“Who’s that bird?”
“He’s only been here a month. He ain’t got a title yet. You been here six months, remember.”
Bill grinned.
“You think I’m high-hat, don’t you? Well, I’m not kidding myself anyhow. I like it; it gets me. I’d like to be the Marquis of McChesney.”
“Maybe you can drink yourself into it,” suggested Brancusi.
“Shut your trap. Who said I was drinking? Is that what they say now? Look here; if you can tell me any American manager in the history of the theater who’s had the success that I’ve had in London in less than eight months, I’ll go back to America with you tomorrow. If you’ll just tell me--”
“It was with your old shows. You had two flops in New York.”
Bill stood up, his face hardening.
“Who do you think you are?” he demanded. “Did you come over here to talk to me like that?”
“Don’t get sore now, Bill. I just want you to come back. I’d say anything for that. Put over three seasons like you had in ‘22 and ‘23, and you’re fixed for life.”
“New York makes me sick,” said Bill moodily. “One minute you’re a king; then you have two flops, they go around saying you’re on the toboggan.”
Brancusi shook his head.
“That wasn’t why they said it. It was because you had that quarrel with Aronstael, your best friend.”
“Friend hell!”
“Your best friend in business anyhow. Then--”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He looked at his watch. “Look here; Emmy’s feeling bad so I’m afraid I can’t have dinner with you tonight. Come around to the office before you sail.”
Five minutes later, standing by the cigar counter, Brancusi saw Bill enter the Savoy again and descend the steps that led to the tea room.
“Grown to be a great diplomat,” thought Brancusi; “he used to just say when he had a date. Going with these dukes and ladies is polishing him up even more.”
Perhaps he was a little hurt, though it was not typical of him to be hurt. At any rate he made a decision, then and there, that McChesney was on the down grade; it was quite typical of him that at that point he erased him from his mind forever.
There was no outward indication that Bill was on the down grade; a hit at the New Strand, a hit at the Prince of Wales, and the weekly grosses pouring in almost as well as they had two or three years before in New York. Certainly a man of action was justified in changing his base. And the man who, an hour later, turned into his Hyde Park house for dinner had all the vitality of the late twenties. Emmy, very tired and clumsy, lay on a couch in the upstairs sitting room. He held her for a moment in his arms.
“Almost over now,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It’s true. You’re always beautiful. I don’t know why. Perhaps because you’ve got character, and that’s always in your face, even when you’re like this.”
She was pleased; she ran her hand through his hair.
“Character is the greatest thing in the world,” he declared, “and you’ve got more than anybody I know.”
“Did you see Brancusi?”
“I did, the little louse! I decided not to bring him home to dinner.”
“What was the matter?”
“Oh, just snooty--talking about my row with Aronstael, as if it was my fault.”
She hesitated, closed her mouth tight, and then said quietly, “You got into that fight with Aronstael because you were drinking.”
He rose impatiently.
“Are you going to start--”
“No, Bill, but you’re drinking too much now. You know you are.”
Aware that she was right, he evaded the matter and they went in to dinner. On the glow of a bottle of claret he decided he would go on the wagon tomorrow till after the baby was born.
“I always stop when I want, don’t I? I always do what I say. You never saw me quit yet.”
“Never yet.”
They had coffee together, and afterward he got up.
“Come back early,” said Emmy.
“Oh, sure. . . . What’s the matter, baby?”
“I’m just crying. Don’t mind me. Oh, go on; don’t just stand there like a big idiot.”
“But I’m worried, naturally. I don’t like to see you cry.”
“Oh, I don’t know where you go in the evenings; I don’t know who you’re with. And that Lady Sybil Combrinck who kept phoning. It’s all right, I suppose, but I wake up in the night and I feel so alone, Bill. Because we’ve always been together, haven’t we, until recently?”
“But we’re together still. . . . What’s happened to you, Emmy?”
“I know--I’m just crazy. We’d never let each other down, would we? We never have--”
“Of course not.”
“Come back early, or when you can.”
He looked in for a minute at the Prince of Wales Theatre; then he went into the hotel next door and called a number.
“I’d like to speak to her Ladyship. Mr. McChesney calling.”
It was some time before Lady Sybil answered:
“This is rather a surprise. It’s been several weeks since I’ve been lucky enough to hear from you.”
Her voice was flip as a whip and cold as automatic refrigeration, in the mode grown familiar since British ladies took to piecing themselves together out of literature. It had fascinated Bill for a while, but just for a while. He had kept his head.
“I haven’t had a minute,” he explained easily. “You’re not sore, are you?”
“I should scarcely say ‘sore.’“
“I was afraid you might be; you didn’t send me an invitation to your party tonight. My idea was that after we talked it all over we agreed--”
“You talked a great deal,” she said; “possibly a little too much.”
Suddenly, to Bill’s astonishment, she hung up.
“Going British on me,” he thought. “A little skit entitled The Daughter of a Thousand Earls.”
