In all events, the Schwartzes were going home. For three years they had lived in hotels--in Paris, Florence, St. Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz. Everywhere there had been schools--always new schools--and both children spoke in perfect French and scrawny fragments of Italian. Fifi had grown from a large-featured child of fourteen to a beauty; John had grown into something rather dismal and lost. Both of them played bridge, and somewhere Fifi had picked up tap dancing. Mrs. Schwartz felt that it was all somehow unsatisfactory, but she did not know why. So, two days after Fifi’s party, she announced that they would pack their trunks, go to Paris for some new fall clothes and then go home.
That same afternoon Fifi came to the bar to get her phonograph, left there the night of her party. She sat up on a high stool and talked to the barman while she drank a ginger ale.
“Mother wants to take me back to America, but I’m not going.”
“What will you do?”
“Oh, I’ve got a little money of my own, and then I may get married.” She sipped her ginger ale moodily.
“I hear you had some money stolen,” he remarked. “How did it happen?”
“Well, Count Borowki thinks the man got into the apartment early and hid in between the two doors between us and the next apartment. Then, when we were asleep, he took the money and walked out.”
“Ha!”
Fifi sighed. “Well, you probably won’t see me in the bar any more.”
“We’ll miss you, Miss Schwartz.”
Mr. Weicker put his head in the door, withdrew it and then came in slowly.
“Hello,” said Fifi coldly.
“A-ha, young lady.” He waggled his finger at her with affected facetiousness. “Didn’t you know I spoke to your mother about your coming in to the bar? It’s merely for your own good.”
“I’m just having a ginger ale,” she said indignantly.
“But no one can tell what you’re having. It might be whisky or what not. It is the other guests who complain.”
She stared at him indignantly--the picture was so different from her own--of Fifi as the lively center of the hotel, of Fifi in clothes that ravished the eye, standing splendid and unattainable amid groups of adoring men. Suddenly Mr. Weicker’s obsequious, but hostile, face infuriated her.
“We’re getting out of this hotel!” she flared up. “I never saw such a narrow-minded bunch of people in my life; always criticizing everybody and making up terrible things about them, no matter what they do themselves. I think it would be a good thing if the hotel caught fire and burned down with all the nasty cats in it.”
Banging down her glass, she seized the phonograph case and stalked out of the bar.
In the lobby a porter sprang to help her, but she shook her head and hurried on through the salon, where she came upon Count Borowki.
“Oh, I’m so furious!” she cried. “I never saw so many old cats! I just told Mr. Weicker what I thought of them!”
“Did someone dare to speak rudely to you?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’re going away.”
“Going away!” He started. “When?”
“Right away. I don’t want to, but mamma says we’ve got to.”
“I must talk to you seriously about this,” he said. “I just called your room. I have brought you a little engagement present.”
Her spirits returned as she took the handsome gold-and-ivory cigarette case engraved with her initials.
“How lovely!”
“Now, listen; what you tell me makes it more important that I talk to you immediately. I have just received another letter from my mother. They have chosen a girl for me in Budapest--a lovely girl, rich and beautiful and of my own rank who would be very happy at the match, but I am in love with you. I would never have thought it possible, but I have lost my heart to an American.”
“Well, why not?” said Fifi, indignantly. “They call girls beautiful here if they have one good feature. And then, if they’ve got nice eyes or hair, they’re usually bow-legged or haven’t got nice teeth.”
“There is no flaw or fault in you.”
“Oh, yes,” said Fifi modestly. “I got a sort of big nose. Would you know I was Jewish?”
With a touch of impatience, Borowki came back to his argument: “So they are bringing pressure to bear for me to marry. Questions of inheritance depend on it.”
“Besides, my forehead is too high,” observed Fifi abstractedly. “It’s so high it’s got sort of wrinkles in it. I knew an awfully funny boy who used to call me ‘the highbrow.’“
“So the sensible thing,” pursued Borowki, “is for us to marry immediately. I tell you frankly there are other American girls not far from here who wouldn’t hesitate.”
“Mamma would be about crazy,” Fifi said.
“I’ve thought about that too,” he answered her eagerly. “Don’t tell her. If we drove over the border tonight we could be married tomorrow morning. Then we come back and you show your mother the little gilt coronets painted on your luggage. My own personal opinion is that she’ll be delighted. There you are, off her hands, with social position second to none in Europe. In my opinion, your mother has probably thought of it already, and may be saying to herself: ‘Why don’t those two young people just take matters into their own hands and save me all the fuss and expense of a wedding?’ I think she would like us for being so hard-boiled.”
He broke off impatiently as Lady Capps-Karr, emerging from the dining room with her Pekingese, surprised them by stopping at their table. Count Borowki was obliged to introduce them. As he had not known of the Marquis Kinkallow’s defection the other evening, nor that His Lordship had taken a wound to Milan the following morning, he had no suspicion of what was coming.
“I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz,” said the Englishwoman in a clear, concise voice. “And of course I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz’s clothes.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Fifi.
