I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “I’m going to ask you one thing—did anybody ever really kill themselves because they loved someone too much? I mean do you think so?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “Why? Are you planning to kill yourself for Mister De Luxe?”

  “Don’t talk so loud. But listen, there have been people who’ve done that, haven’t there?”

  “I don’t know. Ask one of the script writers back home—they’ll tell you. Or ask Prout. Hey, Prout—”

  “Don’t start a row again!”

  “Then let’s don’t talk.”

  The car passed Chimney Rock and pulled up at the hotel in a dripping quiet. They had been on the road an hour but it seemed only a minute to Atlanta since she had heard Isabelle Panzer’s voice on the float. She was not angry—her feeling was one of overwhelming grief—and in the midst she felt perversely sorry for Delannux.

  But when he asked in the lobby if everyone was absolutely determined to go to bed—a question obviously aimed to her—she said hastily:

  “I’m for the tub. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.”

  But she could not sleep. For the first time in her life, for better or worse, she was emotionally wide awake, trying by turns to analyze her passion for the man, to argue him from her mind, to think what should be done. Had Roger not been concerned she would have gone to him and asked him—but now there was no one. Toward morning she dozed—to awake with a start before seven. One glance at a somber window told her there would be no work for a few hours anyhow, and her maid confirmed the fact on her arrival. Atlanta got listlessly into her bathing suit and went down to the lake for a dip, swimming on an unreal surface that existed between a world of water like mist and a drizzling firmament of air. She went up to the hotel and breakfasted and dressed, and then it was almost nine o’clock. Downstairs she read a letter from her mother, and for a moment stood with Prout on the verandah.

  “Roger’s in a bad humor,” he announced. “He’s got camera parts laid all over his bed.”

  “Maybe he’s lucky to have something to do on a rainy day.”

  Presently she went into the lobby and asked the number of Mr. Delannux’s room. When she knocked at his door and when he answered “Yes?” she called:

  “Why don’t you ever get up? Do you hide all day? Are you an owl?”

  “Come in.”

  Inside the door she stopped. The room was full of luggage in disarray and Carley was in the process of helping a boy belt down a suitcase.

  “I thought you’d be resting,” he said. “I thought on a rainy day—”

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “Doing?” He looked a little guilty. “Oh, as a matter of fact I’m leaving. You see, Atlanta, I’m safe now and I can go back to the great world.”

  “You said it’d be a week more.”

  “You must have misunderstood.” She stood stock still in the middle of the floor as he went on talking. “You know when you knocked I jumped. You might have been the process server after all.”

  “You said you had a week more,” she repeated stubbornly.

  The negro boy shut the bag with a click. His eyes turned interrogatively toward Delannux—

  “Come back in fifteen minutes,” Carley said.

  The boy closed the door behind him.

  “Why are you going?” Atlanta demanded, “—without saying anything to anybody? I come in and find you with your bags all packed.” She shook her head helplessly. “Of course it’s none of my business what you do.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I will not sit down.” She was almost crying now. “It even looks as if you did your packing in ten minutes—look at all those shoes. What do you think you’re going to do with them?”

  He glanced at the forgotten shoes on the wardrobe floor—then back at Atlanta’s face.

  “You were going without saying goodbye,” she accused him.

  “I was going to say goodbye.”

  “Yes—after you had all your bags in the car, and there was nothing to be done about it.”

  “I was afraid I’d fall in love with you,” he said lightly. “Or you’d fall in love with me.”

  “You needn’t worry about that.”

  He looked at her with a flash of amusement.

  “Come here close,” he said.

  A small voice inside told her that he was trying some power of his on her, that he was just perversely playing. Then another and, it seemed, a stronger voice forgave him for that, made her interpret his command as a desperate cry of need.

  He repeated:

  “Come here.”

  —and she took a step forward.

  “Come closer.”

  She was touching him and suddenly her face was reaching up to his. Then at the end of the kiss he kept her close with the pressure of his hands along her inside arms . . .

  “So you see I think I’d better go away.”

  “It’s absurd!” Atlanta cried. “I want you to stay! I’m not in love with you—honestly! But if you go I’ll always think I drove you away.”

  She was so transparent now that she was not even ashamed—meaning him to see the truth underneath. “I’m not jealous of Miss Panzer. How could I be? I don’t care what you’ve done—”

  “I can understand Isabelle thinking she liked me—because she hasn’t got anything. But you’ve got everything. Why should you be interested in a battered old wreck?”

  “I’m not—yes, I guess I am.” She had a burst of unusual eloquence. “I don’t know just why—but all of a sudden you’re just all the men in the world to me.”

  He sat down—his face was tired and drawn.

  “You’re young.” He sighed, “—and you’re beautiful. You’ve got your work—and you’ve got any man you want for the asking. Do you remember when I told you that I belonged to another age?”

  “It isn’t true,” she wailed.

  “I wish it weren’t. But since it is, anything between you and me would be all dated—sort of mouldy.” He stood up restlessly. “You think I could live in your nice fresh world of work and love. Well, I couldn’t. We’d last about a month and then you’d be all bitter and dented—and maybe I’d care. And that might be tough for me.”

