At the last minute the pale green evening dress from Callets, draped across a chair in her bedroom, decided her. She went.
Somewhere, during the shuffle and delay on the gangplank while the guests went aboard and were challenged and drank down their cocktails with attendant gaiety, Nicole realized that she had made a mistake. There was, at any rate, no formal receiving line and, after greeting their hosts, Nelson found her a chair on deck, where presently the faintness disappeared.
Then she was glad she had come. The boat was hung with fragile lanterns, which blended with the pastels of the bridges and the reflected stars in the dark Seine, like a child’s dream out of the Arabian Nights. A crowd of hungry-eyed spectators were gathered on the banks. Champagne moved past in platoons like a drill of bottles, while the music, instead of being loud and obtrusive, drifted down from the upper deck like frosting dripping over a cake. She became aware presently that they were not the only Americans there – across the deck were the Liddell Mileses, whom she had not seen for several years.
Other people from that crowd were present, and she felt a faint disappointment. What if this was not the marquis’ best party? She remembered her mother’s second days at home. She asked Chiki, who was at her side, to point out celebrities, but when she inquired about several people whom she associated with that set, he replied vaguely that they were away, or coming later, or could not be there. It seemed to her that she saw across the room the girl who had made the scene in the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, but she could not be sure, for with the faint almost imperceptible movement of the boat, she realized that she was growing faint again. She sent for Nelson to take her home.
‘You can come right back, of course. You needn’t wait for me, because I’m going right to bed.’
He left her in the hands of the nurse, who helped her upstairs and aided her to undress quickly.
‘I’m desperately tired,’ Nicole said. ‘Will you put my pearls away?’
‘Where?’
‘In the jewel box on the dressing-table.’
‘I don’t see it,’ said the nurse after a minute.
‘Then it’s in a drawer.’
There was a thorough rummaging of the dressing-table, without result.
‘But of course it’s there.’ Nicole attempted to rise, but fell back, exhausted. ‘Look for it, please, again. Everything is in it – all my mother’s things and my engagement things.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Kelly. There’s nothing in this room that answers to that description.’
‘Wake up the maid.’
The maid knew nothing; then, after a persistent cross-examination, she did know something. Count Sarolai’s valet had gone out, carrying his suitcase, half an hour after madame left the house.
Writhing in sharp and sudden pain, with a hastily summoned doctor at her side, it seemed to Nicole hours before Nelson came home. When he arrived, his face was deathly pale and his eyes were wild. He came directly into her room.
‘What do you think?’ he said savagely. Then he saw the doctor. ‘Why, what’s the matter?’
‘Oh, Nelson, I’m sick as a dog and my jewel box is gone, and Chiki’s valet has gone. I’ve told the police … Perhaps Chiki would know where the man –’
‘Chiki will never come in this house again,’ he said slowly. ‘Do you know whose party that was? Have you got any idea whose party that was?’ He burst into wild laughter. ‘It was our party – our party, do you understand? We gave it – we didn’t know it, but we did.’
‘Maintenant, monsieur, il ne faut pas exciter madame – the doctor began.
‘I thought it was odd when the marquis went home early, but I didn’t suspect till the end. They were just guests – Chiki invited all the people. After it was over, the caterers and musicians began to come up and ask me where to send their bills. And that damn Chiki had the nerve to tell me he thought I knew all the time. He said that all he’d promised was that it would be his brother-in-law’s sort of party, and that his sister would be there. He said perhaps I was drunk, or perhaps I didn’t understand French – as if we’d ever talked anything but English to him.’
‘Don’t pay!’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t think of paying.’
‘So I said, but they’re going to sue – the boat people and the others. They want twelve thousand dollars.’
She relaxed suddenly. ‘Oh, go away!’ she cried. ‘I don’t care! I’ve lost my jewels and I’m sick, sick!’
IV
This is the story of a trip abroad, and the geographical element must not be slighted. Having visited North Africa, Italy, the Riveria, Paris and points in between, it was not surprising that eventually the Kellys should go to Switzerland. Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
Though there was an element of choice in their other ports of call, the Kellys went to Switzerland because they had to. They had been married a little more than four years when they arrived one spring day at the lake that is the centre of Europe – a placid, smiling spot with pastoral hillsides, a backdrop of mountains and waters of postcard blue, waters that are a little sinister beneath the surface with all the misery that had dragged itself here from every corner of Europe. Weariness to recuperate and death to die. There are schools, too, and young people splashing at the sunny plages; there is Bonivard’s dungeon and Calvin’s city, and the ghosts of Byron and Shelley still sail the dim shores by night; but the Lake Geneva that Nelson and Nicole came to was the dreary one of sanatoriums and rest hotels.
For, as if by some profound sympathy that had continued to exist beneath the unlucky destiny that had pursued their affairs, health had failed them both at the same time; Nicole lay on the balcony of a hotel coming slowly back to life after two successive operations, while Nelson fought for life against jaundice in a hospital two miles away. Even after the reserve force of twenty-nine years had pulled him through, there were months ahead during which he must live quietly. Often they wondered why, of all those who sought pleasure over the face of Europe, this misfortune should have come to them.