“No, thank you.” She turned to Borowki. “Miss Schwartz’s clothes make us all appear somewhat drab. I always refuse to dress elaborately in hotels. It seems such rotten taste. Don’t you think so?”
“I think people always ought to look nice,” said Fifi, flushing.
“Naturally. I merely said that I consider it rotten taste to dress elaborately, save in the houses of one’s friends.”
She said “Good-by-e-e” to Borowki and moved on, emitting a mouthed cloud of smoke and a faint fragrance of whisky.
The insult had been as stinging as the crack of a whip, and as Fifi’s pride of her wardrobe was swept away from her, she heard all the comments that she had not heard, in one great resurgent whisper. Then they said that she wore her clothes here because she had nowhere else to wear them. That was why the Howard girl considered her vulgar and did not care to know her.
For an instant her anger flamed up against her mother for not telling her, but she saw that her mother did not know either.
“I think she’s so dowdy,” she forced herself to say aloud, but inside she was quivering. “What is she, anyhow? I mean, how high is her title? Very high?”
“She’s the widow of a baronet.”
“Is that high?” Fifi’s face was rigid. “Higher than a countess?”
“No. A countess is much higher--infinitely higher.” He moved his chair closer and began to talk intently.
Half an hour later Fifi got up with indecision on her face.
“At seven you’ll let me know definitely,” Borowki said, “and I’ll be ready with a car at ten.”
Fifi nodded. He escorted her across the room and saw her vanish into a dark hall mirror in the direction of the lift.
As he turned away, Lady Capps-Karr, sitting alone over her coffee, spoke to him:
“I want a word with you. Did you, by some slip of the tongue, suggest to Weicker that in case of difficulties I would guarantee your bills?”
Borowki flushed. “I may have said something like that, but--”
“Well, I told him the truth--that I never laid eyes on you until a fortnight ago.”
“I, naturally, turned to a person of equal rank--”
“Equal rank! What cheek! The only titles left are English titles. I must ask you not to make use of my name again.”
He bowed. “Such inconveniences will soon be for me a thing of the past.”
“Are you getting off with that vulgar little American?”
“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly.
“Don’t be angry. I’ll stand you a whisky-and-soda. I’m getting in shape for Bopes Kinkallow, who’s just telephoned he’s tottering back here.”
Meanwhile, upstairs, Mrs. Schwartz was saying to Fifi: “Now that I know we’re going away I’m getting excited about it. It will be so nice seeing the Hirsts and Mrs. Bell and Amy and Marjorie and Gladys again, and the new baby. You’ll be happy, too; you’ve forgotten how they’re like. You and Gladys used to be great friends. And Marjorie--”
“Oh, mamma, don’t talk about it,” cried Fifi miserably. “I can’t go back.”
“We needn’t stay. If John was in a college like his father wanted, we could, maybe, go to California.”
But for Fifi all the romance of life was rolled up into the last three impressionable years in Europe. She remembered the tall guardsmen in Rome and the old Spaniard who had first made her conscious of her beauty at the Villa d’Este at Como, and the French naval aviator at St. Raphael who had dropped her a note from his plane into their garden, and the feeling that she had sometimes, when she danced with Borowki, that he was dressed in gleaming boots and a white-furred dolman.
She had seen many American moving pictures and she knew that the girls there always married the faithful boy from the old home town, and after that there was nothing.
“I won’t go,” she said aloud.
Her mother turned with a pile of clothes in her arms. “What talk is that from you, Fifi? You think I could leave you here alone?” As Fifi didn’t answer, she continued, with an air of finality: “That talk doesn’t sound nice from you. Now you stop fretting and saying such things, and get me this list of things uptown.”
But Fifi had decided. It was Borowki, then, and the chance of living fully and adventurously. He could go into the diplomatic service, and then one day when they encountered Lady Capps-Karr and Miss Howard at a legation ball, she could make audible the observation that for the moment seemed so necessary to her: “I hate people who always look as if they were going to or from a funeral.”
“So run along,” her mother continued. “And look in at that café and see if John is up there, and take him to tea.”
Fifi accepted the shopping list mechanically. Then she went into her room and wrote a little note to Borowki which she would leave with the concierge on the way out.
Coming out, she saw her mother struggling with a trunk, and felt terribly sorry for her. But there were Amy and Gladys in America, and Fifi hardened herself.
She walked out and down the stairs, remembering halfway that in her distraction she had omitted an official glance in the mirror; but there was a large mirror on the wall just outside the grand salon, and she stopped in front of that instead.
She was beautiful--she learned that once more, but now it made her sad. She wondered whether the dress she wore this afternoon was in bad taste, whether it would minister to the superiority of Miss Howard or Lady Capps-Karr. It seemed to her a lovely dress, soft and gentle in cut, but in color a hard, bright, metallic powder blue.
Then a sudden sound broke the stillness of the gloomy hall and Fifi stood suddenly breathless and motionless.
