Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (396 page)

A look of sincere surprise passed over Charley’s face.

“Are you mad at me about that?” he asked in a puzzled way. “I thought you were mad because I didn’t come to your party.”

Michael did not answer.

“I supposed she’d told you about that long ago,” went on Charley. “I couldn’t help it about Marion. I was lonesome and you two had each other. Every time I went to your house you’d tell me what a wonderful girl Marion was and finally I — I began to agree with you. How could I help falling in love with her, when for a year and a half she was the only decent girl I knew?” He looked defiantly at Michael. “Well, you’ve got her, haven’t you. I didn’t take her away. I never so much as kissed her — do you have to rub it in?”

“Look here,” said Michael sharply, “just why should I lend you this money?”

“Well — “ Charley hesitated, laughed uneasily, “I don’t know any exact reason. I just thought you would.”

“Why should I?”

“No reason at all, I suppose, from your way of looking at it.”

“That’s the trouble. If I gave it to you it would just be because I was slushy and soft. I’d be doing something that I don’t want to do.”

“All right,” Charley smiled unpleasantly, “that’s logical. Now that I think, there’s no reason why you should lend it to me. Well — “ he shoved his hands into his coat pocket and throwing his head back slightly seemed to shake the subject off like a cap, “I won’t go to prison — and maybe you’ll feel differently about it to-morrow.”

“Don’t count on that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I’ll ask you again. I mean something — quite different.”

He nodded his head, turned quickly and walking down the gravel path was swallowed up in the darkness. Where the path met the road Michael heard his footsteps cease as if he were hesitating. Then they turned down the road toward the station a mile away.

Michael sank into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He heard Marion come out the door.

“I listened,” she whispered, “I couldn’t help it. I’m glad you didn’t lend him anything.”

She came close to him and would have sat down in his lap but an almost physical repulsion came over him and he got up quickly from his chair.

“I was afraid he’d work on your sentiment and make a fool of you,” went on Marion. She hesitated. “He hated you, you know. He used to wish you’d die. I told him that if he ever said so to me again I’d never see him any more.”

Michael looked up at her darkly.

“In fact, you were very noble.”

“Why, Michael — “

“You let him say things like that to you — and then when he comes here, down and out, without a friend in the world to turn to, you say you’re glad I sent him away.”

“It’s because I love you, dear — “

“No, it isn’t!” He interrupted savagely. “It’s because hate’s cheap in this world. Everybody’s got it for sale. My God! What do you suppose I think of myself now?”

“He’s not worth feeling that way about.”

“Please go away!” cried Michael passionately. “I want to be alone.”

Obediently she left him and he sat down again in the darkness of the porch, a sort of terror creeping over him. Several times he made a motion to get up but each time he frowned and remained motionless. Then after another long while he jumped suddenly to his feet, cold sweat starting from his forehead. The last hour, the months just passed, were washed away and he was swept years back in time. Why, they were after Charley Hart, his old friend. Charley Hart who had come to him because he had no other place to go. Michael began to run hastily about the porch in a daze, hunting for his hat and coat.

“Why Charley!” he cried aloud.

He found his coat finally and, struggling into it, ran wildly down the steps. It seemed to him that Charley had gone out only a few minutes before.

“Charley!” he called when he reached the road, “Charley, come back here. There’s been a mistake!”

He paused, listening. There was no answer. Panting a little he began to run doggedly along the road through the hot night.

It was only half past eight o’clock but the country was very quiet and the frogs were loud in the strip of wet marsh that ran along beside the road. The sky was salted thinly with stars and after a while there would be a moon, but the road ran among dark trees and Michael could scarcely see ten feet in front of him. After a while he slowed down to a walk, glancing at the phosphorous dial of his wrist watch — the New York train was not due for an hour. There was plenty of time.

In spite of this he broke into an uneasy run and covered the mile between his house and the station in fifteen minutes. It was a little station, crouched humbly beside the shining rails in the darkness. Beside it Michael saw the lights of a single taxi waiting for the next train.

The platform was deserted and Michael opened the door and peered into the dim waiting-room. It was empty.

“That’s funny,” he muttered.

Rousing a sleepy taxi driver, he asked if there had been anyone waiting for the train. The taxi driver considered — yes, there had been a young man waiting, about twenty minutes ago. He had walked up and down for a while, smoking a cigarette, and then gone away into the darkness.

“That’s funny,” repeated Michael. He made a megaphone of his hands and facing toward the wood across the track shouted aloud.

“Charley!”

There was no answer. He tried again. Then he turned back to the driver.

“Have you any idea what direction he went?”

The man pointed vaguely down the New York road which ran along beside the railroad track.

“Down there somewhere.”

With increasing uneasiness Michael thanked him and started swiftly along the road which was white now under the risen moon. He knew now as surely as he knew anything that Charley had gone off by himself to die. He remembered the expression on his face as he had turned away and the hand tucked down close in his coat pocket as if it clutched some menacing thing.

“Charley!” he called in a terrible voice.

The dark trees gave back no sound. He walked on past a dozen fields bright as silver under the moon, pausing every few minutes to shout and then waiting tensely for an answer.

It occurred to him that it was foolish to continue in this direction — Charley was probably back by the station in the woods somewhere. Perhaps it was all imagination, perhaps even now Charley was pacing the station platform waiting for the train from the city. But some impulse beyond logic made him continue. More than that — several times he had the sense that someone was in front of him, someone who just eluded him at every turning, out of sight and earshot, yet leaving always behind him a dim, tragic aura of having passed that way. Once he thought he heard steps among the leaves on the side of the road but it was only a piece of vagrant newspaper blown by the faint hot wind.

