Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (347 page)

“Have to have a word with that wench,” said Bopes twenty minutes later. “You arrange it for me, Rafe, that’s a good chap.”

Ralph Berry had met Miss Schwartz, and, as the opportunity for the introduction now presented itself, he rose obligingly. The opportunity was that a
chasseur
had just requested Count Borowki’s presence in the office; he managed to beat two or three young men to her side.

“The Marquis Kinkallow is so anxious to meet you. Can’t you come and join us?”

Fifi looked across the room, her fine brow wrinkling a little. Something warned her that her evening was full enough already. Lady Capps-Karr had never spoken to her; Fifi believed she was jealous of her clothes.

“Can’t you bring him over here?”

A minute later Bopes sat down beside Fifi with a shadow of fine tolerance settling on his face. This was nothing he could help; in fact, he constantly struggled against it, but it was something that happened to his expression when he met Americans. “The whole thing is too much for me,” it seemed to say. “Compare my confidence with your uncertainty, my sophistication with your naïveté, and yet the whole world has slid into your power.” Of later years he found that his tone, unless carefully guarded, held a smoldering resentment.

Fifi eyed him brightly and told him about her glamorous future.

“Next I’m going to Paris,” she said, announcing the fall of Rome, “to, maybe, study at the Sorbonne. Then, maybe, I’ll get married; you can’t tell. I’m only eighteen. I had eighteen candles on my birthday cake tonight. I wish you could have been here. . . . I’ve had marvelous offers to go on the stage, but of course a girl on the stage gets talked about so.”

“What are you doing tonight?” asked Bopes.

“Oh, lots more boys are coming in later. Stay around and join the party.”

“I thought you and I might do something. I’m going to Milan tomorrow.”

Across the room, Lady Capps-Karr was tense with displeasure at the desertion.

“After all,” she protested, “a chep’s a chep, and a chum’s a chum, but there are certain things that one simply doesn’t do. I never saw Bopes in such frightful condition.”

She stared at the dialogue across the room.

“Come along to Milan with me,” the marquis was saying. “Come to Tibet or Hindustan. We’ll see them crown the King of Ethiopia. Anyhow, let’s go for a drive right now.”

“I got too many guests here. Besides, I don’t go out to ride with people the first time I meet them. I’m supposed to be engaged. To a Hungarian count. He’d be furious and would probably challenge you to a duel.”

Mrs. Schwartz, with an apologetic expression, came across the room to Fifi.

“John’s gone,” she announced. “He’s up there again.”

Fifi gave a yelp of annoyance. “He gave me his word of honor he would not go.”

“Anyhow, he went. I looked in his room and his hat’s gone. It was that champagne at dinner.” She turned to the marquis. “John is not a vicious boy, but vurry, vurry weak.”

“I suppose I’ll have to go after him,” said Fifi resignedly.

“I hate to spoil your good time tonight, but I don’t know what else. Maybe this gentleman would go with you. You see, Fifi is the only one that can handle him. His father is dead and it really takes a man to handle a boy.”

“Quite,” said Bopes.

“Can you take me?” Fifi asked. “It’s just up in town to a café.”

He agreed with alacrity. Out in the September night, with her fragrance seeping through an ermine cape, she explained further:

“Some Russian woman’s got hold of him; she claims to be a countess, but she’s only got one silver-fox fur, that she wears with everything. My brother’s just nineteen, so whenever he’s had a couple glasses champagne he says he’s going to marry her, and mother worries.”

Bopes’ arm dropped impatiently around her shoulder as they started up the hill to the town.

Fifteen minutes later the car stopped at a point several blocks beyond the café and Fifi stepped out. The marquis’ face was now decorated by a long, irregular finger-nail scratch that ran diagonally across his cheek, traversed his nose in a few sketchy lines and finished in a sort of grand terminal of tracks upon his lower jaw.

“I don’t like to have anybody get so foolish,” Fifi explained. “You needn’t wait. We can get a taxi.”

“Wait!” cried the marquis furiously. “For a common little person like you? They tell me you’re the laughingstock of the hotel, and I quite understand why.”

