“Why, Michael,” she cried, “how perfectly swell! I can’t tell you how gladI am. I’ve always thought you were the sort of person who ought to have money.”
“Yes, just too late to make a difference.”
The revolving door from the street groaned around and Hamilton Rutherford came into the lobby. His face was flushed, his eyes were restless and impatient.
“Hello, darling; hello, Mr. Curly.” He bent and kissed Caroline. “I broke away for a minute to find out if I had any telegrams. I see you’ve got them there.” Taking them from her, he remarked to Curly, “That was an odd business there in the bar, wasn’t it? Especially as I understand some of you had a joke fixed up in the same line.” He opened one of the telegrams, closed it and turned to Caroline with the divided expression of a man carrying two things in his head at once.
“A girl I haven’t seen for two years turned up,” he said. “It seemed to be some clumsy form of blackmail, for I haven’t and never have had any sort of obligation toward her whatever.”
“What happened?”
“The head barman had a Sûreté Générale man there in ten minutes and it was settled in the hall. The French blackmail laws make ours look like a sweet wish, and I gather they threw a scare into her that she’ll remember. But it seems wiser to tell you.”
“Are you implying that I mentioned the matter?” said Michael stiffly.
“No,” Rutherford said slowly. “No, you were just going to be on hand. And since you’re here, I’ll tell you some news that will interest you even more.”
He handed Michael one telegram and opened the other.
“This is in code,” Michael said.
“So is this. But I’ve got to know all the words pretty well this last week. The two of them together mean that I’m due to start life all over.”
Michael saw Caroline’s face grow a shade paler, but she sat quiet as a mouse.
“It was a mistake and I stuck to it too long,” continued Rutherford. “So you see I don’t have all the luck, Mr. Curly. By the way, they tell me you’ve come into money.”
“Yes,” said Michael.
“There we are, then.” Rutherford turned to Caroline. “You understand, darling, that I’m not joking or exaggerating. I’ve lost almost every cent I had and I’m starting life over.”
Two pairs of eyes were regarding her--Rutherford’s noncommittal and unrequiring, Michael’s hungry, tragic, pleading. In a minute she had raised herself from the chair and with a little cry thrown herself into Hamilton Rutherford’s arms.
“Oh, darling,” she cried, “what does it matter! It’s better; I like it better, honestly I do! I want to start that way; I want to! Oh, please don’t worry or be sad even for a minute!”
“All right, baby,” said Rutherford. His hand stroked her hair gently for a moment; then he took his arm from around her.
“I promised to join the party for an hour,” he said. “So I’ll say good night, and I want you to go to bed soon and get a good sleep. Good night, Mr. Curly. I’m sorry to have let you in for all these financial matters.”
But Michael had already picked up his hat and cane. “I’ll go along with you,” he said.
III
It was such a fine morning. Michael’s cutaway hadn’t been delivered, so he felt rather uncomfortable passing before the cameras and moving-picture machines in front of the little church on the Avenue George-Cinq.
It was such a clean, new church that it seemed unforgivable not to be dressed properly, and Michael, white and shaky after a sleepless night, decided to stand in the rear. From there he looked at the back of Hamilton Rutherford, and the lacy, filmy back of Caroline, and the fat back of George Packman, which looked unsteady, as if it wanted to lean against the bride and groom.
The ceremony went on for a long time under the gay flags and pennons overhead, under the thick beams of June sunlight slanting down through the tall windows upon the well-dressed people.
As the procession, headed by the bride and groom, started down the aisle, Michael realized with alarm he was just where everyone would dispense with their parade stiffness, become informal and speak to him.
So it turned out. Rutherford and Caroline spoke first to him; Rutherford grim with the strain of being married, and Caroline lovelier than he had ever seen her, floating all softly down through the friends and relatives of her youth, down through the past and forward to the future by the sunlit door.
Michael managed to murmur, “Beautiful, simply beautiful,” and then other people passed and spoke to him--old Mrs. Dandy, straight from her sickbed and looking remarkably well, or carrying it off like the very fine old lady she was; and Rutherford’s father and mother, ten years divorced, but walking side by side and looking made for each other and proud. Then all Caroline’s sisters and their husbands and her little nephews in Eton suits, and then a long parade, all speaking to Michael because he was still standing paralyzed just at that point where the procession broke.
He wondered what would happen now. Cards had been issued for a reception at the George-Cinq; an expensive enough place, heaven knew. Would Rutherford try to go through with that on top of those disastrous telegrams? Evidently, for the procession outside was streaming up there through the June morning, three by three and four by four. On the corner the long dresses of girls, five abreast, fluttered many-colored in the wind. Girls had become gossamer again, perambulatory flora; such lovely fluttering dresses in the bright noon wind.
Michael needed a drink; he couldn’t face that reception line without a drink. Diving into a side doorway of the hotel, he asked for the bar, whither a chasseur led him through half a kilometer of new American-looking passages.
