‘Don’t go,’ Eva said. ‘You look so cheerful and nice.’
‘Just for ten minutes.’
When he had gone, Adrian rang for two baths.
‘The thing is to put on our best clothes and walk proudly three times around the deck,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ After a moment she added abstractedly: ‘I like that young man. He was awfully nice to me last night when you’d disappeared.’
The bath steward appeared with the information that bathing was too dangerous today. They were in the midst of the wildest hurricane on the North Atlantic in ten years; there were two broken arms this morning from attempts to take baths. An elderly lady had been thrown down a staircase and was not expected to live. Furthermore, they had received the SOS signal from several boats this morning.
‘Will we go to help them?’
‘They’re all behind us, sir, so we have to leave them to the Mauretania. If we tried to turn in this sea the portholes would be smashed.’
This array of calamities minimized their own troubles. Having eaten a sort of luncheon and drunk the beer provided by Butterworth, they dressed and went on deck.
Despite the fact that it was only possible to progress step by step, holding on to rope or rail, more people were abroad than on the day before. Fear had driven them from their cabins, where the trunks bumped and the waves pounded the portholes, and they awaited momentarily the call to the boats. Indeed, as Adrian and Eva stood on the transverse deck above the second class, there was a bugle call, followed by a gathering of stewards and stewardesses on the deck below. But the boat was sound: it had outlasted one of its cargo--Steward James Carton was being buried at sea.
It was very British and sad. There were the rows of stiff, disciplined men and women standing in the driving rain, and there was a shape covered by the flag of the Empire that lived by the sea. The chief purser read the service, a hymn was sung, the body slid off into the hurricane. With Eva’s burst of wild weeping for this humble end, some last string snapped within her. Now she really didn’t care. She responded eagerly when Butterworth suggested that he get some champagne to their cabin. Her mood worried Adrian; she wasn’t used to so much drinking and he wondered what he ought to do. At his suggestion that they sleep instead, she merely laughed, and the bromide the doctor had sent stood untouched on the washstand. Pretending to listen to the insipidities of several Mr Stacombs, he watched her; to his surprise and discomfort she seemed on intimate and even sentimental terms with Butterworth and he wondered if this was a form of revenge for his attention to Betsy D’Amido.
The cabin was full of smoke, the voices went on incessantly, the suspension of activity, the waiting for the storm’s end, was getting on his nerves. They had been at sea only four days; it was like a year.
The two Mr Stacombs left finally, but Butterworth remained. Eva was urging him to go for another bottle of champagne.
‘We’ve had enough,’ objected Adrian. ‘We ought to go to bed.’
‘I won’t go to bed!’ she burst out. ‘You must be crazy! You play around all you want, and then, when I find somebody I--I like, you want to put me to bed.’
‘You’re hysterical.’
‘On the contrary, I’ve never been so sane.’
‘I think you’d better leave us, Butterworth,’ Adrian said. ‘Eva doesn’t know what she’s saying.’
‘He won’t go, I won’t let him go.’ She clasped Butterworth’s hand passionately. ‘He’s the only person that’s been half decent to me.’
‘You’d better go, Butterworth,’ repeated Adrian.
The young man looked at him uncertainly.
‘It seems to me you’re being unjust to your wife,’ he ventured.
‘My wife isn’t herself.’
‘That’s no reason for bullying her.’
Adrian lost his temper. ‘You get out of here!’ he cried.
The two men looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Butterworth turned to Eva, said, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and left the cabin.
‘Eva, you’ve got to pull yourself together,’ said Adrian when the door closed.
She didn’t answer, looked at him from sullen, half-closed eyes.
‘I’ll order dinner here for us both and then we’ll try to get some sleep.’
‘I want to go up and send a wireless.’
‘Who to?’
‘Some Paris lawyer. I want a divorce.’
In spite of his annoyance, he laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Then I want to see the children.’
‘Well, go and see them. I’ll order dinner.’