III
At eleven o’clock Mr. Weicker was tired, but the bar was in one of its periodical riots and he was waiting for it to quiet down. There was nothing to do in the stale office or the empty lobby; and the salon, where all day he held long conversations with lonely English and American women, was deserted; so he went out the front door and began to make the circuit of the hotel. Whether due to his circumambient course or to his frequent glances up at the twinkling bedroom lights and into the humble, grilled windows of the kitchen floor, the promenade gave him a sense of being in control of the hotel, of being adequately responsible, as though it were a ship and he was surveying it from a quarterdeck.
He went past a flood of noise and song from the bar, past a window where two bus boys sat on a bunk and played cards over a bottle of Spanish wine. There was a phonograph somewhere above, and a woman’s form blocked out a window; then there was the quiet wing, and turning the corner, he arrived back at his point of departure. And in front of the hotel, under the dim porte-cochère light, he saw Count Borowki.
Something made him stop and watch--something incongruous--Borowki, who couldn’t pay his bill, had a car and a chauffeur. He was giving the chauffeur some sort of detailed instructions, and then Mr. Weicker perceived that there was a bag in the front seat, and came forward into the light.
“You are leaving us, Count Borowki?”
Borowki started at the voice. “For the night only,” he answered. “I’m going to meet my mother.”
“I see.”
Borowki looked at him reproachfully. “My trunk and hat box are in my room, you’ll discover. Did you think I was running away from my bill?”
“Certainly not. I hope you will have a pleasant journey and find your mother well.”
But inside he took the precaution of dispatching a valet de chambre to see if the baggage was indeed there, and even to give it a thoughtful heft, lest its kernel were departed.
He dozed for perhaps an hour. When he woke up, the night concierge was pulling at his arm and there was a strong smell of smoke in the lobby. It was some moments before he could get it through his head that one wing of the hotel was on fire.
Setting the concierge at the alarms, he rushed down the hall to the bar, and through the smoke that poured from the door he caught sight of the burning billiard table and the flames licking along the floor and flaring up in alcoholic ecstasy every time a bottle on the shelves cracked with the heat. As he hastily retreated he met a line of half-dressed chasseurs and bus boys already struggling up from the lower depths with buckets of water. The concierge shouted that the fire department was on its way. He put two men at the telephones to awaken the guests, and as he ran back to form a bucket line at the danger point, he thought for the first time of Fifi.
Blind rage consumed him--with a precocious Indianlike cruelty she had carried out her threat. Ah, he would deal with that later; there was still law in the country. Meanwhile a clangor outdoors announced that the engines had arrived, and he made his way back through the lobby, filled now with men in pajamas carrying brief cases, and women in bedclothes carrying jewel boxes and small dogs; the number swelling every minute and the talk rising from a cadence heavy with sleep to the full staccato buzz of an afternoon soirée.
A chasseur called Mr. Weicker to the phone, but the manager shook him off impatiently.
“It’s the commissionaire of police,” the boy persisted. “He says you must speak to him.”
With an exclamation, Mr. Weicker hurried into the office. “‘Allo!”
“I’m calling from the station. Is this the manager?”
“Yes, but there’s a fire here.”
“Have you among your guests a man calling himself Count Borowki?”
“Why, yes--”
“We’re bringing him there for identification. He was picked up on the road on some information we received.”
“But--”
“We picked up a girl with him. We’re bringing them both down there immediately.”
“I tell you--”
The receiver clicked briskly in his ear and Mr. Weicker hurried back to the lobby, where the smoke was diminishing. The reassuring pumps had been at work for five minutes and the bar was a wet charred ruin. Mr. Weicker began passing here and there among the guests, tranquilizing and persuading; the phone operators began calling the rooms again, a
dvising such guests as had not appeared that it was safe to go back to bed; and then, at the continued demands for an explanation, he thought again of Fifi, and this time of his own accord he hurried to the phone.
Mrs. Schwartz’s anxious voice answered; Fifi wasn’t there. That was what he wanted to know. He rang off brusquely. There was the story, and he could not have wished for anything more sordidly complete--an incendiary blaze and an attempted elopement with a man wanted by the police. It was time for paying, and all the money of America couldn’t make any difference. If the season was ruined, at least Fifi would have no more seasons at all. She would go to a girls’ institution where the prescribed uniform was rather plainer than any clothing she had ever worn.
As the last of the guests departed into the elevators, leaving only a few curious rummagers among the soaked débris, another procession came in by the front door. There was a man in civilian clothes and a little wall of policemen with two people behind. The commissionaire spoke and the screen of policemen parted.
“I want you to identify these two people. Has this man been staying here under the name of Borowki?”
Mr. Weicker looked. “He has.”
“He’s been wanted for a year in Italy, France and Spain. And this girl?”
She was half hidden behind Borowki, her head hanging, her face in shadow. Mr. Weicker craned toward her eagerly. He was looking at Miss Howard.
A wave of horror swept over Mr. Weicker. Again he craned his head forward, as if by the intensity of his astonishment he could convert her into Fifi, or look through her and find Fifi. But this would have been difficult, for Fifi was far away. She was in front of the café, assisting the stumbling and reluctant John Schwartz into a taxi. “I should say you can’t go back. Mother says you should come right home.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 275