A touch of panic had crept into her voice when she answered that there was no rocket. Wiese eyed the shore tentatively.
“There’s no use in yelling; we must be half a mile out. We’ll just have to wait here until someone comes along.”
“We won’t wait here,” Henry remarked.
“Why not?”
“We’re moving toward the bay. Can’t you tell? We’re moving out with the tide.”
“That’s impossible!” said Choupette sharply.
“Look at those two lights on shore--one passing the other now. Do you see?”
“Do something!” she wailed, and then, in a burst of French: “Ah, c’est épouvantable! N’est-ce pas qu’il y a quelque chose qu’on petit faire?”
The tide was running fast now, and the boat was drifting down the Roads with it toward the sea. The vague blots of two ships passed them, but at a distance, and there was no answer to their hail. Against the western sky a lighthouse blinked, but it was impossible to guess how near to it they would pass.
“It looks as if all our difficulties would be solved for us,” Henry said.
“What difficulties?” Choupette demanded. “Do you mean there’s nothing to be done? Can you sit there and just float away like this?”
“It may be easier on the children, after all.” He winced as Choupette began to sob bitterly, but he said nothing. A ghostly idea was taking shape in his mind.
“Look here, Marston. Can you swim?” demanded Wiese, frowning.
“Yes, but Choupette can’t.”
“I can’t either--I didn’t mean that. If you could swim in and get to a telephone, the coast-guard people would send for us.”
Henry surveyed the dark, receding shore.
“It’s too far,” he said.
“You can try!” said Choupette.
Henry shook his head.
“Too risky. Besides, there’s an outside chance that we’ll be picked up.”
The lighthouse passed them, far to the left and out of earshot. Another one, the last, loomed up half a mile away.
“We might drift to France like that man Gerbault,” Henry remarked. “But then, of course, we’d be expatriates--and Wiese wouldn’t like that, would you, Wiese?”
Wiese, fussing frantically with the engine, looked up.
“See what you can do with this,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about mechanics,” Henry answered. “Besides, this solution of our difficulties grows on me. Just suppose you were dirty dog enough to use that statement and got the children because of it--in that case I wouldn’t have much impetus to go on living. We’re all failures--I as head of my household, Choupette as a wife and a mother, and you, Wiese, as a human being. It’s just as well that we go out of life together.”
“This is no time for a speech, Marston.”
“Oh, yes, it’s a fine time. How about a little more house-organ oratory about money being power?”
Choupette sat rigid in the bow; Wiese stood over the engine, biting nervously at his lips.
“We’re not going to pass that lighthouse very close.” An idea suddenly occurred to him. “Couldn’t you swim to that, Marston?”
“Of course he could!” Choupette cried.
Henry looked at it tentatively.
“I might. But I won’t.”
“You’ve got to!”
Again he flinched at Choupette’s weeping; simultaneously he saw the time had come.
“Everything depends on one small point,” he said rapidly. “Wiese, have you got a fountain pen?”
“Yes. What for?”
“If you’ll write and sign about two hundred words at my dictation, I’ll swim to the lighthouse and get help. Otherwise, so help me God, we’ll drift out to sea! And you better decide in about one minute.”
“Oh, anything!” Choupette broke out frantically. “Do what he says, Charles; he means it. He always means what he says. Oh, please don’t wait!”
“I’ll do what you want”--Wiese’s voice was shaking--”only, for God’s sake, go on. What is it you want--an agreement about the children? I’ll give you my personal word of honor--”
“There’s no time for humor,” said Henry savagely. “Take this piece of paper and write.”
The two pages that Wiese wrote at Henry’s dictation relinquished all lien on the children thence and forever for himself and Choupette. When they had affixed trembling signatures Wiese cried:
“Now go, for God’s sake, before it’s too late!”
“Just one thing more: The certificate from the doctor.”
“I haven’t it here.”
“You lie.”
Wiese took it from his pocket.
“Write across the bottom that you paid so much for it, and sign your name to that.”
A minute later, stripped to his underwear, and with the papers in an oiled-silk tobacco pouch suspended from his neck, Henry dived from the side of the boat and struck out toward the light.
The waters leaped up at him for an instant, but after the first shock it was all warm and friendly, and the small murmur of the waves was an encouragement. It was the longest swim he had ever tried, and he was straight from the city, but the happiness in his heart buoyed him up. Safe now, and free. Each stroke was stronger for knowing that his two sons, sleeping back in the hotel, were safe from what he dreaded. Divorced from her own country, Choupette had picked the things out of American life that pandered best to her own self-indulgence. That, backed by a court decree, she should be permitted to hand on this preposterous moral farrago to his sons was unendurable. He would have lost them forever.
Turning on his back, he saw that already the motorboat was far away, the blinding light was nearer. He was very tired. If one let go--and, in the relaxation from strain, he felt an alarming impulse to let go--one died very quickly and painlessly, and all these problems of hate and bitterness disappeared. But he felt the fate of his sons in the oiled-silk pouch about his neck, and with a convulsive effort he turned over again and concentrated all his energies on his goal.
