Babylon Revisited

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday—he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.

  “Oh, no,” he said to himself…. “No.”

  He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of something—at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else—for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartmenthouse; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do.

  Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.

  “Nick,” he said, “what’s happened to everything?”

  “Dead,” Nick said.

  “Make me a whiskey sour.” Anson handed a pint bottle over the counter. “Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and she got married last week without letting me know.”

  “That a fact? Ha-ha-ha,” responded Nick diplomatically. “Slipped it over on you.”

  “Absolutely,” said Anson. “And I was out with her the night before.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick, “ha-ha-ha!”

  “Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I had the waiters and the musicians singing ‘God save the King’?”

  “Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?” Nick concentrated doubtfully. “Seems to me that was—”

  “Next time they were back for more; and I began to wonder how much I’d paid them,” continued Anson.

  “—seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm’s wedding.”

  “Don’t know him,” said Anson decisively. He was offended that a strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick perceived this.

  “Naw—aw—” he admitted, “I ought to know that. It was one of your crowd—Brakins … Baker—”

  “Bicker Baker,” said Anson responsively. “They put me in a hearse after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove me away.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick. “Ha-ha-ha.”

  Nick’s simulation of the old family servant paled presently and Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around—his eyes met the glance of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower from the morning’s marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cuspidor. He went out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.

  Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon, that he tried every one who might be in New York—men and girls he had not seen for years, an artist’s model of his college days whose faded number was still in his address book—Central told him that even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

  It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone—the private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when the solitude is enforced. There were always women of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never occurred to him—he would have considered that that was something shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman in a strange town.

  Anson paid the telephone bill—the girl tried unsuccessfully to joke with him about its size—and for the second time that afternoon started to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolving door the figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood sideways to the light—a sheer beige cape fluttered at her shoulders when the door turned and, each time, she looked impatiently toward it as if she were weary of waiting. At the first sight of her a strong nervous thrill of familiarity went over him, but not until he was within five feet of her did he realize that it was Paula.

  “Why, Anson Hunter!”

  His heart turned over.

  “Why, Paula—”

  “Why, this is wonderful. I can’t believe it, Anson!”

  She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him—he felt that old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain, that gentleness with which he had always met her optimism as if afraid to mar its surface.

  “We’re at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business—you know of course I’m Mrs. Peter Hagerty now—so we brought the children and took a house. You’ve got to come out and see us.”

  “Can I?” he asked directly. “When?”

  “When you like. Here’s Pete.” The revolving door functioned, giving up a fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trim mustache. His immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with Anson’s increasing bulk, which was obvious under the faintly tight cut-away coat.

  “You oughtn’t to be standing,” said Hagerty to his wife. “Let’s sit down here.” He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.

  “I’ve got to go right home,” she said. “Anson, why don’t you—why don’t you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We’re just getting settled, but if you can stand that—”

  Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.

  “Come out for the night.”

  Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired gesture sank back against silk cushions in the corner.

  “There’s so much I want to talk to you about,” she said, “it seems hopeless.”

  “I want to hear about you.”

  “Well”—she smiled at Hagerty—“that would take a long time too. I have three children—by my first marriage. The oldest is five, then four, then three.” She smiled again. “I didn’t waste much time having them, did I?”

  “Boys?”

  “A boy and two girls. Then—oh, a lot of things happened, and I got a divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That’s all—except that I’m awfully happy.”

  In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from which there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke from an English governess and approached them with an esoteric cry. Abstractedly and with difficulty Paula took each one into her arms, a caress which they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been told not to bump into Mummy. Even against their fresh faces Paula’s skin showed scarcely any weariness—for all her physical languor she seemed younger than when he had last seen her at Palm Beach seven years ago.

  At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage to the radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson wondered if his presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine o’clock, when Hagerty rose and said pleasantly that he was going to leave them by themselves for a while, she began to talk slowly about herself and the past.

  “My first baby,” she said—“the one we call Darling, the biggest little girl—I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her, because Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn’t seem as though she could be my own. I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you were so bad to me, Anson.”

  It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden quickening of memory.

  “Weren’t you engaged once?” she asked—“a girl named Dolly something?”

  “I was
n’t ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved anybody but you, Paula.”

  “Oh,” she said. Then after a moment: “This baby is the first one I ever really wanted. You see, I’m in love now—at last.”

  He didn’t answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance. She must have seen that the “at last” bruised him, for she continued.

  “I was infatuated with you, Anson—you could make me do anything you liked. But we wouldn’t have been happy. I’m not smart enough for you. I don’t like things to be complicated like you do.” She paused. “You’ll never settle down,” she said.

  The phrase struck at him from behind—it was an accusation that of all accusations he had never merited.

  “I could settle down if women were different,” he said. “If I didn’t understand so much about them, if women didn’t spoil you for other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine—why, that’s what I’m made for, Paula, that’s what women have seen in me and liked in me. It’s only that I can’t get through the preliminaries any more.”

  Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula stood up and announced that she was going to bed. She went over and stood by her husband.

  “Where did you go, dearest?” she demanded.

  “I had a drink with Ed Saunders.”

  “I was worried. I thought maybe you’d run away.”

  She rested her head against his coat.

  “He’s sweet, isn’t he, Anson?” she demanded.

  “Absolutely,” said Anson, laughing.

  She raised her face to her husband.

  “Well, I’m ready,” she said. She turned to Anson: “Do you want to see our family gymnastic stunt?”

  “Yes,” he said in an interested voice.

  “All right. Here we go!”

  Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.

  “This is called the family acrobatic stunt,” said Paula. “He carries me up-stairs. Isn’t it sweet of him?”

  “Yes,” said Anson.

  Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula’s.

  “And I love him,” she said. “I’ve just been telling you, haven’t I, Anson?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “He’s the dearest thing that ever lived in this world; aren’t you, darling? … Well, good night. Here we go. Isn’t he strong?”

  “Yes,” Anson said.

  “You’ll find a pair of Pete’s pajamas laid out for you. Sweet dreams—see you at breakfast.”

  “Yes,” Anson said.

  The older members of the firm insisted that Anson should go abroad for the summer. He had scarcely had a vacation in seven years, they said. He was stale and needed a change. Anson resisted.

  “If I go,” he declared, “I won’t come back any more.”

  “That’s absurd, old man. You’ll be back in three months with all this depression gone. Fit as ever.”

  “No.” He shook his head stubbornly. “If I stop, I won’t go back to work. If I stop, that means I’ve given up—I’m through.”

  “We’ll take a chance on that. Stay six months if you like—we’re not afraid you’ll leave us. Why, you’d be miserable if you didn’t work.”

  They arranged his passage for him. They liked Anson—every one liked Anson—and the change that had been coming over him cast a sort of pall over the office. The enthusiasm that had invariably signalled up business, the consideration toward his equals and his inferiors, the lift of his vital presence—within the past four months his intense nervousness had melted down these qualities into the fussy pessimism of a man of forty. On every transaction in which he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain.

  “If I go I’ll never come back,” he said.

  Three days before he sailed Paula Legendre Hagerty died in childbirth. I was with him a great deal then, for we were crossing together, but for the first time in our friendship he told me not a word of how he felt, nor did I see the slightest sign of emotion. His chief preoccupation was with the fact that he was thirty years old—he would turn the conversation to the point where he could remind you of it and then fall silent, as if he assumed that the statement would start a chain of thought sufficient to itself. Like his partners, I was amazed at the change in him, and I was glad when the Paris moved off into the wet space between the worlds, leaving his principality behind.

  “How about a drink?” he suggested.

  We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail a change came over him—he suddenly reached across and slapped my knee with the first joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.

  “Did you see that girl in the red tam?” he demanded, “the one with the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid her good-by.”

  “She’s pretty,” I agreed.

  “I looked her up in the purser’s office and found out that she’s alone. I’m going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We’ll have dinner with her to-night.”

  After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up and down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice. Her red tam was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea, and from time to time she looked up with a flashing bob of her head, and smiled with amusement and interest, and anticipation. At dinner we had champagne, and were very joyous—afterward Anson ran the pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had seen me with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and laughing together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.

  I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only at meals. Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar, and he told me about the girl in the red tam, and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

  1926

  THE FRESHEST BOY

  It was a hidden Broadway restaurant in the dead of the night, and a brilliant and mysterious group of society people, diplomats and members of the underworld were there. A few minutes ago the sparkling wine had been flowing and a girl had been dancing gaily upon a table, but now the whole crowd were hushed and breathless. All eyes were fixed upon the masked but well-groomed man in the dress suit and opera hat who stood nonchalantly in the door.

  “Don’t move, please,” he said, in a well-bred, cultivated voice that had, nevertheless, a ring of steel in it. “This thing in my hand might—go off.”

  His glance roved from table to table—fell upon the malignant man higher up with his pale saturnine face, upon Heatherly, the suave secret agent from a foreign power, then rested a little longer, a little more softly perhaps, upon the table where the girl with dark hair and dark tragic eyes sat alone.

  “Now that my purpose is accomplished, it might interest you to know who I am.” There was a gleam of expectation in every eye. The breast of the dark-eyed girl heaved faintly and a tiny burst of subtle French perfume rose into the air. “I am none other than that elusive gentleman, Basil Lee, better known as the Shadow.”

  Taking off his well-fitting opera hat, he bowed ironically from the waist. Then, like a flash, he turned and was gone into the night.

  “You get up to New York only once a month,” Lewis Crum was saying, “and then you have to take a master along.”

  Slowly, Basil Lee’s glazed eyes returned from the barns and billboards of the Indiana countryside to the interior
of the Broadway Limited. The hypnosis of the swift telegraph poles faded and Lewis Crum’s stolid face took shape against the white slip-cover of the opposite bench.

  “I’d just duck the master when I got to New York,” said Basil.

  “Yes, you would!”

  “I bet I would.”

  “You try it and you’ll see.”

  “What do you mean saying I’ll see, all the time, Lewis? What’ll I see?”

  His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon his companion with boredom and impatience. The two had nothing in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong friendship of their fathers—which is less than nothing. Also they were bound from the same Middle-Western city for Basil’s first and Lewis’ second year at the same Eastern school.

  But, contrary to all the best traditions, Lewis the veteran was miserable and Basil the neophyte was happy. Lewis hated school. He had grown entirely dependent on the stimulus of a hearty vital mother, and as he felt her slipping farther and farther away from him, he plunged deeper into misery and homesickness. Basil, on the other hand, had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity. Indeed, it was with some sense of doing the appropriate thing, having the traditional rough-house, that he had thrown Lewis’ comb off the train at Milwaukee last night for no reason at all.

  To Lewis, Basil’s ignorant enthusiasm was distasteful—his instinctive attempt to dampen it had contributed to the mutual irritation.

  “I’ll tell you what you’ll see,” he said ominously. “They’ll catch you smoking and put you on bounds.”

  “No, they won’t, because I won’t be smoking. I’ll be in training for football.”

  “Football! Yeah! Football!”

  “Honestly, Lewis, you don’t like anything, do you?”

  “I don’t like football. I don’t like to go out and get a crack in the eye.” Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his timidities as common sense. Basil’s answer, made with what he considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates life-long enmities.