The snub roused him, the indifference revived his waning interest. Usually women forgave his changes of heart because of his obvious devotion to Emmy, and he was remembered by various ladies with a not unpleasant sigh. But he had detected no such sigh upon the phone.
“I’d like to clear up this mess,” he thought. Had he been wearing evening clothes, he might have dropped in at the dance and talked it over with her, still he didn’t want to go home. Upon consideration it seemed important that the misunderstanding should be fixed up at once, and presently he began to entertain the idea of going as he was; Americans were excused unconventionalities of dress. In any case, it was not nearly time, and, in the company of several highballs, he considered the matter for an hour.
At midnight he walked up the steps of her Mayfair house. The coat-room attendants scrutinized his tweeds disapprovingly and a footman peered in vain for his name on the list of guests. Fortunately his friend Sir Humphrey Dunn arrived at the same time and convinced the footman it must be a mistake.
Inside, Bill immediately looked about for his hostess.
She was a very tall young woman, half American and all the more intensely English. In a sense, she had discovered Bill McChesney, vouched for his savage charms; his retirement was one of her most humiliating experiences since she had begun being bad.
She stood with her husband at the head of the receiving line--Bill had never seen them together before. He decided to choose a less formal moment for presenting himself.
As the receiving went on interminably, he became increasingly uncomfortable. He saw a few people he knew, but not many, and he was conscious that his clothes were attracting a certain attention; he was aware also that Lady Sybil saw him and could have relieved his embarrassment with a wave of her hand, but she made no sign. He was sorry he had come, but to withdraw now would be absurd, and going to a buffet table, he took a glass of champagne.
When he turned ar
ound she was alone at last, and he was about to approach her when the butler spoke to him:
“Pardon me, sir. Have you a card?”
“I’m a friend of Lady Sybil’s,” said Bill impatiently. He turned away, but the butler followed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll have to ask you to step aside with me and straighten this up.”
“There’s no need. I’m just about to speak to Lady Sybil now.”
“My orders are different, sir,” said the butler firmly.
Then, before Bill realized what was happening, his arms were pressed quietly to his sides and he was propelled into a little anteroom back of the buffet.
There he faced a man in a pince-nez in whom he recognized the Combrincks’ private secretary.
The secretary nodded to the butler, saying, “This is the man”; whereupon Bill was released.
“Mr. McChesney,” said the secretary, “you have seen fit to force your way here without a card, and His Lordship requests that you leave his house at once. Will you kindly give me the check for your coat?”
Then Bill understood, and the single word that he found applicable to Lady Sybil sprang to his lips; whereupon the secretary gave a sign to two footmen, and in a furious struggle Bill was carried through a pantry where busy bus boys stared at the scene, down a long hall, and pushed out a door into the night. The door closed; a moment later it was opened again to let his coat billow forth and his cane clatter down the steps.
As he stood there, overwhelmed, stricken aghast, a taxicab stopped beside him and the driver called:
“Feeling ill, gov’nor?”
“What?”
“I know where you can get a good pick-me-up, gov’nor. Never too late.” The door of the taxi opened on a nightmare. There was a cabaret that broke the closing hours; there was being with strangers he had picked up somewhere; then there were arguments, and trying to cash a check, and suddenly proclaiming over and over that he was William McChesney, the producer, and convincing no one of the fact, not even himself. It seemed important to see Lady Sybil right away and call her to account; but presently nothing was important at all. He was in a taxicab whose driver had just shaken him awake in front of his own home.
The telephone was ringing as he went in, but he walked stonily past the maid and only heard her voice when his foot was on the stair.
“Mr. McChesney, it’s the hospital calling again. Mrs. McChesney’s there and they’ve been phoning every hour.”
Still in a daze, he held the receiver up to his ear.
“We’re calling from the Midland Hospital, for your wife. She was delivered of a still-born child at nine this morning.”
“Wait a minute.” His voice was dry and cracking. “I don’t understand.”
After a while he understood that Emmy’s child was dead and she wanted him. His knees sagged groggily as he walked down the street, looking for a taxi.
The room was dark; Emmy looked up and saw him from a rumpled bed.
“It’s you!” she cried. “I thought you were dead! Where did you go?”
He threw himself down on his knees beside the bed, but she turned away.
“Oh, you smell awful,” she said. “It makes me sick.”
But she kept her hand in his hair, and he knelt there motionless for a long time.
“I’m done with you,” she muttered, “but it was awful when I thought you were dead. Everybody’s dead. I wish I was dead.”
A curtain parted with the wind, and as he rose to arrange it, she saw him in the full morning light, pale and terrible, with rumpled clothes and bruises on his face. This time she hated him instead of those who had hurt him. She could feel him slipping out of her heart, feel the space he left, and all at once he was gone, and she could even forgive him and be sorry for him. All this in a minute.
She had fallen down at the door of the hospital, trying to get out of the taxicab alone.