  He looked up and faced her helpless love.

  “Can’t you imagine somebody who’d had the best experiences in the world not wanting any more—not wanting love to be real love? Can you imagine that? I even resent your beauty because now I’m old—but once I had what it takes to love a girl like you—”

  There was a knock at the door. Prout was there, his eyes darting from one to the other.

  “It’s clearing off outside,” he said. “Roger told me to find you right away.”

  Atlanta pulled herself together. In the doorway she paused and told Carley:

  “I’ll be back in a minute. You won’t go till I see you. You promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll be right back. You can drive me over to Chimney Rock.”

  A moment later, down in Roger’s room, she was listening to his instructions like a woman in a dream. The minute he was finished she dashed back up the stairs and, with a quick knock, entered Carley’s room.

  But it was empty.

  V

  She hurried down to the desk, to be told that Delannux had paid his bill and gone out to the garage—perhaps had driven off by now. Breathlessly she sped out the door, down the drive through a light rain. She was outraged, furious with herself and him. She turned a corner . . .

  —and there he was, talking to a mechanic in front of the garage.

  She leaned against the damp rain on the garage door, gasping with her emotion.

  “You said you wouldn’t go.”

  “Seems I can’t.”

  “You told me you’d wait.”

  “I have to. One of the washers took my car out for a joy ride, and broke a wheel. It’ll take two days to get another.”

  Roger Clark’s car was being driven
out of the garage—Atlanta still had many things to say, but there was no time. All she could think of was:

  “Women must come easy for you if you can do this. I don’t think you like women—you pretend to, but you don’t. That’s why you can do what you want with them.”

  She heard Prout’s “Halloo!” from in front of the hotel. That was her signal and she went quickly.

  ***

  All day, as they worked, she planned and planned. But it was like a condemned criminal planning to escape, but always distracted from his schemes by the sound of keys turning in locks around him—or by the hope that reprieve would come from outside, with no effort on his part. Plans are difficult at such moments—Atlanta could only wait for an opportunity. Nevertheless, clouds of fragmentary possibilities were around her head. Perhaps Carley didn’t have much money—maybe he would be glad of a chance in Hollywood. He had been a rich jack-of-all-trades—perhaps he could be placed as a specialist in an advisory capacity.

  Or, failing this, she could go East and try for a big part on the stage, train with a famous teacher—there she would at least be in touch with Carley.

  Her reasoning came to wreck upon the single rock that he did not love her.

  But the full force of this didn’t come home to her until she got back to the hotel in the evening—and found he was not there. Before the end of dinner she went to her room, and cried on her bed. After half an hour her throat hurt and no tears started unless she forced them; then she turned on her back and said to herself:

  “This is what’s called infatuation. I used to hear about it, how it was just love without any sense to it, and the thing to do was to get over it . . . But just let them try it . . .”

  She was tired; she called her maid to rub her head.

  “Don’t you want to take one of those pills?” the maid suggested. “The ones that made you sleep when you had the fractured arm.”

  No. Better to suffer, to feel the full poignancy of the knife in her heart.

  “How many times did you knock at Mr. Delannux’s door?” Atlanta asked restlessly.

  “Three or four times—then I asked downstairs and he hadn’t come in.”

  —He’s with Isabelle Panzer, she thought. She’s telling him how she’s going to die for love of him. Then he’ll be sorry for her and think I’m just trivial—a little Hollywood pet.

  The thought was intolerable. She sat bolt upright in the bed.

  “Give me some of the sleeping stuff after all,” she said. “Give me a lot of it—all that’s left.”

  “You were only supposed to take one at a time.”

  They compromised on two and Atlanta sank into a doze, but waking now and then in the night, she was haunted by a dream—of Isabelle dead, and of Delannux hearing the news and saying:

  “She loved me enough—so much that the world wasn’t good enough for her afterwards.”

  Next morning found her with a hangover from the sedative—she had no energy for her usual dip. Dressing in a state of lethargy she rode to location without a thought, realizing that the others were looking at her with the concern reserved for people who are “upset.”

  She hated that, and contrived a more cheerful front through the morning hours, laughing at everything, though it seemed as if all of her was dead except her heart, and that was pumping her bloodstream around at a hundred miles per hour.

  About four they went down to the restaurant for a sandwich. Atlanta was raising hers to her mouth when Prout made his unfortunate remark.

  “Delannux got the wheel for his car,” he said. “I saw it arrive when I went for the carpenter.”

  In a moment she was on her feet.

  “Tell Roger I’m sick! Tell him I can’t work to-day! Tell him I’ve borrowed his car!”

  She dropped down the corkscrew to the main road at the speed of a roller coaster, and drew up at the hotel three minutes later—almost beside the bus from Asheville. And there, disembarking, dusty and hot and tired, was Isabelle Panzer. Atlanta caught up with her on the hotel steps.

  “Can I speak to you a minute?”