Twenty minutes later he stood shivering and dripping in the signal room while it was broadcast out to the coast patrol that a launch was drifting in the bay.
“There’s not much danger without a storm,” the keeper said. “By now they’ve probably struck a cross current from the river and drifted into Peyton Harbor.”
“Yes,” said Henry, who had come to this coast for three summers. “I knew that too.”
IV
In October, Henry left his sons in school and embarked on the Majestic for Europe. He had come home as to a generous mother and had been profusely given more than he asked--money, release from an intolerable situation, and the fresh strength to fight for his own. Watching the fading city, the fading shore, from the deck of the Majestic, he had a sense of overwhelming gratitude and of gladness that America was there, that under the ugly débris of industry the rich land still pushed up, incorrigibly lavish and fertile, and that in the heart of the leaderless people the old generosities and devotions fought on, breaking out sometimes in fanaticism and excess, but indomitable and undefeated. There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of the war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever. The best of America was the best of the world.
Going down to the purser’s office, he waited until a fellow passenger was through at the window. When she turned, they both started, and he saw it was the girl.
“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m glad you’re going! I was just asking when the pool opened. The great thing about this ship is that you can always get a swim.”
“Why do you like to swim?” he demanded.
“You always ask me that.” She laughed.
“Perhaps you’d tell me if we had dinner together tonight.”
But when, in a moment, he left her he knew that she could never tell him--she
or another. France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES
Esquire (July 1941)
It was a wild chance but Donald was in the mood, healthy and bored, with a sense of tiresome duty done. He was now rewarding himself. Maybe.
When the plane landed he stepped out into a mid-western summer night and headed for the isolated pueblo airport, conventionalized as an old red ‘railway depot’. He did not know whether she was alive, or living in this town, or what was her present name. With mounting excitement he looked through the phone book for her father who might be dead too, somewhere in these twenty years.
No. Judge Harmon Holmes--Hillside 3194.
A woman’s amused voice answered his inquiry for Miss Nancy Holmes.
‘Nancy is Mrs Walter Gifford now. Who is this?’
But Donald hung up without answering. He had found out what he wanted to know and had only three hours. He did not remember any Walter Gifford and there was another suspended moment while he scanned the phone book. She might have married out of town.
No. Walter Gifford--Hillside 1191. Blood flowed back into his fingertips.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello. Is Mrs Gifford there--this is an old friend of hers.’
‘This is Mrs Gifford.’
He remembered, or thought he remembered, the funny magic in the voice.
‘This is Donald Plant. I haven’t seen you since I was twelve years old.’
‘Oh-h-h!’ The note was utterly surprised, very polite, but he could distinguish in it neither joy nor certain recognition.
‘--Donald!’ added the voice. This time there was something more in it than struggling memory.
‘. . . when did you come back to town?’ Then cordially, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m out at the airport--for just a few hours.’
‘Well, come up and see me.’
‘Sure you’re not just going to bed?’
‘Heavens, no!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was sitting here--having a highball by myself. Just tell your taxi man . . .’
On his way Donald analysed the conversation. His words ‘at the airport’ established that he had retained his position in the upper bourgeoisie. Nancy’s aloneness might indicate that she had matured into an unattractive woman without friends. Her husband might be either away or in bed. And--because she was always ten years old in his dreams--the highball shocked him. But he adjusted himself with a smile--she was very close to thirty.
At the end of a curved drive he saw a dark-haired little beauty standing against the lighted door, a glass in her hand. Startled by her final materialization, Donald got out of the cab, saying:
‘Mrs Gifford?’
She turned on the porch light and stared at him, wide-eyed and tentative. A smile broke through the puzzled expression.
‘Donald--it is you--we all change so. Oh, this is remarkable!’
As they walked inside, their voices jingled the words ‘all these years’, and Donald felt a sinking in his stomach. This derived in part from a vision of their last meeting--when she rode past him on a bicycle, cutting him dead--and in part from fear lest they have nothing to say. It was like a college reunion--but there the failure to find the past was disguised by the hurried boisterous occasion. Aghast, he realized that this might be a long and empty hour. He plunged in desperately.
‘You always were a lovely person. But I’m a little shocked to find you as beautiful as you are.’
It worked. The immediate recognition of their changed state, the bold compliment, made them interesting strangers instead of fumbling childhood friends.
‘Have a highball?’ she asked. ‘No? Please don’t think I’ve become a secret drinker, but this was a blue night. I expected my husband but he wired he’d be two days longer. He’s very nice, Donald, and very attractive. Rather your type and colouring.’ She hesitated, ‘--and I think he’s interested in someone in New York--and I don’t know.’
‘After seeing you it sounds impossible,’ he assured her. ‘I was married for six years, and there was a time I tortured myself that way. Then one day I just put jealousy out of my life forever. After my wife died I was very glad of that. It left a very rich memory--nothing marred or spoiled or hard to think over.’