‘There’ve been too many people in our lives,’ Nelson said. ‘We’ve never been able to resist people. We were so happy the first year when there weren’t any people.’
Nicole agreed. ‘If we could ever be alone – really alone – we could make up some kind of life for ourselves. We’ll try, won’t we, Nelson?’
But there were other days when they both wanted company desperately, concealing it from each other. Days when they eyed the obese, the wasted, the crippled and the broken of all nationalities who filled the hotel, seeking for one who might be amusing. It was a new life for them, turning on the daily visits of their two doctors, the arrival of the mail and newspapers from Paris, the little walk into the hillside village or occasionally the descent by funicular to the pale resort on the lake, with its Kursaal, its grass beach, its tennis clubs and sight-seeing buses. They read Tauchnitz editions and yellow-jacketed Edgar Wallaces; at a certain hour each day they watched the baby being given its bath; three nights a week there was a tired and patient orchestra in the lounge after dinner, that was all.
And sometimes there was a booming from the vine-covered hills on the other side of the lake, which meant that cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds, to save the vineyards from an approaching storm; it came swiftly, first falling from the heavens and then falling again in torrents from the mountains, washing loudly down the roads and stone ditches; it came with a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and crashing, world-splitting thunder, while ragged and destroyed clouds fled along before the wind past the hotel. The mountains and the lake disappeared completely; the hotel crouched alone amid tumult and chaos and darkness.
It was during such a storm, when the mere opening of a door admitted a tornado of rain and wind into the hall, that the Kellys for the first time in months saw someone they knew. Sitting downstairs with other victims of frayed nerves, they became aware of two new arrivals – a man and
woman whom they recognized as the couple, first seen in Algiers, who had crossed their path several times since. A single unexpressed thought flashed through Nelson and Nicole. It seemed like destiny that at last here in this desolate place they should know them, and watching, they saw other couples eyeing them in the same tentative way. Yet something held the Kellys back. Had they not just been complaining that there were too many people in their lives?
Later, when the storm had dozed off into a quiet rain, Nicole found herself near the girl on the glass veranda. Under cover of reading a book, she inspected the face closely. It was an inquisitive face, she saw at once, possibly calculating; the eyes, intelligent enough, but with no peace in them, swept over people in a single quick glance as though estimating their value. ‘Terrible egoist’, Nicole thought, with a certain distaste. For the rest, the cheeks were wan, and there were little pouches of ill health under the eyes; these combining with a certain flabbiness of arms and legs to give an impression of unwholesomeness. She was dressed expensively, but with a hint of slovenliness, as if she did not consider the people of the hotel important.
On the whole, Nicole decided she did not like her; she was glad that they had not spoken, but she was rather surprised that she had not noticed these things when the girl crossed her path before.
Telling Nelson her impression at dinner, he agreed with her.
‘I ran into the man in the bar, and I noticed we both took nothing but mineral water, so I started to say something. But I got a good look at his face in the mirror and I decided not to. His face is so weak and self-indulgent that it’s almost mean – the kind of face that needs half a dozen drinks really to open the eyes and stiffen the mouth up to normal.’
After dinner the rain stopped and the night was fine outside. Eager for the air, the Kellys wandered down into the dark garden; on their way they passed the subjects of their late discussion, who withdrew abruptly down a side path.
‘I don’t think they want to know us any more than we do them,’ Nicole laughed.
They loitered among the wild rose-bushes and the beds of damp-sweet, indistinguishable flowers. Below the hotel, where the terrace fell a thousand feet to the lake, stretched a necklace of lights that was Montreux and Vevey, and then, in a dim pendant, Lausanne; a blurred twinkling across the lake was Evian and France. From somewhere below – probably the Kursaal – came the sound of full-bodied dance music – American, they guessed, though now they heard American tunes months late, mere distant echoes of what was happening far away.
Over the Dent du Midi, over a black bank of clouds that was the rearguard of the receding storm, the moon lifted itself and the lake brightened; the music and the far-away lights were like hope, like the enchanted distance from which children see things. In their separate hearts Nelson and Nicole gazed backward to a time when life was all like this. Her arm went through his quietly and drew him close.
‘We can have it all again,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t we try, Nelson?’
She paused as two dark forms came into the shadows near-by and stood looking down at the lake below.
Nelson put his arm around Nicole and pulled her closer.
‘It’s just that we don’t understand what’s the matter,’ she said. ‘Why did we lose peace and love and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I’d try so hard.’
The last clouds were lifting themselves over the Bernese Alps. Suddenly, with a final intensity, the west flared with pale white lightning. Nelson and Nicole turned, and simultaneously the other couple turned, while for an instant the night was as bright as day. Then darkness and a last low peal of thunder, and from Nicole a sharp, terrified cry. She flung herself against Nelson; even in the darkness she saw that his face was as white and strained as her own.
‘Did you see?’ she cried in a whisper, ‘Did you see them?’
‘Yes!’
‘They’re us! They’re us! Don’t you see?’
Trembling, they clung together. The clouds merged into the dark mass of mountains; looking around after a moment, Nelson and Nicole saw that they were alone together in the tranquil moonlight.
