Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (136 page)

“All right. All right. All right.”

“All right, I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I? Then you come up and asked me to put some more in the horn!”

“You asked me to sit down, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“I asked you to sit down but I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I?”

“All right. All right.”

The Negro got up sourly and went away, leaving Dick in a still more evil humor. But he saw a girl smiling at him from across the room and immediately the pale Roman shapes around him receded into decent, humble perspective. She was a young English girl, with blonde hair and a healthy, pretty English face and she smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it.

“There’s a quick trick or else I don’t know bridge,” said Collis.

Dick got up and walked to her across the room.

“Won’t you dance?”

The middle-aged Englishman with whom she was sitting said, almost apologetically: “I’m going out soon.”

Sobered by excitement Dick danced. He found in the girl a suggestion of all the pleasant English things; the story of safe gardens ringed around by the sea was implicit in her bright voice and as he leaned back to look at her, he meant what he said to her so sincerely that his voice trembled. When her current escort should leave, she promised to come and sit with them. The Englishman accepted her return with repeated apologies and smiles.

Back at his table Dick ordered another bottle of spumante.

“She looks like somebody in the movies,” he said. “I can’t think who.” He glanced impatiently over his shoulder. “Wonder what’s keeping her?”

“I’d like to get in the movies,” said Collis thoughtfully. “I’m supposed to go into my father’s business but it doesn’t appeal to me much. Sit in an office in Birmingham for twenty years--”

His voice resisted the pressure of materialistic civilization.

“Too good for it?” suggested Dick.

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“How do you know what I mean? Why don’t you practise as a doctor, if you like to work so much?”

Dick had made them both wretched by this time, but simultaneously they had become vague with drink and in a moment they forgot; Collis left, and they shook hands warmly.

“Think it over,” said Dick sagely.

“Think what over?”

“You know.” It had been something about Collis going into his father’s business--good sound advice.

Clay walked off into space. Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped--and she had disappeared.

“Have you seen her?”

“Seen who?”

“The girl I was dancing with. Su’nly disappeared. Must be in the building.”

“No! No! That’s the ladies’ room.”

He stood up by the bar. There were two other men there, but he could think of no way of starting a conversation. He could have told them all about Rome and the violent origins of the Colonna and Gaetani families but he realized that as a beginning that would be somewhat abrupt. A row of Yenci dolls on the cigar counter fell suddenly to the floor; there was a subsequent confusion and he had a sense of having been the cause of it, so he went back to the cabaret and drank a cup of black coffee. Collis was gone and the English girl was gone and there seemed nothing to do but go back to the hotel and lie down with his black heart. He paid his check and got his hat and coat.

There was dirty water in the gutters and between the rough cobblestones; a marshy vapor from the Campagna, a sweat of exhausted cultures tainted the morning air. A quartet of taxi-drivers, their little eyes bobbing in dark pouches, surrounded him. One who leaned insistently in his face he pushed harshly away.

“Quanto a Hotel Quirinal?”

“Cento lire.”

Six dollars. He shook his head and offered thirty lire which was twice the day-time fare, but they shrugged their shoulders as one pair, and moved off.

“Trente-cinque lire e mancie,” he said firmly.

“Cento lire.”

He broke into English.

“To go half a mile? You’ll take me for forty lire.”

“Oh, no.”

He was very tired. He pulled open the door of a cab and got in.

“Hotel Quirinal!” he said to the driver who stood obstinately outside the window. “Wipe that sneer off your face and take me to the Quirinal.”

“Ah, no.”

Dick got out. By the door of the Bonbonieri some one was arguing with the taxi-drivers, some one who now tried to explain their attitude to Dick; again one of the men pressed close, insisting and gesticulating and Dick shoved him away.

“I want to go to the Quirinal Hotel.”

“He says wan huner lire,” explained the interpreter.

“I understand. I’ll give him fif’y lire. Go on away.” This last to the insistent man who had edged up once more. The man looked at him and spat contemptuously.

The passionate impatience of the week leaped up in Dick and clothed itself like a flash in violence, the honorable, the traditional resource of his land; he stepped forward and slapped the man’s face.

They surged about him, threatening, waving their arms, trying ineffectually to close in on him--with his back against the wall Dick hit out clumsily, laughing a little and for a few minutes the mock fight, an affair of foiled rushes and padded, glancing blows, swayed back and forth in front of the door. Then Dick tripped and fell; he was hurt somewhere but he struggled up again wrestling in arms that suddenly broke apart. There was a new voice and a new argument but he leaned against the wall, panting and furious at the indignity of his position. He saw there was no sympathy for him but he was unable to believe that he was wrong.

They were going to the police station and settle it there. His hat was retrieved and handed to him, and with some one holding his arm lightly he strode around the corner with the taxi-men and entered a bare barrack where carabinieri lounged under a single dim light.

At a desk sat a captain, to whom the officious individual who had stopped the battle spoke at length in Italian, at times pointing at Dick, and letting himself be interrupted by the taxi-men who delivered short bursts of invective and denunciation. The captain began to nod impatiently. He held up his hand and the hydra-headed address, with a few parting exclamations, died away. Then he turned to Dick.

“Spick Italiano?” he asked.

“No.”

“Spick Français?”

“Oui,” said Dick, glowering.

“Alors. Écoute. Va au Quirinal. Espèce d’endormi. Écoute: vous êtes saoûl. Payez ce que le chauffeur demande. Comprenez-vous?”

Diver shook his head.

“Non, je ne veux pas.”

“Come?”

“Je paierai quarante lires. C’est bien assez.”

The captain stood up.

“Écoute!” he cried portentously. “Vous êtes saoûl. Vous avez battu le chauffeur. Comme ci, comme ça.” He struck the air excitedly with right hand and left, “C’est bon que je vous donne la liberté. Payez ce qu’il a dit--cento lire. Va au Quirinal.”

