For a moment he was tempted to say something conciliatory, but he saw it was no use. He was up against the maternal instinct, the same force that had sent little Helen through the storm with her injured cat.
At the station he bought a one-way ticket to Montgomery. The village was drab under the sky of a retarded spring, and as the train pulled out, it was odd to think that six months ago it had seemed to him as good a place as any other.
He was alone in the white section of the day coach; presently he felt for a bottle on his hip and drew it forth. “After all, a man of forty-five is entitled to more artificial courage when he starts over again.” He began thinking of Helen. “She hasn’t got any kin. I guess she’s my little girl now.”
He patted the bottle, then looked down at it as if in surprise.
“Well, we’ll have to put you aside for a while, old friend. Any cat that’s worth all that trouble and care is going to need a lot of grade-B milk.”
He settled down in his seat, looking out the window. In his memory of the terrible week the winds still sailed about him, came in as draughts through the corridor of the car — winds of the world — cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes — gray and black, expected or unforeseen, some from the sky, some from the caves of hell.
But he would not let them touch Helen again — if he could help it.
He dozed momentarily, but a haunting dream woke him:”Daddy stood over me and I stood over kitty.”
“All right, Helen,” he said aloud, for he often talked to himself, “I guess the old brig can keep afloat a little longer — in any wind.”
A SHORT TRIP HOME
Author’s Note: In a moment of hasty misjudgment a whole paragraph of description was lifted out of this tale where it originated, and properly belongs, and applied to quite a different character in a novel of mine. I have ventured nonetheless to leave it here, even at the risk of seeming to serve warmed-over fare.
I was near her, for I had lingered behind in order to get the short walk with her from the living room to the front door. That was a lot, for she had flowered suddenly and I, being a man and only a year older, hadn’t flowered at all, had scarcely dared to come near her in the week we’d been home. Nor was I going to say anything in that walk of ten feet, or touch her; but I had a vague hope she’d do something, give a gay little performance of some sort, personal only in so far as we were alone together.
She had bewitchment suddenly in the twinkle of short hairs on her neck, in the sure, clear confidence that at about eighteen begins to deepen and sing in attractive American girls. The lamp light shopped in the yellow strands of her hair.
Already she was sliding into another world--the world of Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart waiting for us now in the car. In another year she would pass beyond me forever.
As I waited, feeling the others outside in the snowy night, feeling the excitement of Christmas week and the excitement of Ellen here, blooming away, filling the room with “sex appeal”--a wretched phrase to express a quality that isn’t like that at all--a maid came in from the dining room, spoke to Ellen quietly and handed her a note. Ellen read it and her eyes faded down, as when the current grows weak on rural circuits, and smouldered off into space. Then she gave me an odd look--in which I probably didn’t show--and without a word, followed the maid into the dining room and beyond. I sat turning over the pages of a magazine for a quarter of an hour.
Joe Jelke came in, red-faced from the cold, his white silk muffler gleaming at the neck of his fur coat. He was a senior at New Haven, I was a sophomore. He was prominent, a member of Scroll and Keys, and, in my eyes, very distinguished and handsome.
“Isn’t Ellen coming?”
“I don’t know,” I answered discreetly. “She was all ready.”
“Ellen!” he called. “Ellen!”
He had left the front door open behind him and a great cloud of frosty air rolled in from outside. He went halfway up the stairs--he was a familiar in the house--and called again, till Mrs. Baker came to the banister and said that Ellen was below. Then the maid, a little excited, appeared in the dining-room door.
“Mr. Jelke,” she called in a low voice.
Joe’s face fell as he turned toward her, sensing bad news.
“Miss Ellen says for you to go on to the party. She’ll come later.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She can’t come now. She’ll come later.”
