“But I do love you.” She thought for a moment; the red-and-green glow of a filling station on the corner lit up the struggle in her face. “If you love me that much, I’ll marry you tomorrow.”
“Marry me!” he exclaimed. She was so absorbed in what she had just said that she did not notice.
“I’ll marry you tomorrow,” she repeated. “I like you better than anybody in the world and I guess I’ll get to love you the way you want me to.” She uttered a single half-broken sob. “But--I didn’t know this was going to happen. Please let me alone tonight.”
Jacob didn’t sleep. There was music from the Ambassador grill till late and a fringe of working girls hung about the carriage entrance waiting for their favorites to come out. Then a long-protracted quarrel between a man and a woman began in the hall outside, moved into the next room and continued as a low two-toned mumble through the intervening door. He went to the window sometime toward three o’clock and stared out into the clear splendor of the California night. Her beauty rested outside on the grass, on the damp, gleaming roofs of the bungalows, all around him, borne up like music on the night. It was in the room, on the white pillow, it rustled ghostlike in the curtains. His desire recreated her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even of the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love--an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer--not to perish till he could say, “I never really loved her.” Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name.
Later, when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart.
V
“I won’t marry you unless you love me,” he said, driving back from the studio. She waited, her hands folded tranquilly in her lap. “Do you think I’d want you if you were unhappy and unresponsive, Jenny--knowing all the time you didn’t love me?”
“I do love you. But not that way.”
“What’s ‘that way’?”
She hesitated, her eyes were far off. “You don’t--thrill me, Jake. I don’t know--there have been some men that sort of thrilled me when they touched me, dancing or anything. I know it’s crazy, but--”
“Does Raffino thrill you?”
“Sort of, but not so much.”
“And I don’t at all?”
“I just feel comfortable and happy with you.”
He should have urged her that that was best, but he couldn’t say it, whether it was an old truth or an old lie.
“Anyhow, I told you I’ll marry you; perhaps you might thrill me later.”
He laughed, stopped suddenly. “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why did you seem to care so much last summer?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was young. You never know how you once felt, do you?”
She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks. And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.
“Listen, Jake,” she said suddenly. “That lawyer my sister had--that Scharnhorst--called up the studio this afternoon.”
“Your sister’s all right,” he said absently, and he added: “So a lot of men thrill you.”
“Well, if I’ve felt it with a lot of men, it couldn’t have anything to do with real love, could it?” she said hopefully.
“But your theory is that love couldn’t come without it.”
“I haven’t got any theories or anything. I just told you how I felt. You know more than me.”
“I don’t know anything at all.”
There was a man waiting in the lower hall of the apartment house. Jenny went up and spoke to him; then, turning back to Jake, said in a low voice: “It’s Scharnhorst. Would you mind waiting downstairs while he talks to me? He says it won’t take half an hour.”
He waited, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Ten minutes passed. Then the telephone operator beckoned him.
“Quick!” she said. “Miss Prince wants you on the telephone.”
Jenny’s voice was tense and frightened. “Don’t let Scharnhorst get out,” she said. “He’s on the stairs, maybe in the elevator. Make him come back here.”
Jacob put down the receiver just as the elevator clicked. He stood in front of the elevator door, barring the man inside. “Mr. Scharnhorst?”
“Yeah.” The face was keen and suspicious.
“Will you come up to Miss Prince’s apartment again? There’s something she forgot to say.”
“I can see her later.” He attempted to push past Jacob. Seizing him by the shoulders, Jacob shoved him back into the cage, slammed the door and pressed the button for the eighth floor.
“I’ll have you arrested for this!” Scharnhorst remarked. “Put into jail for assault!”
Jacob held him firmly by the arms. Upstairs, Jenny, with panic in her eyes, was holding open her door. After a slight struggle, the lawyer went inside.
“What is it?” demanded Jacob.
“Tell him, you,” she said. “Oh, Jake, he wants twenty thousand dollars!”
“What for?”
“To get my sister a new trial.”
“But she hasn’t a chance!” exclaimed Jacob. He turned to Scharnhorst. “You ought to know she hasn’t a chance.”
“There are some technicalities,” said the lawyer uneasily--”things that nobody but an attorney would understand. She’s very unhappy there, and her sister so rich and successful. Mrs. Choynski thought she ought to get another chance.”
“You’ve been up there working on her, heh?”
“She sent for me.”
“But the blackmail idea was your own. I suppose if Miss Prince doesn’t feel like supplying twenty thousand to retain your firm, it’ll come out that she’s the sister of the notorious murderess.”
Jenny nodded. “That’s what he said.”
“Just a minute!” Jacob walked to the phone. “Western Union, please. Western Union? Please take a telegram.” He gave the name and address of a man high in the political world of New York. “Here’s the message:
The convict Choynski threatening her sister, who is a picture actress, with exposure of relationship stop Can you arrange it with warden that she be cut off from visitors until I can get East and explain the situation stop Also wire me if two witnesses to an attempted blackmailing scene are enough to disbar a lawyer in New York if charges proceed from such a quarter as Read, Van Tyne, Biggs & Company, or my uncle the surrogate stop Answer Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles.