It was a stifling night — the moon seemed to be beating hot rays down upon the sweltering earth. Michael took off his coat and threw it over his arm as he walked. A little way ahead of him now was a stone bridge over the tracks and beyond that an interminable line of telephone poles which stretched in diminishing perspective toward an endless horizon. Well, he would walk to the bridge and then give up. He would have given up before except for this sense he had that someone was walking very lightly and swiftly just ahead.

Reaching the stone bridge he sat down on a rock, his heart beating in loud exhausted thumps under his dripping shirt. Well, it was hopeless — Charley was gone, perhaps out of range of his help forever. Far away beyond the station he heard the approaching siren of the nine-thirty train.

Michael found himself wondering suddenly why he was here. He despised himself for being here. On what weak chord in his nature had Charley played in those few minutes, forcing him into this senseless, frightened run through the night? They had discussed it all and Charley had been unable to give a reason why he should be helped.

He got to his feet with the idea of retracing his steps but before turning he stood for a minute in the moonlight looking down the road. Across the track stretched the line of telephone poles and, as his eyes followed them as far as he could see, he heard again, louder now and not far away, the siren of the New York train which rose and fell with musical sharpness on the still night. Suddenly his eyes, which had been traveling down the tracks, stopped and were focused suddenly upon one spot in the line of poles, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. It was a pole just like the others and yet it was different — there was something about it that was indescribably different.

And watching it as one might concentrate on some figure in the pattern of a carpet, something curious happened in his mind and instantly he saw everything in a completely different light. Something had come to him in a whisper of the breeze, something that changed the whole complexion of the situation. It was this: He remembered having read somewhere that at some point back
in
the dark ages a man named Gerbert had all by himself summed up the whole of European civilization. It became suddenly plain to Michael that he himself had just now been in a position like that. For one minute, one spot in time, all the mercy in the world had been vested in him.

He realized all this in the space of a second with a sense of shock and instantly he understood the reason why he should have helped Charley Hart. It was because it would be intolerable to exist in a world where there was no help — where any human being could be as alone as Charley had been alone this afternoon.

Why, that was it, of course — he had been trusted with that chance. Someone had come to him who had no other place to go — and he had failed.

All this time, this moment, he had been standing utterly motionless staring at the telephone pole down the track, the one that his eye had picked out as being different from the others. The moon was so bright now that near the top he could see a white bar set crosswise on the pole and as he looked the pole and the bar seemed to have become isolated as if the other poles had shrunk back and away.

Suddenly a mile down the track he heard the click and clamor of the electric train when it left the station, and as if the sound had startled him into life he gave a short cry and set off at a swaying run down the road, in the direction of the pole with the crossed bar.

The train whistled again. Click — click — click — it was nearer now, six hundred, five hundred yards away and as it came under the bridge he was running in the bright beam of its searchlight. There was no emotion in his mind but terror — he knew only that he must reach that pole before the train, and it was fifty yards away, struck out sharp as a star against the sky.

There was no path on the other side of the tracks under the poles but the train was so close now that he dared wait no longer or he would be unable to cross at all. He darted from the road, cleared the tracks in two strides and with the sound of the engine at his heels raced along the rough earth. Twenty feet, thirty feet — as the sound of the electric train swelled to a roar in his ears he reached the pole and threw himself bodily on a man who stood there close to the tracks, carrying him heavily to the ground with the impact of his body.

There was the thunder of steel in his ear, the heavy clump of the wheels on the rails, a swift roaring of air, and the nine-thirty train had gone past.

“Charley,” he gasped incoherently, “Charley.”

A white face looked up at him in a daze. Michael rolled over on his back and lay panting. The hot night was quiet now — there was no sound but the far-away murmur of the receding train.

“Oh, God!”

Michael opened his eyes to see that Charley was sitting up, his face in his hands.

“S’all right,” gasped Michael, “s’all right, Charley. You can have the money. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Why — why, you’re one of my oldest friends.”

Charley shook his head.

“I don’t understand,” he said brokenly. “Where did you come from — how did you get here?”

“I’ve been following you. I was just behind.”

“I’ve been here for half an hour.”

“Well, it’s good you chose this pole to — to wait under. I’ve been looking at it from down by the bridge. I picked it out on account of the crossbar.”

Charley had risen unsteadily to his feet and now he walked a few steps and looked up the pole in the full moonlight.

“What did you say?” he asked after a minute, in a puzzled voice. “Did you say this pole had a crossbar?”

“Why, yes. I was looking at it a long time. That’s how — “

Charley looked up again and hesitated curiously before he spoke.

“There isn’t any crossbar,” he said.

THE UNSPEAKABLE EGG

When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.

The years bleached out Fifi’s tan and turned her a pale-pink color, but she still managed to spoil many places and plans for many hopeful men. So when at last it was announced in the best newspapers that she had concentrated on a gentleman named Van Tyne everyone was rather glad that all the sadness and longing that followed in her wake should become the responsibility of one self-sacrificing individual; not better for the individual, but for Fifi’s little world very much better indeed.

The engagement was not announced on the sporting page, nor even in the help-wanted column, because Fifi’s family belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Large Fortunes; and Mr. Van Tyne was descended from the man who accidentally founded that society, back before the Civil War. It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the
Aquitania
wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match; and so far as human events can be prophesied, Fifi was as good as married; or, as not a few young men considered, as bad as married.