He waited for her in the cabin twenty minutes. Then impatiently he opened the door across the corridor; the nurse told him that Mrs Smith had not been there.
With a sudden prescience of disaster he ran upstairs, glanced in the bar, the salons, even knocked at Butterworth’s door. Then a quick round of the decks, feeling his way through the black spray and rain. A sailor stopped him at a network of ropes.
‘Orders are no one goes by, sir. A wave has gone over the wireless room.’
‘Have you seen a lady?’
‘There was a young lady here--’ He stopped and glanced around. ‘Hello, she’s gone.’
‘She went up the stairs!’ Adrian said anxiously. ‘Up to the wireless room!’
The sailor ran up to the boat deck; stumbling and slipping, Adrian followed. As he cleared the protected sides of the companionway, a tremendous body struck the boat a staggering blow and, as she keeled over to an angle of forty-five degrees, he was thrown in a helpless roll down the drenched deck, to bring up dizzy and bruised against a stanchion.
‘Eva!’ he called. His voice was soundless in the black storm. Against the faint light of the wireless-room window he saw the sailor making his way forward.
‘Eva!’
The wind blew him like a sail up against a lifeboat. Then there was another shuddering crash, and high over his head, over the very boat, he saw a gigantic, glittering white wave, and in the split second that it balanced there he became conscious of Eva, standing beside a ventilator twenty feet away. Pushing out from the stanchion, he lunged desperately toward her, just as the wave broke with a smashing roar. For a moment the rushing water was five feet deep, sweeping with enormous force towards the side, and then a human body was washed against him, and frantically he clutched it and was swept with it back towards the rail. He felt his body bump against it, but desperately he held on to his burden; then, as the ship rocked slowly back, the two of them, still joined by his fierce grip, were rolled out exhausted on the wet planks. For a moment he knew no more.
IV
Two days later, as the boat train moved tranquilly south toward Paris, Adrian tried to persuade his children to look out the window at the Norman countryside.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he assured them. ‘All the little farms like toys. Why, in heaven’s name, won’t you look?’
‘I like the boat better,’ said Estelle.
Her parents exchanged an infanticidal glance.
‘The boat is still rocking for me,’ Eva said with a shiver. ‘Is it for you?’
‘No. Somehow, it all seems a long way off. Even the passengers looked unfamiliar going through the customs.’
‘Most of them hadn’t appeared above ground before.’
He hesitated. ‘By the way, I cashed Butterworth’s cheque for him.’
‘You’re a fool. You’ll never see the money again.’
‘He must have needed it pretty badly or he would not have come to me.’
A pale and wan girl, passing along the corridor, recognized them and put her head through the doorway.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Awful.’
‘Me, too,’ agreed Miss D’Amido. ‘I’m vainly hoping my fiancé will recognize me at the Gare du Nord. Do you know two waves went over the wireless room?’
‘So we heard,’ Adrian answered dryly.
She passed gracefully along t
he corridor and out of their life.
‘The real truth is that none of it happened,’ said Adrian after a moment. ‘It was a nightmare--an incredibly awful nightmare.’
‘Then, where are my pearls?’
‘Darling, there are better pearls in Paris. I’ll take the responsibility for those pearls. My real belief is that you saved the boat.’
‘Adrian, let’s never get to know anyone else, but just stay together always--just we two.’
He tucked her arm under his and they sat close. ‘Who do you suppose those Adrian Smiths on the boat were?’ he demanded. ‘It certainly wasn’t me.’
‘Nor me.’
‘It was two other people,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘There are so many Smiths in this world.’
SIX OF ONE--
Redbook (February 1932)
Barnes stood on the wide stairs looking down through a wide hall into the living-room of the country place and at the group of youths. His friend Schofield was addressing some benevolent remarks to them, and Barnes did not want to interrupt; as he stood there, immobile, he seemed to be drawn suddenly into rhythm with the group below; he perceived them as statuesque beings, set apart, chiseled out of the Minnesota twilight that was setting on the big room.
