Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (369 page)

‘No.’

‘Can I do anything for you before I go?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Meeting those kids in the bar. Can I do anything for you?’

‘No.’

‘Darling, I hate to leave you like this.’

‘Don’t be silly. I just want to sleep.’

That solicitous frown--when she knew he was crazy to be out and away from the close cabin. She was glad when the door closed. The thing to do was to sleep, sleep.

Up--down--sideways. Hey there, not so far! Pull her round the corner there! Now roll her, right--left--Crea-eak! Wrench! Swoop!

Some hours later Eva was dimly conscious of Adrian bending over her. She wanted him to put his arms around her and draw her up out of this dizzy lethargy, but by the time she was fully awake the cabin was empty. He had looked in and gone. When she awoke next the cabin was dark and he was in bed.

The morning was fresh and cool, and the sea was just enough calmer to make Eva think she could get up. They breakfasted in the cabin and with Adrian’s help she accomplished an unsatisfactory makeshift toilet and they went up on the boat deck. The tennis tournament had already begun and was furnishing action for a dozen amateur movie cameras, but the majority of passengers were represented by lifeless bundles in deck chairs beside untasted trays.

Adrian and Miss D’Amido played their first match. She was deft and graceful; blatantly well. There was even more warmth behind her ivory skin than there had been the day before. The strolling first officer stopped and talked to her; half a dozen men whom she couldn’t have known three days ago called her Betsy. She was already the pretty girl of the voyage, the cynosure of starved ship’s eyes.

But after a while Eva preferred to watch the gulls in the wireless masts and the slow slide of the roll-top sky. Most of the passengers looked silly with their movie cameras that they had all rushed to get and now didn’t know what to use for, but the sailors painting the lifeboat stanchions were quiet and beaten and sympathetic, and probably wished, as she did, that the voyage was over.

Butterworth sat down on the deck beside her chair.

‘They’re operating on one of the stewards this morning. Must be terrible in this sea.’

‘Operating? What for?’ she asked listlessly.

‘Appendicitis. They have to operate now because we’re going into worse weather. That’s why they’re having the ship’s party tonight.’

‘Oh, the poor man!’ she cried, realizing it must be her steward.

Adrian was showing off now by being very courteous and thoughtful in the game.

‘Sorry. Did you hurt yourself? . . . No, it was my fault. . . You better put on your coat right away, pardner, or you’ll catch cold.’

The match was over and they had won. Flushed and hearty, he came up to Eva’s chair.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Winners are buying a drink in the bar,’ he said apologetically.

‘I’m coming, too,’ Eva said, but an immediate dizziness made her sink back in her chair.

‘You’d better stay here. I’ll send you up something.’

She felt that his public manner had hardened towards her slightly.

‘You’ll come back?’

‘Oh, right away.’

She was alone on the boat deck, save for a solitary ship’s officer who slanted obliquely as he paced the bridge. When the cocktail arrived she forced herself to drink it, and felt better. Trying to distract her mind with pleasant things, she reached back to the sanguine talks that she and Adrian had had before sailing: There was the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French--that was all she could think of now--the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French--so she repeated the words over and over to herself until they became as meaningless as the wide white sky. The why of their being here had suddenly eluded her; she felt unmotivated, accidental, and she wanted Adrian to come back quick, all responsive and tender, to reassure her. It was in the hope that there was some secret of graceful living, some real compensation for the lost, careless confidence of twenty-one, that they were going to spend a year in France.

The day passed darkly, with fewer people around and a wet sky falling. Suddenly it was five o’clock, and they were all in the bar again, and Mr Butterworth was telling her about his past. She took a good deal of champagne, but she was seasick dimly through it, as if the illness was her soul trying to struggle up through some thickening incrustation of abnormal life.

‘You’re my idea of a Greek goddess, physically,’ Butterworth was saying.

It was pleasant to be Mr Butterworth’s idea of a Greek goddess physically, but where was Adrian? He and Miss D’Amido had gone out on a forward deck to feel the spray. Eva heard herself promising to get out her colours and paint the Eiffel Tower on Butterworth’s shirt front for the party tonight.