Fifi hurried along the street and into the café, pausing in the door until she saw her brother. He was a reproduction of Fifi without her high warmth; at the moment he was sitting at a table with a frail exile from the Caucasus and two Serbian consumptives. Fifi waited for her temper to rise to an executive pitch; then she crossed the dance floor, conspicuous as a thundercloud in her bright black dress.

“Mamma sent me after you, John. Get your coat.”

“Oh, what’s biting her?” he demanded, with a vague eye.

“Mamma says you should come along.”

He got up unwillingly. The two Serbians rose also; the countess never moved; her eyes, sunk deep in Mongol cheek bones, never left Fifi’s face; her head crouched in the silver-fox fur which Fifi knew represented her brother’s last month’s allowance. As John Schwartz stood there swaying unsteadily the orchestra launched into
Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss.
Diving into the confusion of the table, Fifi emerged with her brother’s arm, marched him to the coat room and then out toward the taxi stand.

It was late, the evening was over, her birthday was over, and driving back to the hotel, with John slumped against her shoulder, Fifi felt a sudden depression. By virtue of her fine health she had never been a worrier, and certainly the Schwartz family had lived so long against similar backgrounds that Fifi felt no insufficiency in the Hotel des Trois Mondes as cloud and community--and yet the evening was suddenly all wrong. Didn’t evenings sometimes end on a high note and not fade out vaguely in bars? After ten o’clock every night she felt she was the only real being in a colony of ghosts, that she was surrounded by utterly intangible figures who retreated whenever she stretched out her hand.

The doorman assisted her brother to the elevator. Stepping in, Fifi saw, too late, that there were two other people inside. Before she could pull John out again, they had both brushed past her as if in fear of contamination. Fifi heard “Mercy!” from Mrs. Taylor and “How revolting!” from Miss Howard. The elevator mounted. Fifi held her breath until it stopped at her floor.

It was, perhaps, the impact of this last encounter that caused her to stand very still just inside the door of the dark apartment. Then she had the sense that someone else was there in the blackness ahead of her, and after her brother had stumbled forward and thrown himself on a sofa, she still waited.

“Mamma,” she called, but there was no answer; only a sound fainter than a rustle, like a shoe scraped along the floor.

A few minutes later, when her mother came upstairs, they called the
valet de chambre
and went through the rooms together, but there was no one. Then they stood side by side in the open door to their balcony and looked out on the lake with the bright cluster of Evian on the French shore and the white caps of snow on the mountains.

“I think we’ve been here long enough,” said Mrs. Schwartz suddenly. “I think I’ll take John back to the States this fall.”

Fifi was aghast. “But I thought John and I were going to the Sorbonne in Paris?”

“How can I trust him in Paris? And how could I leave you behind alone there?”

“But we’re used to living in Europe now. Why did I learn to talk French? Why, mamma, we don’t even know any people back home any more.”

“We can always meet people. We always have.”

“But you know it’s different; everybody is so bigoted there. A girl hasn’t the chance to meet the same sort of men, even if there were any. Everybody just watches everything you do.”

“So they do here,” said her mother. “That Mr. Weicker just stopped me in the hall; he saw you come in with John, and he talked to me about how you must keep out of the bar, you were so young. I told him you only took lemonade, but he said it didn’t matter; scenes like tonight made people leave the hotel.”

“Oh, how perfectly mean!”

“So I think we better go back home.”

The empty word rang desolately in Fifi’s ears. She put her arms around her mother’s waist, realizing that it was she and not her mother, with her mother’s clear grip on the past, who was completely lost in the universe. On the sofa her brother snored, having already entered the world of the weak, of the leaners together, and found its fetid and mercurial warmth sufficient. But Fifi kept looking at the alien sky, knowing that she could pierce it and find her own way through envy and corruption. For the first time she seriously considered marrying Borowki immediately.

“Do you want to go downstairs and say good night to the boys?” suggested her mother. “There’s lots of them still there asking where you are.”

But the Furies were after Fifi now--after her childish complacency and her innocence, even after her beauty--out to break it all down and drag it in any convenient mud. When she shook her head and walked sullenly into her bedroom, they had already taken something from her forever.

II

The following morning Mrs. Schwartz went to Mr. Weicker’s office to report the loss of two hundred dollars in American money. She had left the sum on her chiffonier upon retiring; when she awoke, it was gone. The door of the apartment had been bolted, but in the morning the bolt was found drawn, and yet neither of her children was awake. Fortunately, she had taken her jewels to bed with her in a chamois sack.

