Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (404 page)

Stella McComas was the daughter of a small hay and grain dealer of upper New York. Her father was unlucky and always on the verge of failure, so she grew up in the shadow of worry. Later, while Henry McComas got his start in New York, she earned her living by teaching physical culture in the public schools of Utica. In consequence she brought to her marriage a belief in certain stringent rules for the care of the body and an exaggerated fear of adversity.

For the first years she was so impressed with her husband’s rapid rise and so absorbed in her babies that she accepted Henry as something infallible and protective, outside the scope of her provincial wisdom. But as her little girl grew into short dresses and hair ribbons, and her little boy into the custody of an English nurse she had more time to look closely at her husband. His leisurely ways, his corpulency, his sometimes maddening deliberateness, ceased to be the privileged idiosyncrasies of success, and became only facts.

For a while he paid no great attention to her little suggestions as to his diet, her occasional crankiness as to his hours, her invidious comparisons between his habits and the fancied habits of other men. Then one morning a peculiar lack of taste in his coffee precipitated the matter into the light.

“I can’t drink the stuff — it hasn’t had any taste for a week,” he complained. “And why is it brought in a cup from the kitchen? I like to put the cream and sugar in myself.”

Stella avoided an answer but later he reverted to the matter.

“About my coffee. You’ll remember — won’t you? — to tell Rose.”

Suddenly she smiled at him innocently.

“Don’t you feel better, Henry?” she asked eagerly.

“What?”

“Less tired, less worried?”

“Who said I was tired and worried? I never felt better in my life.”

“There you are.” She looked at him triumphantly. “You laugh at my theories but this time you’ll have to admit there’s something in them. You feel better because you haven’t had sugar in your coffee for over a week.”

He looked at her incredulously.

“What have I had?”

“Saccharine.”

He got up indignantly and threw his newspaper on the table.

“I might have known it,” he broke out. “All that bringing it out from the kitchen. What the devil is saccharine?”

“It’s a substitute, for people who have a tendency to run to fat.”

For a moment he hovered on the edge of anger, then he sat down shaking with laughter.

“It’s done you good,” she said reproachfully.

“Well, it won’t do me good any more,” he said grimly. “I’m thirty-four years old and I haven’t been sick a day in ten years. I’ve forgotten more about my constitution than you’ll ever know.”

“You don’t live a healthy life, Henry. It’s after forty that things begin to tell.”

“Saccharine!” he exclaimed, again breaking into laughter. “Saccharine! I thought perhaps it was something to keep me from drink. You know they have these — “

Suddenly she grew angry.

“Well why not? You ought to be ashamed to be so fat at your age. You wouldn’t be if you took a little exercise and didn’t lie around in bed all morning.”

Words utterly failed her,

“If I wanted to be a farmer,” said her husband quietly, “I wouldn’t have left home. This saccharine business is over today — do you see?”

Their financial situation rapidly improved. By the second year of the war they were keeping a limousine and chauffeur and began to talk vaguely of a nice summer house on Long Island Sound. Month by month a swelling stream of materials flowed through the ledgers of Drinkwater and McComas to be dumped on the insatiable bonfire across the ocean. Their staff of clerks tripled and the atmosphere of the office was so charged with energy and achievement that Stella herself often liked to wander in on some pretext during the afternoon.

One day early in 1916 she called to learn that Mr. McComas was out and was on the point of leaving when she ran into Ted Drinkwater coming out of the elevator.

“Why, Stella,” he exclaimed, “I was thinking about you only this morning.”

The Drinkwaters and the McComases were close if not particularly spontaneous friends. Nothing but their husbands’ intimate association would have thrown the two women together, yet they were “Henry, Ted, Mollie, and Stella” to each other and in ten years scarcely a month had passed without their partaking in a superficially cordial family dinner. The dinner being over, each couple indulged in an unsparing post-mortem over the other without, however, any sense of disloyalty. They were used to each other — so Stella was somewhat surprised by Ted Drinkwater’s personal eagerness at meeting her this afternoon.