When Adrian and Betsy D’Amido, soaked with spray, opened the door with difficulty against the driving wind and came into the now-covered security of the promenade deck, they stopped and turned toward each other.

‘Well?’ she said. But he only stood with his back to the rail, looking at her, afraid to speak. She was silent, too, because she wanted him to be first; so for a moment nothing happened. Then she made a step towards him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her forehead.

‘You’re just sorry for me, that’s all.’ She began to cry a little. ‘You’re just being kind.’

‘I feel terribly about it.’ His voice was taut and trembling.

‘Then kiss me.’

The deck was empty. He bent over her swiftly.

‘No, really kiss me.’

He could not remember when anything had felt so young and fresh as her lips. The rain lay, like tears shed for him, upon the softly shining porcelain cheeks. She was all new and immaculate, and her eyes were wild.

‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t help loving you, can I? When I first saw you--oh, not on the boat, but over a year ago--Grace Heally took me to a rehearsal and suddenly you jumped up in the second row and began telling them what to do. I wrote you a letter and tore it up.’

‘We’ve got to go.’

She was weeping as they walked along the deck. Once more, imprudently, she held up her face to him at the door of her cabin. His blood was beating through him in wild tumult as he walked on to the bar.

He was thankful that Eva scarcely seemed to notice him or to know that he had been gone. After a moment he pretended an interest in what she was doing.

‘What’s that?’

‘She’s painting the Eiffel Tower on my shirt front for tonight,’ explained Butterworth.

‘There,’ Eva laid away her brush and wiped her hands.

‘How’s that?’

‘A
chef-d’oeuvre.’

Her eyes swept around the watching group, lingered casually upon Adrian.

‘You’re wet. Go and change.’

‘You come too.’

‘I want another champagne cocktail.’

‘You’ve had enough. It’s time to dress for the party.’

Unwilling she closed her paints and preceded him.

‘Stacomb’s got a table for nine,’ he remarked as they walked along the corridor.

‘The younger set,’ she said with unnecessary bitterness. ‘Oh, the younger set. And you just having the time of your life--with a child.’

They had a long discussion in the cabin, unpleasant on her part and evasive on his, which ended when the ship gave a sudden gigantic heave, and Eva, the edge worn off her champagne, felt ill again. There was nothing to do but to have a cocktail in the cabin, and after that they decided to go to the party--she believed him now, or she didn’t care.

Adrian was ready first--he never wore fancy dress.

‘I’ll go on up. Don’t be long.’

‘Wait for me, please; it’s rocking so.’

He sat down on a bed, concealing his impatience.

‘You don’t mind waiting, do you? I don’t want to parade up there all alone.’

She was taking a tuck in an oriental costume rented from the barber.

‘Ships make people feel crazy,’ she said. ‘I think they’re awful.’

‘Yes,’ he muttered absently.

‘When it gets very bad I pretend I’m in the top of a tree, rocking to and fro. But finally I get pretending everything, and finally I have to pretend I’m sane when I know I’m not.’

‘If you get thinking that way you will go crazy.’

‘Look, Adrian.’ She held up the string of pearls before clasping them on. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’

In Adrian’s impatience she seemed to move around the cabin like a figure in a slow-motion picture. After a moment he demanded:

‘Are you going to be long? It’s stifling in here.’

‘You go on!’ she fired up.

‘I don’t want--’

‘Go on, please! You just make me nervous trying to hurry me.’

With a show of reluctance he left her. After a moment’s hesitation he went down a flight to a deck below and knocked at a door.

‘Betsy.’

‘Just a minute.’

She came out in the corridor attired in a red pea-jacket and trousers borrowed from the elevator boy.

‘Do elevator boys have fleas?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got everything in the world on under this as a precaution.’

‘I had to see you,’ he said quickly.

‘Careful,’ she whispered. ‘Mrs Worden, who’s supposed to be chaperoning me, is across the way. She’s sick.’

‘I’m sick for you.’

They kissed suddenly, clung close together in the narrow corridor, swaying to and fro with the motion of the ship.