  Miss Panzer seemed taken back by the encounter.

  “Why, yes, Miss Downs, I suppose so. I came to see Mr. Delannux.”

  “What does a minute more or less matter now?”

  The two women sat facing each other on the verandah.

  “You love him, don’t you?” said Atlanta.

  Isabelle broke suddenly.

  “O God, how can you ask me that—when it’s you he loves now—it’s you he left me for—”

  Atlanta shook her head.

  “No. He doesn’t love me either.”

  “Neither of you mean anything when you talk about love.”

  To be spoken to like that by a child—a girl who had endured less in all her nursing course than Atlanta had sometimes endured in a day.

  “I don’t know what love means?” she exclaimed incredulously.

  She felt a sound in front of her eyes, like a miner’s lamp exploding. Something must be done about the whole matter immediately—

  And then Atlanta knew what to do: she must make words real at last, put into action all she had ever thought, dreamed, pretended, been ordered to do or tempted to do, justify all that was superficial or trivial in her life, find the way to supreme consecration and consummation at last. It was plain as plain.

  Deliberately she went over to the other girl and kissed her on the forehead. Then she went down the steps, climbed into Roger’s car, and drove off.

  Chimney Rock restaurant was empty after the session of the day’s traffic—and, as she had hoped, there was no sign of the picture outfit.

  She left the key in the car and started to leave a note but she did not know any longer exactly what she had wanted to say—anyhow she had left her purse at home with the pen in it.

  Her feet and legs were stiff from the day’s climbing—well, she would leave her shoes behind like the evil queen in the Wizard of Oz who had been all burned up except her shoes. She kicked them to one side and put her foot experimentally on the first step—it was cool to her foot—it had seemed warm in the afternoon even through her soles.

  As she began to climb she became increasingly conscious of the rock looming above. But maybe it would be like jumping into a basket of many colored skies.

  VI

  Roger came up on the porch less than five minutes after Atlanta had left. Isabelle was sitting there.

  “Good evening,” he said. “Waiting to see Delannux off?”

  “Something like that.”

  —Why didn’t she say anything? he wondered. Why did she sit like that? Was there a pistol in her handbag?

  There was a bustle of departure in the lobby—in a moment Carley Delannux and baggage came out on the porch.

  “Goodbye, Delannux,” Roger said, without offering to shake hands.

  “Goodbye, Clark.” He seemed scarcely to notice Isabelle—a car stopped at the door and he went forward to meet the mechanic.

  “How’s the wheel?”

  He broke off. “Excuse me, I thought it was someone else.”

  “This is Delannux,” cried Isabelle suddenly.

  There was a moment of confusion. Then the man who had come up the steps reached forward, tucked a white sheet in Carley’s pocket and said:

  “This paper is for Mr. Delannux. Don’t bother to read it. I can tell you what it is. It’s a Capias ad Respondum. That means I’ve got to take you North with me on a little matter of director’s responsibility.”

  Carley sat down suddenly.

  “So you got me,” he said. “And in about four more hours you couldn’t have served that paper.”

  “No sir—not after midnight to-night. The Statute of Limitations—”

  “How did you find me? How did you even know I was in North Carolina?”

  But suddenly Carley stopped, knowing very well how the process server had found him—and Roger realized too. Isabelle gave a broken little cry and covered her eyes wi
th her hand.

  Carley threw her an expressionless look, without even contempt in it.

  “I’d like to see you alone,” he said to the process server. “Shall we go up to my room?”

  “All right by me, but I warn you I’m not for sale.”

  “It’s just to arrange certain things about leaving.”

  When they had gone Isabelle wept on silently.

  “Why did you do it?” Roger asked mildly. “It’ll ruin him, won’t it?”

  “Yes. I guess so.”

  “Why did you want to do that?”

  “Oh, because he was so bad to me, and I hated him so.”

  “Aren’t you a little sorry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “You certainly must have loved him a lot to have hated him that much.”

  “I did.”

  He was terribly sorry for her.

  “Don’t you want to go and lie down in Atlanta’s room for awhile?”

  “I’d rather lie on the beach, thank you.”

  After he watched her depart he still sat there. She turned and called back to him.

  “You’d better look after your own girl,” she said. “She’s not in the hotel.”

  VII

  Roger sat alone rocking and thinking. He loved Atlanta, no matter how little she had given him to love lately.

  —She’s not here, he said to himself.

  He sat there thinking and thinking, with a mind accustomed only to technical problems.

  —She’s a fool. All right then—I love a fool.

  —Then I ought to go and find her because I think I know where she is. Or shall I sit on this porch rocking?

  —I’m the only living human being that can take care of her.

  “Let her go!”

  “I can’t—” He spoke aloud at last, saying what most men have said about a woman one day—and most women about a man: “I happen to love her . . .”

  He got up and ordered a hotel car, hurrying a little as he got in with the sense that it might be too late. He drove quickly to Chimney Rock and up the mountain to the restaurant, as far as the car could go. As he began the climb a thought dogged his steps.