Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (362 page)

“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.”

“Maybe you didn’t want it.”

“I thought I did when I was young.”

The mare neighed peremptorily and Bess backed out of the car.

“So that’s the story, Lew Lowrie, of the last Gunther girl. You always did have a sort of yen for us, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I! If I could possibly stay in Baltimore, I’d insist on coming to your wedding.”

At the lost expression on her face, he wondered to whom she was handing herself, a very precious self. He knew more about people now, and he felt the steel beneath the softness in her, the girders showing through the gentle curves of cheek and chin. She was an exquisite person, and he hoped that her husband would be a good man.

When she had ridden off into a green lane, he drove tentatively toward Baltimore. This was the end of a human experience and it released old images that regrouped themselves about him--if he had married one of the sisters; supposing--The past, slipping away under the wheels of his car, crunched awake his acuteness.

“Perhaps I was always an intruder in that family. . . . But why on earth was that girl riding in bedroom slippers?”

At the crossroads store he stopped to get cigarettes. A young clerk searched the case with country slowness.

“Big wedding up at the Gunther place,” Lew remarked.

“Hah? Miss Bess getting married?”

“Next week. The wedding party’s there now.”

“Well, I’ll be dog! Wonder what they’re going to sleep on, since Mark H. Bourne took the furniture away?”

“What’s that? What?”

“Month ago Mark H. Bourne took all the furniture and everything else while Miss Bess was out riding--they mortgaged on it just before Gunther died. They say around here she ain’t got a stitch except them riding clothes. Mark H. Bourne was good and sore. His claim was they sold off all the best pieces of furniture without his knowing it. . . . Now, that’s ten cents I owe you.”

“What do she and her aunt live on?”

“Never heard about an aunt--I only been here a year. She works the truck garden herself; all she buys from us is sugar, salt and coffee.”

Anything was possible these times, yet Lew wondered what incredibly fantastic pride had inspired her to tell that lie.

He turned his car around and drove back to the Gunther place. It was a desperately forlorn house he came to, and a jungled garden; one side of the veranda had slipped from the brick pillars and sloped to the ground; a shingle job, begun and abandoned, rotted paintless on the roof, a broken pane gaped from the library window.

Lew went in without knocking. A voice challenged him from the dining room and he walked toward it, his feet loud on the rugless floor, through rooms empty of stick and book, empty of all save casual dust. Bess Gunther, wearing the cheapest of house dresses, rose from the packing box on which she sat, with fright in her eyes; a tin spoon rattled on the box she was using as a table.

“Have you been kidding me?” he demanded. “Are you actually living like this?”

“It’s you.” She smiled in relief; then, with visible effort, she spurred herself into amenities:

“Take a box, Mr. Lowrie. Have a canned-goods box--they’re superior; the grain is better. And welcome to the open spaces. Have a cigar, a glass of champagne, have some rabbit stew and meet my fiancé.”

“Stop that.”

“All right,” she agreed.

“Why didn’t you go and live with some relatives?”

“Haven’t got any relatives. Jean’s in China.”

“What are you doing? What do you expect to happen?”

“I was waiting for you, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always seemed to turn up. I thought if you turned up, I’d make a play for you. But when it came to the point, I thought I’d better lie. I seem to lack the S.A. my sisters had.”

Lew pulled her up from the box and held her with his fingers by her waist.

“Not to me.”

In the hour since Lew had met her on the road the vitality seemed to have gone out of her; she looked up at him very tired.

“So you liked the Gunthers,” she whispered. “You liked us all.”

Lew tried to think, but his heart beat so quick that he could only sit her back on the box and pace along the empty walls.

“We’ll get married,” he said. “I don’t know whether I love you--I don’t even know you--I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick.” Suddenly he went down on both knees in front of her so that she would not seem so unbearably small and helpless. “Miss Bess Gunther, so it was you I was meant to love all the while.”

“Don’t be so anxious about it,” she laughed. “I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do; I never got the trick of it.” She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. “So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.”