He hesitated, confused. It was the last big dance of vacation, and he was mad about Ellen. He had tried to give her a ring for Christmas, and failing that, got her to accept a gold mesh bag that must have cost two hundred dollars. He wasn’t the only one--there were three or four in the same wild condition, and all in the ten days she’d been home--but his chance came first, for he was rich and gracious and at that moment the “desirable” boy of St. Paul. To me it seemed impossible that she could prefer another, but the rumor was she’d described Joe as much too perfect. I suppose he lacked mystery for her, and when a man is up against that with a young girl who isn’t thinking of the practical side of marriage yet--well--.
“She’s in the kitchen,” Joe said angrily.
“No, she’s not.” The maid was defiant and a little scared.
“She is.”
“She went out the back way, Mr. Jelke.”
“I’m going to see.”
I followed him. The Swedish servants washing dishes looked up sideways at our approach and an interested crashing of pans marked our passage through. The storm door, unbolted, was flapping in the wind and as we walked out into the snowy yard we saw the tail light of a car turn the corner at the end of the back alley.
“I’m going after her,” Joe said slowly. “I don’t understand this at all.”
I was too awed by the calamity to argue. We hurried to his car and drove in a fruitless, despairing zigzag all over the residence section, peering into every machine on the streets. It was half an hour before the futility of the affair began to dawn upon him--St. Paul is a city of almost three hundred thousand people--and Jim Cathcart reminded him that we had another girl to stop for. Like a wounded animal he sank into a melancholy mass of fur in the corner, from which position he jerked upright every few minutes and waved himself backward and forward a little in protest and despair.
Jim’s girl was ready and impatient, but after what had happened her impatience didn’t seem important. She looked lovely though. That’s one thing about Christmas vacation--the excitement of growth and change and adventure in foreign parts transforming the people you’ve known all your life. Joe Jelke was polite to her in a daze--he indulged in one burst of short, loud, harsh laughter by way of conversation--and we drove to the hotel.
The chauffeur approached it on the wrong side--the side on which the line of cars was not putting forth guests--and because of that we came suddenly upon Ellen Baker just getting out of a small coupé. Even before we came to a stop, Joe Jelke had jumped excitedly from the car.
Ellen turned toward us, a faintly distracted look--perhaps of surprise, but certainly not of alarm--in her face; in fact, she didn’t seem very aware of us. Joe approached her with a stern, dignified, injured and, I thought, just exactly correct reproof in his expression. I followed.
Seated in the coupé--he had not dismounted to help Ellen out--was a hard thin-faced man of about thirty-five with an air of being scarred, and a slight sinister smile. His eyes were a sort of taunt to the whole human family--they were the eyes of an animal, sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species. They were helpless yet brutal, unhopeful yet confident. It was as if they felt themselves powerless to originate activity, but infinitely capable of profiting by a single gesture of weakness in another.
Vaguely I placed him as one of the sort of men whom I had been conscious of from my earliest youth as “hanging around”--leaning with one elbow on the counters of tobacco stores, watching, through heaven knows what small chink of the mind, the people who hurried in and out. Intimate to garages, whe
re he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops and to the lobbies of theatres--in such places, anyhow, I placed the type, if type it was, that he reminded me of. Sometimes his face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons, and I had always from earliest boyhood thrown a nervous glance toward the dim borderland where he stood, and seen him watching me and despising me. Once, in a dream, he had taken a few steps toward me, jerking his head back and muttering: “Say, kid” in what was intended to be a reassuring voice, and I had broken for the door in terror. This was that sort of man.
Joe and Ellen faced each other silently; she seemed, as I have said, to be in a daze. It was cold, but she didn’t notice that her coat had blown open; Joe reached out and pulled it together, and automatically she clutched it with her hand.
Suddenly the man in the coupé, who had been watching them silently, laughed. It was a bare laugh, done with the breath--just a noisy jerk of the head--but it was an insult if I had ever heard one; definite and not to be passed over. I wasn’t surprised when Joe, who was quick tempered, turned to him angrily and said:
“What’s your trouble?”
