I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  After a moment he said without smiling:

  “That’s the first and the only terrible speech I’ve ever heard you make.”

  “I’m sorry, Roger—”

  But the habitually cheerful expression had come back into his face.

  “Here comes Mr. Delannux, looking tired of himself. Let’s pick him up and see if he’ll give you a tumble.”

  Atlanta drew back.

  “I hate professional heart-breakers.”

  But as if in revenge for her recent remark Roger addressed the advancing figure, asking for a match. A few minutes later the three of them were strolling back along the beach toward the hotel.

  “I couldn’t make out your party,” said Delannux. “You didn’t exactly have a vacation air about you.”

  “We thought maybe you were Dillinger,” Atlanta answered, “or whoever it is now.”

  “As a matter of fact I am in hiding. Did you ever try to hide? It’s awful—I’m beginning to see why they come out and give themselves up.”

  “Are you a criminal?”

  “I don’t know—and I don’t want to find out. I’m hiding from a civil suit and as long as they can’t serve the papers on me I’m all right. For awhile I hid in a hospital but I got too well to stay there. Now you tell me why you’re going to photograph this rock.”

  “That’s easy,” answered Roger. “In the picture Atlanta plays the part of a mother eagle who doesn’t know where to build her nest—”

  “Shut up, idiot!” To Delannux she said: “It’s a pioneer picture—about the Indian wars. The heroine signals from the rock and that sort of thing.”

  “How long will you be here?”

  “That’s my clue to go in,” Roger said. “I ought to be working on a broken camera. Staying out, Atlanta?”

  “Do you think I’d go in unless I had to—on a night like this?”

  “Well, you and Prout be up on the rock at eight o’clock—and better not try to climb it in one breath.”

  She sat with Delannux on the side of a beached raft while the sunset broke into pink picture puzzle pieces that solved themselves in the dark west.

  “It’s strange how quick everything is nowadays,” said Delannux. “Here we are, suddenly sitting on the shore of a lake—”

  —He’s one of those quick workers, she thought.

  But the detached tone of his voice disarmed her, and she looked at him more closely. Plain he was—only his eyes were large and fine. His nose was bent sideways in a fashion that gave him a humorous expression from one angle and a sardonic one from the other. His body was slender with long arms and big hands.

  “—a lake without a history,” he continued. “It ought to have a legend.”

  “But it has one,” she said. “Something about an Indian maiden who drowned herself for love—” At the look in his face she stopped suddenly and finished, “—but I’m no good at stories. Did I hear you say you’d been in the hospital?”

  “Yes—over in Asheville. I had the whooping cough.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, all the absurd things happen to me.” He changed the subject.

  “Is Atlanta really your name?”

  “Yes, I was born there.”

  “It’s a lovely name. It reminds me of a great poem, Atlanta in Calydon.” He recited gravely:

  When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s Traces

  The mother of months in meadow or plain

  Fills the shadows and windy places

  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain—

  A little later he was somehow talking about the war.

  “—I hadn’t been within miles of the line and I was very bored and had nothing to write home. I wrote my mother that I’d just saved the lives of Pershing and Foch—that a bomb had fallen on them and I’d picked it up and thrown it away. And what did mother do but telephone the news about her brave boy to every paper in Philadelphia.”

  She felt suddenly at home with this man yet utterly unable to imagine his causing any devastation in the feminine heart. He seemed to have none of that quality that was once called “It” about him, only an amusing frankness and a politeness that made him easy to be with.

  After awhile people came out to swim, and their voices sounded strange in the dark as they experimented with the cooling water. Then there were splashing crawls, and after that their voices again, far away on the diving tower. When they came in and hurried shivering up to the hotel, the moon was showing over the mountains—just like a child’s drawing of the moon. Behind the hotel, a choir was rehearsing in a negro church but after midnight it stopped and there were only the frogs and a few restless birds and the sound of automobiles far away.

  Atlanta stretched, and in doing so saw her watch.

  “It’s after one! And I’m working tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry—it’s my fault. I’ve talked and talked.”

  “I love to hear you talk. But I must go, really. Why don’t you have lunch with us at Chimney Rock tomorrow?”

  “I’d like to.”

  As they said goodbye amid the ghostly wicker of the lobby Atlanta was conscious of what a nice evening she had with him—later, before she went to sleep, she remembered a dozen indirect little compliments he had given her—the kind that one could remember with a pleasant shimmer. He made her laugh and he made her feel attractive. Had he possessed the special quality of being “thrilling” she could even imagine some girl falling for him a little.

  “But not me,” she thought sleepily. “No suicide for me.”

  II

  On top of Chimney Rock, which is a great monolith breaking off from the mountains like the spout of a teapot, about twenty persons can stand and look down at ten counties and a dozen rivers and valleys. This morning Atlanta looked down alone upon miles of green wheat and light blue rye and upon cotton fields and red clay and terribly swift streams capped with white foam. By noon she had looked at plenty of scenery while the airplane zoomed round and round the rock, and she was hungry when she descended the winding steps to the restaurant, and found Carley Delannux and a girl on the terrace.