The Fiend
On June 3, 1895 on a country road near Stillwater, Minnesota, Mrs Crenshaw Engels and her seven-year-old son, Mark, were waylaid and murdered by a fiend, under circumstances so atrocious that, fortunately, it is not necessary to set them down here.
Crenshaw Engels, the husband and father, was a photographer in Stillwater. He was ‘a great reader’ and considered ‘a little unsafe’, for he had spoken his mind frankly about the farmer-versus-railroad struggles of the time – but no one denied that he was a devoted family man, and the catastrophe visited upon him hung over the little town for many weeks.
There was a move to lynch the perpetrator of the horror, for Minessota did not permit the capital punishment it deserved, but the instigators were foiled by the big stone penitentiary close at hand.
The cloud hung over Engels’ home so that folks went there only in moods of penitence, of fear or guilt, hoping that they would be visited in compensation should their lives ever chance to trek under a black sky. The photography shop suffered also: the routine of being posed, the necessary silences and pauses in the process, permitted the client too much time to regard the prematurely aged face of Crenshaw Engels, and young high school students, married couples, mothers of babies were always glad to escape from the place into the open air.
So Crenshaw’s business fell off, and he went through a time of hardship – finally liquidating the lease, the apparatus and the goodwill, and wearing out the money obtained. He sold his house for a little more than its two mortgages, went to board, and took a position clerking in Radamacher’s Department Store.
In the sight of his neighbours he had become a man ruined by adversity, a man manqué, a man emptied. But in the last opinion they were wrong – he was empty of all save one thing. His memory was long as a Jew’s, and though his heart was in the grave he was sane as when his wife and son had started on their last walk that summer morning.
At the first trial he lost control and got at the Fiend, seizing him by the necktie – and had been dragged off with the tie in such a knot that the Fiend was nearly garrotted.
At the second trial he cried aloud once. Afterwards he went to all the members of the State legislature in the county and handed them a bill he had written himself for the introduction of capital punishment – the bill to be retroactive on criminals condemned to life imprisonment. The bill fell through; it was on the day Crenshaw heard this that he got inside the penitentiary by a ruse and was only apprehended in time to be prevented from shooting the Fiend in his cell.
Crenshaw was given a suspended sentence, and for some months it was assumed that the agony was fading gradually from his mind. In fact, when he presented himself to the warden a year after the crime the official was sympathetic to Crenshaw’s statement that he had had a change of heart, and felt he could only emerge from the valley of the shadow by forgiveness; that he wanted to help the Fiend, show him the True Path by means of good books and appeals to his buried better nature.
So, after being carefully searched, Crenshaw was permitted to sit for half an hour outside the Fiend’s cell.
But had the warden suspected the truth he would not have permitted the visit – for far from forgiving, Crenshaw’s plan was to wreak upon the Fiend a mental revenge to replace the physical one of which he was subducted.
When he faced the Fiend in his cell, Crenshaw felt his scalp tingle. From behind the bars a roly-poly man, who somehow made his convict’s uniform resemble a business suit, a man with thick brown-rimmed glasses and the trim air of an insurance salesman, looked at him uncertainly. Feeling faint, Crenshaw sat down in the chair that had been brought for him.
‘The air round you stinks!’ he cried suddenly. ‘This whole corridor, this whole prison.’
‘I suppose it does,’ admitted the Fiend. ‘I noticed it too.’
‘You’ll have time to notice it,’ Crenshaw snarled. ‘All your life you’ll pace up and down stinking in that little cell, with everything getting blacker and blacker. And after that there’ll be hell waiting for you. For all eternity you’ll be shut in a little space, but in hell it’ll be so small that you can’t stand up or stretch out.’
‘Will it, now?’ asked the Fiend, concerned.
‘It will!’ said Crenshaw. ‘You’ll be alone with your own vile thoughts in that little space, for ever and ever and ever and ever. You’ll itch with corruption, so that you can never sleep, and you’ll always be thirsty, with water just out of reach.’
‘Will I now?’ repeated the Fiend, even more concerned. ‘I remember once –’
‘All the time you’ll be full of horrors,’ Crenshaw interrupted. ‘You’ll be like a person just about to go crazy but can’t go crazy. All the time you’ll be thinking that it’s for ever and ever and ever.’
‘That’s bad,’ said the Fiend shaking his head gloomily. ‘That’s real bad.’
‘Now, listen here to me,’ went on Crenshaw. ‘I’ve brought you some books you’re going to read. It’s arranged that you get no books or papers except what I bring you.’
As a beginning, Crenshaw had brought half a dozen books which his vagarious curiosity had collected over as many years. They comprised a German doctor’s thousand case histories of sexual abnormality – cases with no cures, no hopes, no prognoses, cases listed cold; a series of sermons by a New England divine of the Great Revival which pictured the tortures of the damned in hell; a collection of horror stories; and a volume of erotic pieces from each of which the last two pages, containing the consummations, had been torn out; and a volume of detective stories mutilated in the same manner. A tome of the Newgate calendar completed the batch. These Crenshaw handed through the bars – the Fiend took them and put them on his iron cot.
The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald Page 25