecrucian Brotherhood. He didn’t find out for a long time that they were gone. And then he just stared at the place where they had been and said “Say, man … say man.”

  For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same. It seemed wrong for them still to call each other Beauty Boy and Lilymary long after the delight was over.

  Some years later they both died in an influenza epidemic and went to heaven. They thought it was going to be all right then — indeed things began to happen in exactly the way that they had been told as children. Beauty Boy’s leg grew again and he became golf champion of all heaven, both white and black, and drove the ball powerfully from cloud to cloud through the blue fairway. Lilymary’s breasts became young and firm, she was respected among the other angels, and her pride n Beauty Boy became as it had been before.

  In the evening they sat and tried to remember what it was they missed. It was not this Hobbs, for here everyone knew all those things by heart, and it was not the little boy for he had never really been on e of them. They couldn’t remember so after a puzzled time they would give up trying, and talk about how nice the other one was, of how fine a score Beauty Boy would make tomorrow.

  So things go.

  PAT AT THE FAIR REUNION AT THE FAIR

  Once when Pat Hobby was a boy a maiden aunt took him to the circus. The only fly in the ointment was that she wouldn’t give him a dime to see the bearded lady in the side show — which was Pats’ heart’s desire.

  And now forty years later a somewhat parallel situation obtained with Mr. Pat Hobby at the Golden Gate World’s Fair. The lady of his desire was not bearded — no, no such incarnation would have been approved among Mr. Rosis Aquabelles — but the part of the maiden aunt was almost literally played by George Poupolous, motion picture producer.

  The heel of the girls shoe come off without warning and she grabbed at the rolling chair for support. The attendant svayed her arm and sat her down beside Pat Hobby, a visitor from Hollywood!

  “Could you drop me at the Aquacade?” she groaned.

  Pat looked nervously at the door through which Mr. Poupolous had disappeared a minute before. Over was a sign which read “The Birth of Twins in Technicolor. The Golden Gates most Scientific Exhibit.”

  Pat had no way of estimating how long the birth of twins took. He thought of her. Popolous who stood handsomely between him and starvation — then he looked at the girl.

  “Aquacade,” he said to her attendant.

  “I work there,” said the girl.

  Pat introduced himself.

  “I’m a writer — from Hollywood.”

  “I swim at the Aquacade.”

  They eyed each other sparring for advantage. She was nineteen. Pat was a somewhat shop-worn thirty mul.

  Moreover the recent words of Mr. Poupolous — “George” to his face but referred to otherwose in his absense — rang in Pat’s ear.

  “I want you should stay with me. Always when a producer takes a writer on a trip the writer is to stay with him. Suppose I have an idea — like now, a picture about a World’s Fair? Who would it be to write down the idea and remember it?”

  Pat spoke urgently to the attendant.

  “Push hard,” he said to the attendant. “I got to be back in ten minutes.”

  The girl was straw-haired and appealing.

  “Did you see the birth of twins,” he asked, and when she looked at him scalthingly he hurriedly added, “I just wondered how long it takes.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. I spend all the time I can get off in the Art Exposition.”

  He looked at her again.

  “I’m here with a producer,” he said, “He’s always looking for talent.”

  Perhaps the Aquabelle had heard this one before because she did not answer — in fact made no further remark untill he had deposited her at the steps of the water carnival. Then she relaxed.

  “Come and see us,” she said.

  He looked at the Aquabelle longingly and hopelessly. Mr. Poupolous had seen the Aquacade in New York.

  “Home, James,” he said.

  On the way back he found himself reminded of a bearded lady. Not that Mr. Rose’s employee wore any more than the most conventional and invisible down, but once forty years ago his maiden aunt had refused him ten cents to see a bearded lady. And the present situation had a familiar ring. There was nothing he could do about it — in his present decline two weeks at two fifty were not to be despised.

  He reached the midway just as Mr. Poupolous emerged from his scientific studies.

  “Where now?” said Pat with proper joviality.

  “That was Panorananama,”said Mr. Popolous.

  Pat looking longingly at Sally Rands nude ranch.

  “Humpfrey Bogart and his wife are here today,” volunteered the man behind the rolling chair. “They had dinner at the Golden Gate Restaurant.”

  Pat and Mr. Poupolous exchanged a glance — known as George to his face and “Pupe” behind his back — took the news calmly. He pointed onto the building in front of them and said to his companion, Mr. Pat Hobby.

  “Art Expedition.”

  Mr. Poupolous had never been good at signs.

  The youth pushing the chair spoke again.

  “You do want to go to the Art Exposition? Humpfrey Bogart and his — — “

  “Stop!” cried Mr. Poupolous. “There’s Bruce Ligorna.”

  Pat’s scelerotic heart was thrilled. After long neglect — broken by an occasional week at two fifty — he was in the swim again. Everybody was here — that was indeed Legorna, the director sitting alone on the steps of the Fine Art Building.

  “He looks sick,” said Mr. Poupolous as they approached. “Hi there, Bruce.”

  “I’m sick,” said Bruce.

  “What’s a matter?”

  Ligorna waved his hand despondently toward the picture gallery.

  “Hung pictures,” he said, “They make me faint. I shouldn’t have gone in alone — they had to carry me out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them who you were?” demanded Pat indignantly.

  “I was unconscious.”

  “You mean the pictures made you sick?” asked Mr. Poupolous.

  “Always have,” said Bruce dismally, “I been psyked but they can’t find out why. I’m trying to get over it myself — but I should have had somebody with me.”

 
“Do moving pictures make you sick?” asked Pat.

  “No — just hung pictures.”

  Poupolous smiled suspiciously to think if he were drunk — but the fresh fine air of the Golden Gate was without a faint….

  *****

  From editor: That’s all that survived of the text — the end of the story is missing.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE RAYMOND MORTGAGE

  When I first saw John Syrel of the New York Daily News, he was standing before an open window of my house gazing out on the city. It was about six o’clock and the lights were just going on. All down 33rd Street was a long line of gayly illuminated buildings. He was not a tall man, but thanks to the erectness of his posture, and the suppleness of his movement, it would take no athlete to tell that he was of fine build. He was twenty-three years old when I first saw him, and was already a reporter on the News. He was not a handsome man; his face was clean-shaven, and his chin showed him to be of strong character. His eyes and hair were brown.

  As I entered the room he turned around slowly and addressed me in a slow, drawling tone: “I think I have the honor of speaking to Mr. Egan, chief of police.” I assented, and he went on: “My name is John Syrel and my business, — to tell you frankly, is to learn all I can about that case of the Raymond mortgage.”

  I started to speak but he silenced me with a wave of his hand. “Though I belong to the staff of the Daily News,” he continued, “I am not here as an agent of the paper,”

  “I am not here,” I interrupted coldly, “to tell every newspaper reporter or adventurer about private affairs. James, show this man out.”

  Syrel turned without a word and I heard his steps echo up the driveway.

  However, this was not destined to be the last time I ever saw Syrel, as events will show.