But--how did it happen?--the bar was full. There were ten--fifteen men and two--four girls, all from the wedding, all needing a drink. There were cocktails and champagne in the bar; Rutherford’s cocktails and champagne, as it turned out, for he had engaged the whole bar and the ballroom and the two great reception rooms and all the stairways leading up and down, and windows looking out over the whole square block of Paris. By and by Michael went and joined the long, slow drift of the receiving line. Through a flowery mist of “Such a lovely wedding,” “My dear, you were simply lovely,” “You’re a lucky man, Rutherford” he passed down the line. When Michael came to Caroline, she took a single step forward and kissed him on the lips, but he felt no contact in the kiss; it was unreal and he floated on away from it. Old Mrs. Dandy, who had always liked him, held his hand for a minute and thanked him for the flowers he had sent when he heard she was ill.
“I’m so sorry not to have written; you know, we old ladies are grateful for--” The flowers, the fact that she had not written, the wedding--Michael saw that they all had the same relative importance to her now; she had married off five other children and seen two of the marriages go to pieces, and this scene, so poignant, so confusing to Michael, appeared to her simply a familiar charade in which she had played her part before.
A buffet luncheon with champagne was already being served at small tables and there was an orchestra playing in the empty ballroom. Michael sat down with Jebby West; he was still a little embarrassed at not wearing a morning coat, but he perceived now that he was not alone in the omission and felt better. “Wasn’t Caroline divine?” Jebby West said. “So entirely self-possessed. I asked her this morning if she wasn’t a little nervous at stepping off like this. And she said, ‘Why should I be? I’ve been after him for two years, and now I’m just happy, that’s all.’“
“It must be true,” said Michael gloomily.
“What?”
“What you just said.”
He had been stabbed, but, rather to his distress, he did not feel the wound.
He asked Jebby to dance. Out on the floor, Rutherford’s father and mother were dancing together.
“It makes me a little sad, that,” she said. “Those two hadn’t met for years; both of them were married again and she divorced again. She went to the sta
tion to meet him when he came over for Caroline’s wedding, and invited him to stay at her house in the Avenue du Bois with a whole lot of other people, perfectly proper, but he was afraid his wife would hear about it and not like it, so he went to a hotel. Don’t you think that’s sort of sad?”
An hour or so later Michael realized suddenly that it was afternoon. In one corner of the ballroom an arrangement of screens like a moving-picture stage had been set up and photographers were taking official pictures of the bridal party. The bridal party, still as death and pale as wax under the bright lights, appeared, to the dancers circling the modulated semidarkness of the ballroom, like those jovial or sinister groups that one comes upon in The Old Mill at an amusement park.
After the bridal party had been photographed, there was a group of the ushers; then the bridesmaids, the families, the children. Later, Caroline, active and excited, having long since abandoned the repose implicit in her flowing dress and great bouquet, came and plucked Michael off the floor.
“Now we’ll have them take one of just old friends.” Her voice implied that this was best, most intimate of all. “Come here, Jebby, George--not you, Hamilton; this is just my friends--Sally--”
A little after that, what remained of formality disappeared and the hours flowed easily down the profuse stream of champagne. In the modern fashion, Hamilton Rutherford sat at the table with his arm about an old girl of his and assured his guests, which included not a few bewildered but enthusiastic Europeans, that the party was not nearly at an end; it was to reassemble at Zelli’s after midnight. Michael saw Mrs. Dandy, not quite over her illness, rise to go and become caught in polite group after group, and he spoke of it to one of her daughters, who thereupon forcibly abducted her mother and called her car. Michael felt very considerate and proud of himself after having done this, and drank much more champagne.
“It’s amazing,” George Packman was telling him enthusiastically. “This show will cost Ham about five thousand dollars, and I understand they’ll be just about his last. But did he countermand a bottle of champagne or a flower? Not he! He happens to have it--that young man. Do you know that T. G. Vance offered him a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year ten minutes before the wedding this morning? In another year he’ll be back with the millionaires.”
The conversation was interrupted by a plan to carry Rutherford out on communal shoulders--a plan which six of them put into effect, and then stood in the four-o’clock sunshine waving good-by to the bride and groom. But there must have been a mistake somewhere, for five minutes later Michael saw both bride and groom descending the stairway to the reception, each with a glass of champagne held defiantly on high.
“This is our way of doing things,” he thought. “Generous and fresh and free; a sort of Virginia-plantation hospitality, but at a different pace now, nervous as a ticker tape.”
Standing unself-consciously in the middle of the room to see which was the American ambassador, he realized with a start that he hadn’t really thought of Caroline for hours. He looked about him with a sort of alarm, and then he saw her across the room, very bright and young, and radiantly happy. He saw Rutherford near her, looking at her as if he could never look long enough, and as Michael watched them they seemed to recede as he had wished them to do that day in the Rue de Castiglione--recede and fade off into joys and griefs of their own, into the years that would take the toll of Rutherford’s fine pride and Caroline’s young, moving beauty; fade far away, so that now he could scarcely see them, as if they were shrouded in something as misty as her white, billowing dress.
Michael was cured. The ceremonial function, with its pomp and its revelry, had stood for a sort of initiation into a life where even his regret could not follow them. All the bitterness melted out of him suddenly and the world reconstituted itself out of the youth and happiness that was all around him, profligate as the spring sunshine. He was trying to remember which one of the bridesmaids he had made a date to dine with tonight as he walked forward to bid Hamilton and Caroline Rutherford good-by.