In the first place all five, the two young Schofields and their friends, were fine-looking boys, very American, dressed in a careless but not casual way over well-set-up bodies, and with responsive faces open to all four winds. Then he saw that they made a design, the faces profile upon profile, the heads blond and dark, turning toward Mr. Schofield, the erect yet vaguely lounging bodies, never tense but ever ready under the flannels and the soft angora wool sweaters, the hands placed on other shoulders, as if to bring each one into the solid freemasonry of the group. Then suddenly, as though a group of models posing for a sculptor were being dismissed, the composition broke and they all moved toward the door. They left Barnes with a sense of having seen something more than five young men between sixteen and eighteen going out to sail or play tennis or golf, but having gained a sharp impression of a whole style, a whole mode of youth, something different from his own less assured, less graceful generation, something unified by standards that he didn’t know. He wondered vaguely what the standards of 1920 were, and whether they were worth anything--had a sense of waste, of much effort for a purely esthetic achievement. Then Schofield saw him and called him down into the living-room.
“Aren’t they a fine bunch of boys?” Schofield demanded. “Tell me, did you ever see a finer bunch?”
“A fine lot,” agreed Barnes, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. He felt a sudden premonition that his generation in its years of effort had made possible a Periclean age, but had evolved no prospective Pericles. They had set the scene: was the cast adequate?
“It isn’t just because two of them happen to be mine,” went on Schofield. “It’s self-evident. You couldn’t match that crowd in any city in the country. First place, they’re such a husky lot. Those two little Kavenaughs aren’t going to be big men--more like their father; but the oldest one could make any college hockey-team in the country right now.”
“How old are they?” asked Barnes.
“Well, Howard Kavenaugh, the oldest, is nineteen--going to Yale next year. Then comes my Wister--he’s eighteen, also going to Yale next year. You liked Wister, didn’t you? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. He’d make a great politician, that kid. Then there’s a boy named Larry Patt who wasn’t here today--he’s eighteen too, and he’s State golf champion. Fine voice too; he’s trying to get in Princeton.”
“Who’s the blond-haired one who looks like a Greek god?”
“That’s Beau Lebaume. He’s going to Yale, too, if the girls will let him leave town. Then there’s the other Kavenaugh, the stocky one--he’s going to be an even better athlete than his brother. And finally there’s my youngest, Charley; he’s sixteen,” Schofield sighed reluctantly. “But I guess you’ve heard all the boasting you can stand.”
“No, tell me more about them--I’m interested. Are they anything more than athletes?”
“Why, there’s not a dumb one in the lot, except maybe Beau Lebaume; but you can’t help liking him anyhow. And every one of them’s a natural leader. I remember a few years ago a tough gang tried to start something with them, calling them ‘candies’--well, that gang must be running yet. They sort of remind me of young knights. And what’s the matter with their being athletes? I seem to remember you stroking the boat at New London, and that didn’t keep you from consolidating railroad systems and--”
“I took up rowing because I had a sick stomach,” said Barnes. “By the way, are these boys all rich?”
“Well, the Kavenaughs are, of course; and my boys will have something.”
Barnes’ eyes twinkled.
“So I suppose since they won’t have to worry about money, they’re brought up to serve the State,” he suggested. “You spoke of one of your sons having a political talent and their all being like young knights, so I suppose they’ll go out for public life and the army and navy.”
“I don’t know about that,” Schofield’s voice sounded somewhat alarmed. “I think their fathers would be pretty disappointed if they didn’t go into business. That’s natural, isn’t it?”
“It’s natural, but it isn’t very romantic,” said Barnes good-humoredly.