She looked at him attentively, then sympathetically as he spoke.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. And after a proper moment,’ You’ve changed a lot. Turn your head. I remember father saying, “That boy has a brain.”‘
‘You probably argued against it.’
‘I was impressed. Up to then I thought everybody had a brain. That’s why it sticks in my mind.’
‘What else sticks in your mind?’ he asked smiling.
Suddenly Nancy got up and walked quickly a little away.
‘Ah, now,’ she reproached him. ‘That isn’t fair! I suppose I was a naughty girl.’
‘You were not,’ he said stoutly. ‘And I will have a drink now.’
As she poured it, her face still turned from him, he continued:
‘Do you think you were the only little girl who was ever kissed?’
‘Do you like the subject?’ she demanded. Her momentary irritation melted and she said: ‘What the hell! We did have fun. Like in the song.’
‘On the sleigh ride.’
‘Yes--and somebody’s picnic--Trudy James’s. And at Frontenac that--those summers.’
It was the sleigh ride he remembered most and kissing her cool cheeks in the straw in one corner while she laughed up at the cold white stars. The couple next to them had their backs turned and he kissed her little neck and her ears and never her lips.
‘And the Macks’ party where they played post office and I couldn’t go because I had the mumps,’ he said.
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Oh, you were there. And you were kissed and I was crazy with jealousy like I never have been since.’
‘Funny I don’t remember. Maybe I wanted to forget.’
‘But why?’ he asked in amusement. ‘We were two perfectly innocent kids. Nancy, whenever I talked to my wife about the past, I told her you were the girl I loved almost as much as I loved her. But I think I really loved you just as much. When we moved out of town I carried you like a cannon ball in my insides.’
‘Were you that much--stirred up?’
‘My God, yes! I--’ He suddenly realized that they were standing just two feet from each other, that he was talking as if he loved her in the present, that she was looking up at him with her lips half-parted and a clouded look in her eyes.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I’m ashamed to say--I like it. I didn’t know you were so upset then. I thought it was me who was upset.’
‘You!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you remember throwing me over at the drugstore.’ He laughed. ‘You stuck out your tongue at me.’
‘I don’t remember at all. It seemed to me you did the throwing over.’ Her hand fell lightly, almost consolingly on his arm. ‘I’ve got a photograph book upstairs I haven’t looked at for years. I’ll dig it out.’
Donald sat for five minutes with two thoughts--first the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remembered about the same event--and secondly that in a frightening way Nancy moved him as a woman as she had moved him as a child. Half an hour had developed an emotion that he had not known since the death of his wife--that he had never hoped to know again.
Side by side on a couch they opened the book between them. Nancy looked at him, smiling and very happy.
‘Oh, this is such fun,’ she said. ‘Such fun that you’re so nice, that you remember me so--beautifully. Let me tell you--I wish I’d known it then! After you’d gone I hated you.’
‘W
hat a pity,’ he said gently.
‘But not now,’ she reassured him, and then impulsively, ‘Kiss and make up--’
‘. . . that isn’t being a good wife,’ she said after a minute. ‘I really don’t think I’ve kissed two men since I was married.’
He was excited--but most of all confused. Had he kissed Nancy? or a memory? or this lovely trembly stranger who looked away from him quickly and turned a page of the book?
‘Wait!’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could see a picture for a few seconds.’
‘We won’t do it again. I don’t feel so very calm myself.’
Donald said one of those trivial things that cover so much ground.
‘Wouldn’t it be awful if we fell in love again?’
‘Stop it!’ She laughed, but very breathlessly. ‘It’s all over. It was a moment. A moment I’ll have to forget.’
‘Don’t tell your husband.’
‘Why not? Usually I tell him everything.’
‘It’ll hurt him. Don’t ever tell a man such things.’
‘All right I won’t.’
‘Kiss me once more,’ he said inconsistently, but Nancy had turned a page and was pointing eagerly at a picture.
‘Here’s you,’ she cried. ‘Right away!’
He looked. It was a little boy in shorts standing on a pier with a sailboat in the background.
‘I remember--’ she laughed triumphantly, ‘--the very day it was taken. Kitty took it and I stole it from her.’
For a moment Donald failed to recognize himself in the photo--then, bending closer--he failed utterly to recognize himself.
‘That’s not me,’ he said.
‘Oh yes. It was at Frontenac--the summer we--we used to go to the cave.’
‘What cave? I was only three days in Frontenac.’ Again he strained his eyes at the slightly yellowed picture. ‘And that isn’t me. That’s Donald Bowers. We did look rather alike.’
Now she was staring at him--leaning back, seeming to lift away from him.
‘But you’re Donald Bowers!’ she exclaimed; her voice rose a little. ‘No, you’re not. You’re Donald Plant.’
‘I told you on the phone.’
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 297