Mr. Weicker decided that the situation must be handled with care. There were not a few guests in the hotel who were in straitened circumstances and inclined to desperate remedies, but he must move slowly. In America one has money or hasn’t; in Europe the heir to a fortune may be unable to stand himself a haircut until the collapse of a fifth cousin, yet be a sure risk and not to be lightly offended. Opening the office copy of the Almanack de Gotha, Mr. Weicker found Stanislas Karl Joseph Borowki hooked firmly on to the end of a line older than the crown of St. Stephen. This morning, in riding clothes that were smart as a hussar’s uniform, he had gone riding with the utterly correct Miss Howard. On the other hand, there was no doubt as to who had been robbed, and Mr. Weicker’s indignation began to concentrate on Fifi and her family, who might have saved him this trouble by taking themselves off some time ago. It was even conceivable that the dissipated son, John, had nipped the money.

In all events, the Schwartzes were going home. For three years they had lived in hotels--in Paris, Florence, St. Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz. Everywhere there had been schools--always new schools--and both children spoke in perfect French and scrawny fragments of Italian. Fifi had grown from a large-featured child of fourteen to a beauty; John had grown into something rather dismal and lost. Both of them played bridge, and somewhere Fifi had picked up tap dancing. Mrs. Schwartz felt that it was all somehow unsatisfactory, but she did not know why. So, two days after Fifi’s party, she announced that they would pack their trunks, go to Paris for some new fall clothes and then go home.

That same afternoon Fifi came to the bar to get her phonograph, left there the night of her party. She sat up on a high stool and talked to the barman while she drank a ginger ale.

“Mother wants to take me back to America, but I’m not going.”

“What will you do?”

“Oh, I’ve got a little money of my own, and then I may get married.” She sipped her ginger ale moodily.

“I hear you had some money stolen,” he remarked. “How did it happen?”

“Well, Count Borowki thinks the man got into the apartment early and hid in between the two doors between us and the next apartment. Then, when we were asleep, he took the money and walked out.”

“Ha!”

Fifi sighed. “Well, you probably won’t see me in the bar any more.”

“We’ll miss you, Miss Schwartz.”

Mr. Weicker put his head in the door, withdrew it and then came in slowly.

“Hello,” said Fifi coldly.

“A-ha, young lady.” He waggled his finger at her with affected facetiousness. “Didn’t you know I spoke to your mother about your coming in to the bar? It’s merely for your own good.”

“I’m just having a ginger ale,” she said indignantly.

“But no one can tell what you’re having. It might be whisky or what not. It is the other guests who complain.”

She stared at him indignantly--the picture was so different from her own--of Fifi as the lively center of the hotel, of Fifi in clothes that ravished the eye, standing splendid and unattainable amid groups of adoring men. Suddenly Mr. Weicker’s obsequious, but hostile, face infuriated her.

“We’re getting out of this hotel!” she flared up. “I never saw such a narrow-minded bunch of people in my life; always criticizing everybody and making up terrible things about them, no matter what they do themselves. I think it would be a good thing if the hotel caught fire and burned down with all the nasty cats in it.”

Banging down her glass, she seized the phonograph case and stalked out of the bar.

In the lobby a porter sprang to help her, but she shook her head and hurried on through the salon, where she came upon Count Borowki.

“Oh, I’m so furious!” she cried. “I never saw so many old cats! I just told Mr. Weicker what I thought of them!”

“Did someone dare to speak rudely to you?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’re going away.”

“Going away!” He started. “When?”

“Right away. I don’t want to, but mamma says we’ve got to.”

“I must talk to you seriously about this,” he said. “I just called your room. I have brought you a little engagement present.”

Her spirits returned as she took the handsome gold-and-ivory cigarette case engraved with her initials.

“How lovely!”

“Now, listen; what you tell me makes it more important that I talk to you immediately. I have just received another letter from my mother. They have chosen a girl for me in Budapest--a lovely girl, rich and beautiful and of my own rank who would be very happy at the match, but I am in love with you. I would never have thought it possible, but I have lost my heart to an American.”