Jacob C. K. Booth”
He waited until the clerk had repeated the message. “Now, Mr. Scharnhorst,” he said, “the pursuit of art should not be interrupted by such alarms and excursions. Miss Prince, as you see, is considerably upset. It will show in her work tomorrow and a million people will be just a little disappointed. So we won’t ask her for any decisions. In fact you and I will leave Los Angeles on the same train tonight.”
VI
The summer passed. Jacob went about his useless life, sustained by the knowledge that Jenny was coming East in the fall. By fall there would have been many Raffinos, he supposed, and she would find that the thrill of their hands and eyes--and lips--was much the same. They were the equivalent, in a different world, of the affairs at a college house party, the undergraduates of a casual summer. And if it was still true that her feeling for him was less than romantic, then he would take her anyway, letting romance come after marriage as--so he had always heard--it had come to many wives before.
Her letters fascinated and baffled him. Through the ineptitude of expression he caught gleams of emotion--an ever-present gratitude, a longing to talk to him, and a quick, almost frightened reaction toward him, from--he could only imagine--some other
man. In August she went on location; there were only post cards from some lost desert in Arizona, then for a while nothing at all. He was glad of the break. He had thought over all the things that might have repelled her--of his portentousness, his jealousy, his manifest misery. This time it would be different. He would keep control of the situation. She would at least admire him again, see in him the incomparably dignified and well adjusted life.
Two nights before her arrival Jacob went to see her latest picture in a huge nightbound vault on Broadway. It was a college story. She walked into it with her hair knotted on the crown of her head--a familiar symbol for dowdiness--inspired the hero to a feat of athletic success and faded out of it, always subsidiary to him, in the shadow of the cheering stands. But there was something new in her performance; for the first time the arresting quality he had noticed in her voice a year before had begun to get over on the screen. Every move she made, every gesture, was poignant and important. Others in the audience saw it too. He fancied he could tell this by some change in the quality of their breathing, by a reflection of her clear, precise expression in their casual and indifferent faces. Reviewers, too, were aware of it, though most of them were incapable of any precise definition of a personality.
But his first real consciousness of her public existence came from the attitude of her fellow passengers disembarking from the train. Busy as they were with friends or baggage, they found time to stare at her, to call their friends’ attention, to repeat her name.
She was radiant. A communicative joy flowed from her and around her, as though her perfumer had managed to imprison ecstasy in a bottle. Once again there was a mystical transfusion, and blood began to course again through the hard veins of New York--there was the pleasure of Jacob’s chauffeur when she remembered him, the respectful frisking of the bell boys at the Plaza, the nervous collapse of the head waiter at the restaurant where they dined. As for Jacob, he had control of himself now. He was gentle, considerate and polite, as it was natural for him to be--but as, in this case, he had found it necessary to plan. His manner promised and outlined an ability to take care of her, a will to be leaned on.
After dinner, their corner of the restaurant cleared gradually of the theater crowd and the sense of being alone settled over them. Their faces became grave, their voices very quiet.
“It’s been five months since I saw you.” He looked down at his hands thoughtfully. “Nothing has changed with me, Jenny. I love you with all my heart. I love your face and your faults and your mind and everything about you. The one thing I want in this world is to make you happy.”
“I know,” she whispered. “Gosh, I know!”
“Whether there’s still only affection in your feeling toward me, I don’t know. If you’ll marry me, I think you’ll find that the other things will come, will be there before you know it--and what you called a thrill will seem a joke to you, because life isn’t for boys and girls, Jenny, but for men and women.”
“Jacob,” she whispered, “you don’t have to tell me. I know.”
He raised his eyes for the first time. “What do you mean--you know?”
“I get what you mean. Oh, this is terrible! Jacob, listen! I want to tell you. Listen, dear, don’t say anything. Don’t look at me. Listen, Jacob, I fell in love with a man.”
“What?” he asked blankly.
“I fell in love with somebody. That’s what I mean about understanding about a silly thrill.”
“You mean you’re in love with me?”
“No.”
The appalling monosyllable floated between them, danced and vibrated over the table: “No--no--no--no--no!”
“Oh, this is awful!” she cried. “I fell in love with a man I met on location this summer. I didn’t mean to--I tried not to, but first thing I knew there I was in love and all the wishing in the world couldn’t help it. I wrote you and asked you to come, but I didn’t send the letter, and there I was, crazy about this man and not daring to speak to him, and bawling myself to sleep every night.”
“An actor?” he heard himself saying in a dead voice. “Raffino?”
“Oh, no, no, no! Wait a minute, let me tell you. It went on for three weeks and I honestly wanted to kill myself, Jake. Life wasn’t worth while unless I could have him. And one night we got in a car by accident alone and he just caught me and made me tell him I loved him. He knew--he couldn’t help knowing.”