IV
When Emmy was well, physically and mentally, her incessant idea was to learn to dance; the old dream inculcated by Miss Georgia Berriman Campbell of South Carolina persisted as a bright avenue leading back to first youth and days of hope in New York. To her, dancing meant that elaborate blend of tortuous attitudes and formal pirouettes that evolved out of Italy several hundred years ago and reached its apogee in Russia at the beginning of this century. She wanted to use herself on something she could believe in, and it seemed to her that the dance was woman’s interpretation of music; instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render Tschaikowsky and Stravinksi; and feet could be as eloquent in Chopiniana as voices in “The Ring.” At the bottom, it was something sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals; at the top it was Pavlova and art.
Once they were settled in an apartment back in New York, she plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen--four hours a day at bar exercises, attitudes, sauts, arabesques and pirouettes. It became the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but she was a natural dancer with a fine body--and that lovely face.
Bill encouraged it; when she was ready he was going to build the first real American ballet around her. There were even times when he envied her her absorption; for affairs in his own line were more difficult since they had come home. For one thing, he had made many enemies in those early days of self-confidence; there were exaggerated stories of his drinking and of his being hard on actors and difficult to work with.
It was against him that he had always been unable to save money and must beg a backing for each play. Then, too, in a curious way, he was intelligent, as he was brave enough to prove in several uncommercial ventures, but he had no Theatre Guild behind him, and what money he lost was charged against him.
There were successes, too, but he worked harder for them, or it seemed so, for he had begun to pay a price for his irregular life. He always intended to take a rest or give up his incessant cigarettes, but there was so much competition now--new men coming up, with new reputations for infallibility--and besides, he wasn’t used to regularity. He liked to do his work in those great spurts, inspired by black coffee, that seem so inevitable in show business, but which took so much out of a man after thirty. He had come to lean, in a way, on Emmy’s fine health and vitality. They were always together, and if he felt a vague dissatisfaction that he had grown to need her more than she needed him, there was always the hope that things would break better for him next month, next season.
Coming home from ballet school one November evening, Emmy swung her little gray bag, pulled her hat far down over her still damp hair, and gave herself up to pleasant speculation. For a month she had been aware of people who had come to the studio especially to watch her--she was ready to dance. Once she had worked just as hard and for as long a time on something else--her relations with Bill--only to reach a climax of misery and despair, but here there was nothing to fail her except herself. Yet even now she felt a little rash in thinking: “Now it’s come. I’m going to be happy.”
She hurried, for something had come up today that she must talk over with Bill.
Finding him in the living room, she called him to come back while she dressed. She began to talk without looking around:
“Listen what happened!” Her voice was loud, to compete with the water running in the tub. “Paul Makova wants me to dance with him at the Metropolitan this season; only it’s not sure, so it’s a secret--even I’m not supposed to know.”
“That’s great.”
“The only thing is whether it wouldn’t be better for me to make a début abroad? Anyhow Donilof says I’m ready to appear. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“I’ve got something on my mind. I’ll tell you about it later. Go on.”
“That’s all, dear. If you still feel like going to Germany for a month, like you said, Donilof would arrange a début for me in Berlin, but I�
��d rather open here and dance with Paul Makova. Just imagine--” She broke off, feeling suddenly through the thick skin of her elation how abstracted he was. “Tell me what you’ve got on your mind.”
“I went to Doctor Kearns this afternoon.”
“What did he say?” Her mind was still singing with her own happiness. Bill’s intermittent attacks of hypochondria had long ceased to worry her.
“I told him about that blood this morning, and he said what he said last year--it was probably a little broken vein in my throat. But since I’d been coughing and was worried, perhaps it was safer to take an X-ray and clear the matter up. Well, we cleared it up all right. My left lung is practically gone.”
“Bill!”
“Luckily there are no spots on the other.”
She waited, horribly afraid.
“It’s come at a bad time for me,” he went on steadily, “but it’s got to be faced. He thinks I ought to go to the Adirondacks or to Denver for the winter, and his idea is Denver. That way it’ll probably clear up in five or six months.”
“Of course we’ll have to--” she stopped suddenly.
“I wouldn’t expect you to go--especially if you have this opportunity.”
“Of course I’ll go,” she said quickly. “Your health comes first. We’ve always gone everywhere together.”
“Oh, no.”
“Why, of course.” She made her voice strong and decisive. “We’ve always been together. I couldn’t stay here without you. When do you have to go?”
“As soon as possible. I went in to see Brancusi to find out if he wanted to take over the Richmond piece, but he didn’t seem enthusiastic.” His face hardened. “Of course there won’t be anything else for the present, but I’ll have enough, with what’s owing--”
“Oh, if I was only making some money!” Emmy cried. “You work so hard, and here I’ve been spending two hundred dollars a week for just my dancing lessons alone--more than I’ll be able to earn for years.”
“Of course in six months I’ll be as well as ever--he says.”
“Sure, dearest; we’ll get you well. We’ll start as soon as we can.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 221