Raging with humiliation, Dick stared back at him.

“All right.” He turned blindly to the door--before him, leering and nodding, was the man who had brought him to the police station. “I’ll go home,” he shouted, “but first I’ll fix this baby.”

He walked past the staring carabinieri and up to the grinning face, hit it with a smashing left beside the jaw. The man dropped to the floor.

For a moment he stood over him in savage triumph--but even as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.

When Doctor Diver lay quite still a pail of water was sloshed over him. One of his eyes opened dimly as he was being dragged along by the wrists through a bloody haze and he made out the human and ghastly face of one of the taxi-drivers.

“Go to the Excelsior hotel,” he cried faintly. “Tell Miss Warren. Two hundred lire! Miss Warren. Due centi lire! Oh, you dirty--you God--”

Still he was dragged along through the bloody haze, choking and sobbing, over vague irregular surfaces into some small place where he was dropped upon a stone floor. The men went out, a door clanged, he was alone.

XXIII

Until one o’clock Baby Warren lay in bed, reading one of Marion Crawford’s curiously inanimate Roman stories; then she went to a window and looked down into the street. Across from the hotel two carabinieri, grotesque in swaddling capes and harlequin hats, swung voluminously from this side and that, like mains’ls coming about, and watching them she thought of the guards’ officer who had stared at her so intensely at lunch. He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall. Had he come up to her and said: “Let’s go along, you and I,” she would have answered: “Why not?”--at least it seemed so now, for she was still disembodied by an unfamiliar background.

Her thoughts drifted back slowly through the guardsman to the two carabinieri, to Dick--she got into bed and turned out the light.

A little before four she was awakened by a brusque knocking.

“Yes--what is it?”

“It’s the concierge, Madame.”

She pulled on her kimono and faced him sleepily.

“Your friend name Deever he’s in trouble. He had trouble with the police, and they have him in the jail. He sent a taxi up to tell, the driver says that he promised him two hundred lire.” He paused cautiously for this to be approved. “The driver says Mr. Deever in the bad trouble. He had a fight with the police and is terribly bad hurt.”

“I’ll be right down.”

She dressed to an accompaniment of anxious heartbeats and ten minutes later stepped out of the elevator into the dark lobby. The chauffeur who brought the message was gone; the concierge hailed another one and told him the location of the jail. As they rode, the darkness lifted and thinned outside and Baby’s nerves, scarcely awake, cringed faintly at the unstable balance between night and day. She began to race against the day; sometimes on the broad avenues she gained but whenever the thing that was pushing up paused for a moment, gusts of wind blew here and there impatiently and the slow creep of light began once more. The cab went past a loud fountain splashing in a voluminous shadow, turned into an alley so curved that the buildings were warped and strained following it, bumped and rattled over cobblestones, and stopped with a jerk where two sentry boxes were bright against a wall of green damp. Suddenly from the violet darkness of an archway came Dick’s voice, shouting and screaming.

“Are there any English? Are there any Americans? Are there any English? Are there any--oh, my God! You dirty Wops!”

His voice died away and she heard a dull sound of beating on the door. Then the voice began again.

“Are there any Americans? Are there any English?”

Following the voice she ran through the arch into a court, whirled about in momentary confusion and located the small guard-room whence the cries came. Two carabinieri started to their feet, but Baby brushed past them to the door of the cell.

“Dick!” she called. “What’s the trouble?”

“They’ve put out my eye,” he cried. “They handcuffed me and then they beat me, the goddamn--the--”

Flashing around Baby took a step toward the two carabinieri.

“What have you done to him?” she whispered so fiercely that they flinched before her gathering fury.

“Non capisco inglese.”

In French she execrated them; her wild, confident rage filled the room, enveloped them until they shrank and wriggled from the garments of blame with which she invested them. “Do something! Do something!”

“We can do nothing until we are ordered.”

“Bene.
Bay-nay! Bene!”

Once more Baby let her passion scorch around them until they sweated out apologies for their impotence, looking at each other with the sense that something had after all gone terribly wrong. Baby went to the cell door, leaned against it, almost caressing it, as if that could make Dick feel her presence and power, and cried: “I’m going to the Embassy, I’ll be back.” Throwing a last glance of infinite menace at the carabinieri she ran out.

She drove to the American Embassy where she paid off the taxi-driver upon his insistence. It was still dark when she ran up the steps and pressed the bell. She had pressed it three times before a sleepy English porter opened the door to her.

“I want to see some one,” she said. “Any one--but right away.”

“No one’s awake, Madame. We don’t open until nine o’clock.”

Impatiently she waved the hour away.

“This is important. A man--an American has been terribly beaten. He’s in an Italian jail.”

“No one’s awake now. At nine o’clock--”

“I can’t wait. They’ve put out a man’s eye--my brother-in-law, and they won’t let him out of jail. I must talk to some one--can’t you see? Are you crazy? Are you an idiot, you stand there with that look in your face?”

“Hime unable to do anything, Madame.”

“You’ve got to wake some one up!” She seized him by the shoulders and jerked him violently. “It’s a matter of life and death. If you won’t wake some one a terrible thing will happen to you--”

“Kindly don’t lay hands on me, Madame.”

From above and behind the porter floated down a weary Groton voice.

“What is it there?”

The porter answered with relief.

“It’s a lady, sir, and she has shook me.” He had stepped back to speak and Baby pushed forward into the hall. On an upper landing, just aroused from sleep and wrapped in a white embroidered Persian robe, stood a singular young man. His face was of a monstrous and unnatural pink, vivid yet dead, and over his mouth was fastened what appeared to be a gag. When he saw Baby he moved his head back into a shadow.