  “You looked nice up there,” he said. “Sort of remote and unimportant—but nice.”

  She sighed; she was weary.

  “Roger made me climb those steps three times running,” she said. “I think it was punishment for sitting up last night.”

  He introduced his companion.

  “This is Miss Isabelle Panzer—she wanted to meet you and since she saved my life I couldn’t refuse her.”

  “Saved your life?”

  “When I had whooping cough. Miss Panzer’s a nurse—just barely a nurse—I was her first case.”

  “My second,” the girl corrected him.

  It was a lovely discontented face—if ever the two can go together. It was very American and rather sad, mirroring an eternal hope of being someone like Atlanta without either the talent or the self discipline that makes strong individuals. Atlanta answered some shy questions about Hollywood.

  “You know as much about it as I do,” she said, “—if you read the magazines. All I know about pictures is someone says to climb up a rock and so I climb up a rock.”

  They waited to order lunch, until Roger could arrive from the landing field at Asheville.

  “The way I feel is all your fault,” said Atlanta, looking reproachfully at Delannux. “I didn’t get to sleep until four.”

  “Thinking about me?”

  “Thinking about my mother in California. Now I need diversion.”

  “Well, I’ll divert you,” he suggested. “I know a song—do you want to hear it?”

  He went inside and presently some chords drifted out with his voice.

  I’d climb the high-est mountains—

  “Stop!” she groaned.

  “All right,” he agreed. “How’s this one—”

  —I love to climb a mountain

  And to reach the highest peak—

  “Don’t do it,” sh
e begged him.

  Tourists were droning up from the highroad to the restaurant; Roger Clark arrived and they ordered luncheon on the terrace.

  “I want to hear what Delannux is hiding from,” Atlanta announced.

  “So do I,” Roger said, relaxing from his morning with a glass of beer.

  “We come here and he picks us up—” Atlanta continued.

  “You picked me up. Here I come to hide—”

  “That’s what we want to know about,” Roger’s tone was cheerful but Atlanta saw that he was regarding Delannux quizzically. “Have you got a bear after you?”

  “My past is a sort of bear.”

  “We haven’t got any pasts in pictures,” said Atlanta, mollifying the turn of the conversation.

  “Haven’t you? It must be great to be that way. I’ve got enough past for three people—you see I’m a sort of survival from the boom days—I’ve lived too long.”

  “Sort of a luxury article,” suggested Roger mildly.

  “That’s it. Not much in demand any more.”

  Underneath his light tone Atlanta detected a certain discouragement. For the first time in her life she wondered what it felt like to be discouraged. So far she had never known anything but hope and fulfillment. From the time she was fourteen there were always picture people coming into her father’s drug store in Beverly Hills and promising to get her a test. And finally one of them had remembered.

  Discouragement should be when you didn’t have money or a job.

  With Delannux on the hotel porch after dinner that night she asked him suddenly:

  “What did you mean when you said you’d lived too long?”

  He laughed but at her seriousness he answered:

  “I fitted in to a time when people wanted excitement, and I tried to supply it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I spent a lot of money—I backed plays and tried to fly the Atlantic, and tried to drink all the wine in Paris—that sort of thing. It was all pointless and that’s why it’s so dated—it wasn’t about anything.”

  Roger came out at ten o’clock and said somewhat gruffly:

  “I think you ought to turn in early, Atlanta. We’re working at eight tomorrow.”

  “I’m going right away.”

  She and Roger walked upstairs together. Outside her room he said:

  “You don’t know anything about this man—except that he has a bad reputation.”

  “What junk!” she answered impatiently. “Talking to him is like talking to a girl. Why, last night I almost went to sleep—he’s harmless.”

  “I’ve heard that story before. It’s a classic.”

  There were steps on the stairs and Carley Delannux came up. He paused on the landing a moment.

  “When Miss Downs goes to bed the lights go out,” he complained.

  “Roger was afraid I’d got drowned last night,” said Atlanta.

  Then Roger said something utterly unlike himself.

  “It did cross my mind that you were drowned. After all, you were out with Suicide Carley.”

  There was a hushed awful moment. Then Delannux made a lightning motion with his hand and Roger’s head and body slapped back against the wall.

  Another pause, with Roger half stunned keeping on his feet only with the aid of his back and palms against the wall and Delannux facing him, hands by his side clenched and twitching.

  Atlanta gave a whispered cry:

  “Stop! Stop!”

  For another instant neither man moved. Then Roger pushed himself upright and shook his head in a dazed way. He was the taller and heavier of the two and Atlanta had seen him throw a drunken extra over a five foot fence. She tried to wedge herself between them but Clark’s arm brushed her aside.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “He was perfectly right. I had no business saying that.”

  She drew a breath of relief—this was the Clark she knew, generous and just. Delannux relaxed.

  “I’m sorry I was so hasty. Good night.”

  He nodded to them both and turned away toward his room.

  After a minute Clark said, “Good night, Atlanta,” and she was standing alone in the hall.

  III

  “That’s the end of Roger and me,” she thought next morning. “I never loved him—he was only my best friend.”