“It just--swept over you,” said Jacob steadily. “I see.”
“Oh, I knew you’d understand, Jake! You understand everything. You’re the best person in the world, Jake, and don’t I know it?”
“You’re going to marry him?”
Slowly she nodded her head. “I said I’d have to come East first and see you.” As her fear lessened, the extent of his grief became more apparent to her and her eyes filled with tears. “It only comes once, Jake, like that. That’s what kept in my mind all those weeks I didn’t hardly speak to him--if you lose it once, it’ll never come like that again and then what do you want to live for? He was directing the picture--he was the same about me.”
“I see.”
As once before, her eyes held his like hands. “Oh, Ja-a-ake!” In that sudden croon of compassion, all-comprehending and deep as a song, the first force of the shock passed off. Jacob’s teeth came together again and he struggled to conceal his misery. Mustering his features into an expression of irony, he called for the check. It seemed an hour later they were in a taxi going toward the Plaza Hotel.
She clung to him. “Oh, Jake, say it’s all right! Say you understand! Darling Jake, my best friend, my only friend, say you understand!”
“Of course I do, Jenny.” His hand patted her back automatically.
“Oh-h-h, Jake, you feel just awful, don’t you?”
“I’ll survive.”
“Oh-h-h, Jake!”
They reached the hotel. Before they got out Jenny glanced at her face in her vanity mirror and turned up the collar of her fur cape. In the lobby, Jacob ran into several people and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” in a strained, unconvincing voice. The elevator waited. Jenny, her face distraught and tearful, stepped in and held out her hand toward him with the fist clenched helplessly.
“Jake,” she said once more.
“Good night, Jenny.”
She turned her face to the wire wall of the cage. The gate clanged.
“Hold on!” he almost said. “Do you realize what you’re doing, starting that car like that?”
He turned and went out the door blindly. “I’ve lost her,” he whispered to himself, awed and frightened. “I’ve lost her!”
He walked over Fifty-ninth Street to Columbus Circle and then down Broadway. There were no cigarettes in his pocket--he had left them at the restaurant--so he went into a tobacco store. There was some confusion about the change and someone in the store laughed.
When he came out he stood for a moment puzzled. Then the heavy tide of realization swept over him and beyond him, leaving him stunned and exhausted. It swept back upon him and over him again. As one rereads a tragic story with the defiant hope that it will end differently, so he went back to the morning, to the beginning, to the previous year. But the tide came thundering back with the certainty that she was cut off from him forever in a high room at the Plaza Hotel.
He walked down Broadway. In great block letters over the porte-cochère of the Capitol Theater five words glittered out into the night: “Carl Barbour and Jenny Prince.”
The name startled him, as if a passer-by had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in.
Jenny Prince.
Now that she no longer belonged to him, the name assumed a significance entirely its own.
It hung there, cool and impervious, in the night, a challenge, a defiance.
Jenny Prince.
“Come and rest upon my loveliness,” it said. “Fulfill your secret dreams in wedding me for an hour.”
Jenny P
rince.
It was untrue--she was back at the Plaza Hotel, in love with somebody. But the name, with its bright insistence, rode high upon the night.
“I love my dear public. They are all so sweet to me.”
The wave appeared far off, sent up whitecaps, rolled toward him with the might of pain, washed over him. “Never any more. Never any more.” The wave beat upon him, drove him down, pounding with hammers of agony on his ears. Proud and impervious, the name on high challenged the night.
Jenny Prince.
She was there! All of her, the best of her--the effort, the power, the triumph, the beauty.
Jacob moved forward with a group and bought a ticket at the window.
Confused, he stared around the great lobby. Then he saw an entrance and walking in, found himself a place in the fast-throbbing darkness.
THE LOST DECADE
Esquire (December 1939)
All sorts of people came into the offices of the news-weekly and Orrison Brown had all sorts of relations with them. Outside of office hours he was “one of the editors”--during work time he was simply a curly-haired man who a year before had edited the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern and was now only too glad to take the undesirable assignments around the office, from straightening out illegible copy to playing call boy without the title.
He had seen this visitor go into the editor’s office--a pale, tall man of forty with blond statuesque hair and a manner that was neither shy nor timid, nor otherworldly like a monk, but something of all three. The name on his card, Louis Trimble, evoked some vague memory, but having nothing to start on, Orrison did not puzzle over it--until a buzzer sounded on his desk, and previous experience warned him that Mr. Trimble was to be his first course at lunch.
“Mr. Trimble--Mr. Brown,” said the Source of all luncheon money. “Orrison--Mr. Trimble’s been away a long time. Or he feels it’s a long time--almost twelve years. Some people would consider themselves lucky to’ve missed the last decade.”
“That’s so,” said Orrison.
“I can’t lunch today,” continued his chief. “Take him to Voisin or 21 or anywhere he’d like. Mr. Trimble feels there’re lots of things he hasn’t seen.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 279