The man waited a moment, his eyes shifting and yet staring, and always seeing. Then he laughed again in the same way. Ellen stirred uneasily.
“Who is this--this--” Joe’s voice trembled with annoyance.
“Look out now,” said the man slowly.
Joe turned to me.
“Eddie, take Ellen and Catherine in, will you?” he said quickly. . . . “Ellen, go with Eddie.”
“Look out now,” the man repeated.
Ellen made a little sound with her tongue and teeth, but she didn’t resist when I took her arm and moved her toward the side door of the hotel. It struck me as odd that she should be so helpless, even to the point of acquiescing by her silence in this imminent trouble.
“Let it go, Joe!” I called back over my shoulder. “Come inside!”
Ellen, pulling against my arm, hurried us on. As we were caught up into the swinging doors I had the impression that the man was getting out of his coupé.
Ten minutes later, as I waited for the girls outside the women’s dressing-room, Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart stepped out of the elevator. Joe was very white, his eyes were heavy and glazed, there was a trickle of dark blood on his forehead and on his white muffler. Jim had both their hats in his hand.
“He hit Joe with brass knuckles,” Jim said in a low voice. “Joe was out cold for a minute or so. I wish you’d send a bell boy for some witch-hazel and court-plaster.”
It was late and the hall was deserted; brassy fragments of the dance below reached us as if heavy curtains were being blown aside and dropping back into place. When Ellen came out I took her directly downstairs. We avoided the receiving line and went into a dim room set with scraggly hotel palms where couples sometimes sat out during the dance; there I told her what had happened.
“It was Joe’s own fault,” she said, surprisingly. “I told him not to interfere.”
This wasn’t true. She had said nothing, only uttered one curious little click of impatience.
“You ran out the back door and disappeared for almost an hour,” I protested. “Then you turned up with a hard-looking customer who laughed in Joe’s face.”
“A hard-looking customer,” she repeated, as if tasting the sound of the words.
“Well, wasn’t he? Where on earth did you get hold of him, Ellen?”
“On the train,” she answered. Immediately she seemed to regret this admission. “You’d better stay out of things that aren’t your business, Eddie. You see what happened to Joe.”
Literally I gasped. To watch her, seated beside me, immaculately glowing, her body giving off wave after wave of freshness and delicacy--and to hear her talk like that.
“But that man’s a thug!” I cried. “No girl could be safe with him. He used brass knuckles on Joe--brass knuckles!”
“Is that pretty bad?”
She asked this as she might have asked such a question a few years ago. She looked at me at last and really wanted an answer; for a moment it was as if she were trying to recapture an attitude that had almost departed; then she hardened again. I say “hardened,” for I began to notice that when she was concerned with this man her eyelids fell a little, shutting other things--everything else--out of view.
That was a moment I might have said something, I suppose, but in spite of everything, I couldn’t light into her. I was too much under the spell of her beauty and its success. I even began to find excuses for her--perhaps that man wasn’t what he appeared to be; or perhaps--more romantically--she was involved with him against her will to shield some one else. At this point people began to drift into the room and come up to speak to us. We couldn’t talk any more, so we went in and bowed to the chaperones. Then I gave her up to the bright restless sea of the dance, where she moved in an eddy of her own among the pleasant islands of colored favors set out on tables and the south winds from the brasses moaning across the hall. After a while I saw Joe Jelke sitting in a corner with a strip of court-plaster on his forehead watching Ellen as if she herself had struck him down, but I didn’t go up to him. I felt queer myself--like I feel when I wake up after sleeping through an afternoon, strange and portentous, as if something had gone on in the interval that changed the values of everything and that I didn’t see.
The night slipped on through successive phases of cardboard horns, amateur tableaux and flashlights for the morning papers. Then was the grand march and supper, and about two o’clock some of the committee dressed up as revenue agents pinched the party, and a facetious newspaper was distributed, burlesquing the events of the evening. And all the time out of the corner of my eye I watched the shining orchid on Ellen’s shoulder as it moved like Stuart’s plume about the room. I watched it with a definite foreboding until the last sleepy groups had crowded into the elevators, and then, bundled to the eyes in great shapeless fur coats, drifted out into the clear dry Minnesota night.