THE BOWL
Saturday Evening Post (21 January 1928)
There was a man in my class at Princeton who never went to football games. He spent his Saturday afternoons delving for minutiae about Greek athletics and the somewhat fixed battles between Christians and wild beasts under the Antonines. Lately--several years out of college--he has discovered football players and is making etchings of them in the manner of the late George Bellows. But he was once unresponsive to the very spectacle at his door, and I suspect the originality of his judgments on what is beautiful, what is remarkable and what is fun.
I reveled in football, as audience, amateur statistician and foiled participant--for I had played in prep school, and once there was a headline in the school newspaper: “Deering and Mullins Star Against Taft in Stiff Game Saturday.” When I came in to lunch after the battle the school stood up and clapped and the visiting coach shook hands with me and prophesied--incorrectly--that I was going to be heard from. The episode is laid away in the most pleasant lavender of my past. That year I grew very tall and thin, and when at Princeton the following fall I looked anxiously over the freshman candidates and saw the polite disregard with which they looked back at me, I realized that that particular dream was over. Keene said he might make me into a very fair pole vaulter--and he did--but it was a poor substitute; and my terrible disappointment that I wasn’t going to be a great football player was probably the foundation of my friendship with Dolly Harlan. I want to begin this story about Dolly with a little rehashing of the Yale game up at New Haven, sophomore year.
Dolly was started at halfback; this was his first big game. I roomed with him and I had scented something peculiar about his state of mind, so I didn’t let him out of the corner of my eye during the whole first half. With field glasses I could see the expression on his face; it was strained and incredulous, as it had been the day of his father’s death, and it remained so, long after any nervousness had had time to wear off. I thought he was sick and wondered why Keene didn’t see and take him out; it wasn’t until later that I learned what was the matter.
It was the Yale Bowl. The size of it or the enclosed shape of it or the height of the sides had begun to get on Dolly’s nerves when the team practiced there the day before. In that practice he dropped one or two punts, for almost the first time in his life, and he began thinking it was because of the Bowl.
There is a new disease called agoraphobia--afraid of crowds--and another called siderodromophobia--afraid of railroad traveling--and my friend Doctor Glock, the psychoanalyst, would probably account easily for Dolly’s state of mind. But here’s what Dolly told me afterward:
“Yale would punt and I’d look up. The minute I looked up, the sides of that damn pan would seem to go shooting up too. Then when the ball started to come down, the sides began leaning forward and bending over me until I could see all the people on the top seats screaming at me and shaking their fists. At the last minute I couldn’t see the ball at all, but only the Bowl; every time it was just luck that I was under it and every time I juggled it in my hands.”
To go back to the game. I was in the cheering section with a good seat on the forty-yard line--good, that is, except when a very vague graduate, who had lost his friends and his hat, stood up in front of me at intervals and faltered, “Stob Ted Coy!” under the impression that we were watching a game played a dozen years before. When he realized finally that he was funny he began performing for the gallery and aroused a chorus of whistles and boos until he was dragged unwillingly under the stand.
It was a good game--what is known in college publications as a historic game. A picture of the team that played it now hangs in every barber shop in Princeton, with Captain Gottlieb in the middle wearing a white sweater, to show that they won a championship. Yale had had a poor season, but they had the breaks in the first quarter, which ended 3 to 0 in their favor.
Between quarters I watched Dolly. He walked around panting and
sucking a water bottle and still wearing that strained stunned expression. Afterward he told me he was saying over and over to himself: “I’ll speak to Roper. I’ll tell him between halves. I’ll tell him I can’t go through this any more.” Several times already he had felt an almost irresistible impulse to shrug his shoulders and trot off the field, for it was not only this unexpected complex about the Bowl; the truth was that Dolly fiercely and bitterly hated the game.
He hated the long, dull period of training, the element of personal conflict, the demand on his time, the monotony of the routine and the nervous apprehension of disaster just before the end. Sometimes he imagined that all the others detested it as much as he did, and fought down their aversion as he did and carried it around inside them like a cancer that they were afraid to recognize. Sometimes he imagined that a man here and there was about to tear off the mask and say, “Dolly, do you hate this lousy business as much as I do?”
His feeling had begun back at St. Regis’ School and he had come up to Princeton with the idea that he was through with football forever. But upper classmen from St. Regis kept stopping him on the campus and asking him how much he weighed, and he was nominated for vice president of our class on the strength of his athletic reputation--and it was autumn, with achievement in the air. He wandered down to freshman practice one afternoon, feeling oddly lost and dissatisfied, and smelled the turf and smelled the thrilling season. In half an hour he was lacing on a pair of borrowed shoes and two weeks later he was captain of the freshman team.
Once committed, he saw that he had made a mistake; he even considered leaving college. For, with his decision to play, Dolly assumed a moral responsibility, personal to him, besides. To lose or to let down, or to be let down, was simply intolerable to him. It offended his Scotch sense of waste. Why sweat blood for an hour with only defeat at the end?
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 262