  But it made her sad when he did not tell her when to go to bed the next night, and it was not much fun now on location or at meals.

  Two days of rain arrived and she drove with Carley Delannux back into the hills and stopped at lost shacks trading cigarettes for mountain talk and drinking iron water that tasted of fifty years ago. Everything was all right when she was with Carley. Life was gay or melancholy by turns but it was at all times what he made it. Roger rode along with life—Carley dominated it with his sophistication and humor.

  This was the season of flowers and she and Carley spent a rainy day fixing up a float to represent Lake Lure for the Rhododendron Festival in Asheville that night. They decided on a sailboat with a sea of blue hydrangeas and an illuminated moon. Seamstresses worked all afternoon on old-fashioned swimming costumes; and Atlanta turned herself into a stout bathing beauty of 1890, and they telephoned the little nurse, Isabelle Panzer, to be a mermaid. Roger would drive the truck and Atlanta insisted on sitting in front beside him. She was inspired to this gesture by the vague idea, peculiar to women in love, that her presence would cheer and console the other man.

  The rain had stopped and it was a fair night. In Asheville their float took its place in the assembling parade—there had already been one parade in the afternoon and the streets were littered with purple pink rhododendrons and cloudy white azaleas. Tonight was to be Carnival, wild and impudent—but it was soon apparent that to plant an old world saturnalia in the almost virgin soil of the resort was going to be difficult; the gaiety was among the participants rather than in the silent throngs from the mountains, who gathered on the sidewalks to watch the floats move by in the shaky and haphazard manner peculiar to floats, with great silent gaps, and crowdings and dead halts.

  They lurched along the festooned streets between a galley manned by those vague Neros and sirens that turn up in all parades and a straggling battalion that featured the funny papers. This last provoked comment from critical youth on the sidewalks:

  “You s’posed to be Andy Gump?”

  “Hey, you’re too fat for Tillie the Toiler!”

  “I thought Moon Mullins was s’posed to be funny!”

  Atlanta kept thinking that Carley would have brought the scene alive to her somehow if only with mockery—but not Roger.

  “Cheer up!” she urged him, “We’re supposed to be jolly.”

  “Is this jolly? Are we having fun?”

  She agreed that they weren’t but she resented his lack of effort.

  “Did you expect a million dollar super-film? You’ve got to make things fun.”

  “Well, you’re doing your part all right—and the crowd is going to have a circus next time you move. Then the whole top of your bathing suit is going to fall off.”

  “Good Lord!” She grabbed at her back, and finding nothing, simply tipped over backward into the bottom of the float, rolling through the flowers until she could get space to pull the flimsy garment together. Above her and almost beside her were two figures—Miss Panzer on a rocky throne and Carley, holding a pitch-fork trident. While Atlanta patched the rip, she tried to catch what he was saying, but only fragments floated down to her. Then as she sat upright and hunched her back to test the adjustment she heard Isabelle Panzer say:

  “You didn’t tell me you loved me but you made me think so.”

  Atlanta stiffened and sat still as still, but his reply was lost in the explosion of a distant band.

  “Didn’t you know what I was risking,” the girl continued. “When I was still a student nurse I sat in the solarium with you night after night and if the superintendent had come up I’d have been finished.”

  Aga
in Atlanta could hear only an indistinguishable murmur from him.

  “I know I’m just a small town girl to you. But all I want to know is why did you make me love you so?”

  Now Carley turned his head and Atlanta heard his words plainly.

  “Nevertheless it’s a pretty high dive from Chimney Rock.”

  —then Isabelle again.

  “I don’t care if it’s five thousand miles—if you don’t love me there isn’t any living. I’m going to climb up there and see how quick I can get to the bottom.”

  “All right,” Carley agreed. “Please don’t leave any notes addressed to me.”

  IV

  Back in the seat with Roger, Atlanta stared out at the receding crowd, neglecting now to wave or to be gay. There was a faint drizzle in the air again and people were putting coats and papers over their heads; autos honked imperatively from parking spaces and the bands died one by one at the corners, their instruments giving out last gleams as they were cloaked against the increasing rain.

  The Lake Lure party hurried from the float to their car—Atlanta got in front beside Roger. When they dropped Isabelle at her apartment, Roger asked her: “Don’t you want to sit in back?”

  “No.”

  They drove out of the city facing a splitting windshield in silence.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” she said finally, “but you’re so cross with me.”

  “Not any more,” Roger said. “I couldn’t get that way twice.”

  “Well, something’s happened that seems terrible and—”

  “That’s too bad,” he interrupted sympathetically. “But since you’ll be back with your mother in just a week now, you can tell her about it.”

  At his coldness Atlanta instinctively began a sort of emergency primping, wiping the clown’s paint from her face, removing pads from her waist, shaking her wet hair wild and combing it to an aura around her head. Then bending forward into the faint dashboard lights she begged him:

  “Let me ask you one thing.”

  “Not tonight, Atlanta. I haven’t recovered from the shock.”

  “What shock?”

  “The shock of finding that you’re just another woman.”