II
There is a sloping mid-section of our city which lies between the residence quarter on the hill and the business district on the level of the river. It is a vague part of town, broken by its climb into triangles and odd shapes--there are names like Seven Corners--and I don’t believe a dozen people could draw an accurate map of it, though every one traversed it by trolley, auto or shoe leather twice a day. And though it was a busy section, it would be hard for me to name the business that comprised its activity. There were always long lines of trolley cars waiting to start somewhere; there was a big movie theatre and many small ones with posters of Hoot Gibson and Wonder Dogs and Wonder Horses outside; there were small stores with “Old King Brady” and “The Liberty Boys of ‘76” in the windows, and marbles, cigarettes and candy inside; and--one definite place at least--a fancy costumer whom we all visited at least once a year. Some time during boyhood I became aware that one side of a certain obscure street there were bawdy houses, and all through the district were pawnshops, cheap jewellers, small athletic clubs and gymnasiums and somewhat too blatantly run-down saloons.
The morning after the Cotillion Club party, I woke up late and lazy, with the happy feeling that for a day or two more there was no chapel, no classes--nothing to do but wait for another party tonight. It was crisp and bright--one of those days when you forget how cold it is until your cheek freezes--and the events of the evening before seemed dim and far away. After luncheon I started downtown on foot through a light, pleasant snow of small flakes that would probably fall all afternoon, and I was about half through that halfway section of town--so far as I know, there’s no inclusive name for it--when suddenly whatever idle thought was in my head blew away like a hat and I began thinking hard of Ellen Baker. I began worrying about her as I’d never worried about anything outside myself before. I began to loiter, with an instinct to go up on the hill again and find her and talk to her; then I remembered that she was at a tea, and I went on again, but still thinking of her, and har
der than ever. Right then the affair opened up again.
It was snowing, I said, and it was four o’clock on a December afternoon, when there is a promise of darkness in the air and the street lamps are just going on. I passed a combination pool parlor and restaurant, with a stove loaded with hot-dogs in the window, and a few loungers hanging around the door. The lights were on inside--not bright lights but just a few pale yellow high up on the ceiling--and the glow they threw out into the frosty dusk wasn’t bright enough to tempt you to stare inside. As I went past, thinking hard of Ellen all this time, I took in the quartet of loafers out of the corner of my eye. I hadn’t gone half a dozen steps down the street when one of them called to me, not by name but in a way clearly intended for my ear. I thought it was a tribute to my raccoon coat and paid no attention, but a moment later whoever it was called to me again in a peremptory voice. I was annoyed and turned around. There, standing in the group not ten feet away and looking at me with the half-sneer on his face with which he’d looked at Joe Jelke, was the scarred, thin-faced man of the night before.
He had on a black fancy-cut coat, buttoned up to his neck as if he were cold. His hands were deep in his pockets and he wore a derby and high button shoes. I was startled, and for a moment I hesitated, but I was most of all angry, and knowing that I was quicker with my hands than Joe Jelke, I took a tentative step back toward him. The other men weren’t looking at me--I don’t think they saw me at all--but I knew that this one recognized me; there was nothing casual about his look, no mistake.
“Here I am. What are you going to do about it?” his eyes seemed to say.
I took another step toward him and he laughed soundlessly, but with active contempt, and drew back into the group. I followed. I was going to speak to him--I wasn’t sure what I was going to say--but when I came up he had either changed his mind and backed off, or else he wanted me to follow him inside, for he had slipped off and the three men watched my intent approach without curiosity. They were the same kind--sporty, but, unlike him, smooth rather than truculent; I didn’t find any personal malice in their collective glance.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 229