“I want to see you,” he said in his intent direct way. “Have you got a minute, Stella? Could you come into my office?”

“Why, yes.”

As they walked between rows of typists toward the glassed privacy of THEODORE DRINKWATER, PRESIDENT, Stella could not help thinking that he made a more appropriate business figure than her husband. He was lean, terse, quick. His eye glanced keenly from right to left as if taking the exact measure of every clerk and stenographer in sight.

“Sit down, Stella.”

She waited, a feeling of vague apprehension stealing over her.

Drinkwater frowned.

“It’s about Henry,” he said.

“Is he sick?” she demanded quickly.

“No. Nothing like that.” He hesitated. “Stella, I’ve always thought you were a woman with a lot of common sense.”

She waited.

“This is a thing that’s been on my mind for over a year,” he continued. “He and I have battled it out so often that — that a certain coldness has grown up between us.”

“Yes?” Stella’s eyes blinked nervously.

“It’s about the business,” said Drinkwater abruptly. “A coldness with a business partner is a mighty unpleasant thing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The old story, Stella. These are big years for us and he thinks business is going to wait while he carries on in the old country-store way. Down at eleven, hour and a half for lunch, won’t be nice to a man he doesn’t like for love or money. In the last six months he’s lost us about three sizable orders by things like that.”

Instinctively she sprang to her husband’s defense.

“But hasn’t he saved money too by going slow? On that thing about the copper, you wanted to sign right away and Henry — “

“Oh, that — “ He waved it aside a little hurriedly. “I’m the last man to deny that Henry has a wonderful instinct in certain ways — “

“But it was a great big thing,” she interrupted, “It would have practically ruined you if he hadn’t put his foot down. He said — “

She pulled herself up short.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Drinkwater with an expression of annoyance, “perhaps not so bad as that. Anyway, we all make mistakes and that’s aside from the question. We have the opportunity right now of jumping into Class A. I mean it. Another two years of this kind of business and we can each put away our first million dollars. And, Stella, whatever happens, I am determined to put away mine. Even — “ He considered his words for a moment. “Even if it comes to breaking with Henry.”

“Oh!” Stella exclaimed. “I hope — “

“I hope not too. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Can’t you do something, Stella? You’re about the only person he’ll listen to. He’s so darn pig-headed he can’t understand how he disorganizes the office. Get him up in the morning. No man ought to lie in bed till eleven.”

“He gets up at half past nine.”

“He’s down here at eleven. That’s what counts. Stir him up. Tell him you want more money. Orders are more money and there are lots of orders around for anyone who goes after them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said anxiously. “But I don’t know — Henry’s difficult — very set in his ways.”

“You’ll think of something. You might — “ He smiled grimly. “You might give him a few more bills to pay. Sometimes I think an extravagant wife’s the best inspiration a man can have. We need more pep down here. I’ve got to be the pep for two. I mean it, Stella, I can’t carry this thing alone.”

Stella left the office with her mind in a panic. All the fears and uncertainties of her childhood had been brought suddenly to the surface. She saw Henry cast off by Ted Drinkwater and trying unsuccessfully to run a business of his own. With his easy-going ways! They would slide down hill, giving up the servants one by one, the car, the house. Before she reached home her imagination had envisaged poverty, her children at work — starvation. Hadn’t Ted Drinkwater just told her that he himself was the life of the concern — that he kept things moving? What would Henry do alone?

For a week she brooded over the matter, guarding her secret but looking with a mixture of annoyance and compassion at Henry over the dinner table. Then she mustered up her resolution. She went to a real estate agent and handed over her entire bank account of nine thousand dollars as the first payment on a house they had fearfully coveted on Long Island. . . . That night she told Henry.

“Why, Stella, you must have gone crazy,” he cried aghast. “You must have gone crazy. Why didn’t you ask me?”

He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“I was afraid, Henry,” she answered truthfully.

He thrust his hands despairingly through his yellow hair.

“Just at this time, Stella. I’ve just taken out an insurance policy that’s more than I can really afford — we haven’t paid for the new car — we’ve had a new front put on this house — last week your sable coat. I was going to devote tonight to figuring just how close we were running on money.”