‘Don’t go away,’ she murmured.

‘I’ve got to. I’ve--’

Her youth seemed to flow into him, bearing him up into a delicate romantic ecstasy that transcended passion. He couldn’t relinquish it; he had discovered something that he had thought was lost with his own youth forever. As he walked along the passage he knew that he had stopped thinking, no longer dared to think.

He met Eva going into the bar.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked with a strained smile.

‘To see about the table.’

She was lovely; her cool distinction conquered the trite costume and filled him with a resurgence of approval and pride. They sat down at a table.

The gale was rising hour by hour and the mere traversing of a passage had become a rough matter. In every stateroom trunks were lashed to the washstands, and the
Vestris
disaster was being reviewed in detail by nervous ladies, tossing, ill and wretched, upon their beds. In the smoking-room a stout gentleman had been hurled backward and suffered a badly cut head; and now the lighter chairs and tables were stacked and roped against the wall.

The crowd who had donned fancy dress and were dining together had swollen to about sixteen. The only remaining qualification for membership was the ability to reach the smoking-room. They ranged from a Groton-Harvard lawyer to an ungrammatical broker they had nicknamed Gyp the Blood, but distinctions had disappeared; for the moment they were samurai, chosen from several hundred for their triumphant resistance to the storm.

The gala dinner, overhung sardonically with lanterns and streamers, was interrupted by great communal slides across the room, precipitate retirements and spilled wine, while the ship roared and complained that under the panoply of a palace it was a ship after all. Upstairs afterward a dozen couples tried to dance, shuffling and galloping here and there in a crazy fandango, thrust around fantastically by a will alien to their own. In view of the condition of tortured hundreds below, there grew to be something indecent about it like a revel in a house of mourning, and presently there was an egress of the ever-dwindling survivors towards the bar.

As the evening passed, Eva’s feeling of unreality increased. Adrian had disappeared--presumably with Miss D’Amido--and her mind, distorted by illness and champagne, began to enlarge upon the fact; annoyance changed slowly to dark and brooding anger, grief to desperation. She had never tried to bind Adrian, never needed to--for they were serious people, with all sorts of mutual interests, and satisfied with each other--but this was a breach of the contract, this was cruel. How could he think that she didn’t know?

It seemed several hours later that he leaned over her chair in the bar where she was giving some woman an impassioned lecture upon babies, and said:

‘Eva, we’d better turn in.’

Her lip curled. ‘So that you can leave me there and then come back to your eighteen-year--’

‘Be quiet.’

‘I won’t come to bed.’

‘Very well. Good night.’

More time passed and the people at the table changed. The stewards wanted to close up the room, and thinking of Adrian--her Adrian--off somewhere saying tender things to someone fresh and lovely, Eva began to cry.

‘But he’s gone to bed,’ her last attendants assured her. ‘We saw him go.’

She shook her head. She knew better. Adrian was lost. The long seven-year dream was broken. Probably she was punished for something she had done; as this thought occurred to her the shrieking timbers overhead began to mutter that she had guessed at last. This was for the selfishness to her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to marry Adrian; for all the sins and omissions of her life. She stood up, saying she must go out and get some air.

The deck was dark and drenched with wind and rain. The ship pounded through valleys, fleeing from black mountains of water that roared towards it. Looking out at the night, Eva saw that there was no chance for them unless she could make atonement, propitiate the storm. It was Adrian’s love that was demanded of her. Deliberately she unclasped her pearl necklace, lifted it to her lips--for she knew that with it went the freshest, fairest part of her life--and flung it out into the gale.

III

When Adrian awoke it was lunchtime, but he knew that some heavier sound than the bugle had called him up from his deep sleep. Then he realized that the trunk had broken loose from its lashings and was being thrown back and forth between a wardrobe and Eva’s bed. With an exclamation he jumped up, but she was unharmed--still in costume and stretched out in deep sleep. When the steward had helped him secure the trunk, Eva opened a single eye.

‘How are you?’ he demanded, sitting on the side of her bed.