“You’re trying to get my goat,” said Schofield. “Well, if you can match that--”
“They’re certainly an ornamental bunch,” admitted Barnes. “They’ve got what you call glamour. They certainly look like the cigarette ads in the magazine; but--”
“But you’re an old sour-belly,” interrupted Schofield. “I’ve explained that these boys are all well-rounded. My son Wister led his class at school this year, but I was a darn’ sight prouder that he got the medal for best all-around boy.”
The two men faced each other with the uncut cards of the future on the table before them. They had been in college together, and were friends of many years’ standing. Barnes was childless, and Schofield was inclined to attribute his lack of enthusiasm to that.
“I somehow can’t see them setting the world on fire, doing better than their fathers,” broke out Barnes suddenly. “The more charming they are, the harder it’s going to be for them. In the East people are beginning to realize what wealthy boys are up against. Match them? Maybe not now.” He leaned forward, his eyes lighting up. “But I could pick six boys from any high-school in Cleveland, give them an education, and I believe that ten years from this time your young fellows here would be utterly outclassed. There’s so little demanded of them, so little expected of them--what could be softer than just to have to go on being charming and athletic?”
“I know your idea,” objected Schofield scoffingly. “You’d go to a big municipal high-school and pick out the six most brilliant scholars--”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do--” Barnes noticed that he had unconsciously substituted “I will” for “I would,” but he didn’t correct himself. “I’ll go to the little town in Ohio, where I was born--there probably aren’t fifty or sixty boys in the high-school there, and I wouldn’t be likely to find six geniuses out of that number.”
“And what?”
“I’ll give them a chance. If they fail, the chance is lost. That is a serious responsibility, and they’ve got to take it seriously. That’s what these boys haven’t got--they’re only asked to be serious about trivial things.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“I’m going to see.”
A fortnight later he was back in the small town in Ohio where he had been born, where, he felt, the driving emotions of his own youth still haunted the quiet streets. He interviewed the principal of the high-school, who made suggestions; then by the, for Barnes, difficult means of making an address and afterward attending a reception, he got in touch with teachers and pupils. He made a donation to the school, and under cover of th
is found opportunities of watching the boys at work and at play.
It was fun--he felt his youth again. There were some boys that he liked immediately, and he began a weeding-out process, inviting them in groups of five or six to his mother’s house, rather like a fraternity rushing freshman. When a boy interested him, he looked up his record and that of his family--and at the end of a fortnight he had chosen five boys.
In the order in which he chose them, there was first Otto Schlach, a farmer’s son who had already displayed extraordinary mechanical aptitude and a gift for mathematics. Schlach was highly recommended by his teachers, and he welcomed the opportunity offered him of entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A drunken father left James Matsko as his only legacy to the town of Barnes’ youth. From the age of twelve, James had supported himself by keeping a newspaper-and-candy store with a three-foot frontage; and now at seventeen he was reputed to have saved five hundred dollars. Barnes found it difficult to persuade him to study money and banking at Columbia, for Matsko was already assured of his ability to make money. But Barnes had prestige as the town’s most successful son, and he convinced Matsko that otherwise he would lack frontage, like his own place of business.
Then there was Jack Stubbs, who had lost an arm hunting, but in spite of this handicap played on the high-school football team. He was not among the leaders in studies; he had developed no particular bent; but the fact that he had overcome that enormous handicap enough to play football--to tackle and to catch punts--convinced Barnes that no obstacles would stand in Jack Stubbs’ way.
The fourth selection was George Winfield, who was almost twenty. Because of the death of his father, he had left school at fourteen, helped to support his family for four years, and then, things being better, he had come back to finish high-school. Barnes felt, therefore, that Winfield would place a serious value on an education.
Next came a boy whom Barnes found personally antipathetic. Louis Ireland was at once the most brilliant scholar and most difficult boy at school. Untidy, insubordinate and eccentric, Louis drew scurrilous caricatures behind his Latin book, but when called upon inevitably produced a perfect recitation. There was a big talent nascent somewhere in him--it was impossible to leave him out.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 293