“But can’t you — can’t you take something out of the business until things get better?” she demanded in alarm.

“That’s just what I can’t do. It’s impossible. I can’t explain because you don’t understand the situation down there. You see Ted and I — can’t agree on certain things — “

Suddenly a new light dawned on her and she felt her body flinch. Supposing that by bringing about this situation she had put her husband into his partner’s hands. Yet wasn’t that what she wanted — wasn’t it necessary for the present that Henry should conform to Drinkwater’s methods?

“Sixty thousand dollars,” repeated Henry in a frightened voice that made her want to cry. “I don’t know where I am going to get enough to buy it on mortgage.” He sank into a chair. “I might go and see the people you dealt with tomorrow and make a compromise — let some of your nine thousand go.”

“I don’t think they would,” she said, her face set. “They were awfully anxious to sell — the owner’s going away.”

She had acted on impulse, she said, thinking that in their increasing prosperity the money would be available. He had been so generous about the new car — she supposed that now at last they could afford what they wanted.

It was typical of McComas that after the first moment of surprise he wasted no energy in reproaches. But two days later he came home from work with such a heavy and dispirited look on his face that she could not help but guess that he and Ted Drinkwater had had it out — and that what she wanted had come true. That night in shame and pity she cried herself to sleep.

A new routine was inaugurated in Henry McComas’ life. Each morning Stella woke him at eight and he lay for fifteen minutes in an unwilling trance, as if his body were surprised at this departure from the custom of a decade. He reached the office at nine-thirty as promptly as he had once reached it at eleven — on the first morning his appearance caused a flutter of astonishment among the older employees — and he limited his lunch time to a conscientious hour. No longer could he be found asleep on his office couch between two and three o’clock on summer afternoons — the couch itself vanished into that limbo which held his leisurely periods of digestion and his cherished surfeit of sleep. These were his concessions to Drinkwater in exchange for the withdrawal of sufficient money to cover his immediate needs.

Drinkwater of course could have bought him out, but for various reasons the senior partner did not consider this advisable. One of them, though he didn’t admit it to himself, was his absolute reliance on McComas in all matters of initiative and decision. Another reason was the tumultuous condition of the market, for as 1916 boomed on with the tragic battle of the Somme the allied agents sailed once more to the city of plenty for the wherewithal of another year. Coincidently Drinkwater and McComas moved into a suite that was like a floor in a country club and there they sat all day while anxious and gesticulating strangers explained what they must have, helplessly pledging their peoples to thirty years of economic depression. Drinkwater and McComas farmed out a dozen contracts a week and started the movement of countless tons toward Europe. Their names were known up and down the Street now — they had forgotten what it was to be kept waiting on a telephone.

But though profits increased and Stella, settled in the Long Island house, seemed for the first time in years perfectly satisfied, Henry McComas found himself growing irritable and nervous. What he missed most was the sleep for which his body hungered and which seemed to descend upon him at its richest just as he was shocked back into the living world each morning. And in spite of all material gains he was always aware that he was walking in his own paths no longer.

Their interests broadened and Drinkwater was frequently away on trips to the industrial towns of New England or the South. In consequence the detail of the office fell upon McComas — and he took it hard. A man capable of enormous concentration, he had previously harvested his power for hours of importance. Now he was inclined to fritter it away upon things that in perspective often proved to be inessentials. Sometimes he was engaged in office routine until six, then at home working until midnight when he tumbled, worn out but often still wide-eyed, into his beleaguered bed.

The firm’s policy was to slight their smaller accounts in Cuba and the West Indies and concentrate upon the tempting business of the war, and all through the summer they were hurrying to clear the scenes for the arrival of a new purchasing commission in September. When it arrived it unexpectedly found Drinkwater in Pennsylvania, temporarily out of reach. Time was short and the orders were to be placed in bulk. After much anxious parley over the telephone McComas persuaded four members of the commission to meet him for an hour at his own house that night.