TUDY.
Driving up through Provence with his mother in the afternoon he said:
“You’re very brave to try to go around the world by yourself at seventy-eight.”
“I suppose I am,” she said. “But your father and I wanted to see China and Japan — and that was not to be — so I sometimes think I’m going to see them for him, as if he were alive.”
“You loved each other, didn’t you?”
She looked at him as if his question was a young impertinence.
“Of course.” Then she said suddenly: “Tom, is something making you unhappy?”
“Certainly not. Look what we’re passing, Mother — you’re not looking.”
“It’s a river — the Rhone, isn’t it?”
“It’s the Rhone. And after I’ve settled you at the Hotel des Thermes I’ll be following this same river up to Avignon to meet my girl.”
But he had a curious fear as he passed through the great gate of Avignon at four o’clock next morning that she would not be there. There had been a warning in the thin song of his motor, in the closed ominous fronts of the dark villages, in the gray break of light in the sky. He drank a glass of beer in the station buffet where several Italian emigrant families were eating from their baskets. Then he went out on the station platform and beckoned to a porter.
“There will be a lady with some baggage to carry.”
Now the train was coming out of the blue dawn. Tom stood midway on the platform trying to pick out a face at a window or vestibule as it slid to rest, but there was no face. He walked along beside the sleepers, but there was only an impatient conductor taking off small baggage. Tom went up to look at the luggage thinking maybe it was hers, that it was new and he hadn’t recognized it — then suddenly the train was in motion. Once more he glanced up and down the platform.
“Tom!”
She was there.
“Tudy — it’s you.”
“Didn’t you expect me?”
She looked wan and tired in the faint light. His instinct was to pick her up and carry her out to the car.
“I didn’t know there was another wagon-lit,” he said excitedly. “Thank heaven there was.”
“Darling, I’m so glad to see you. All this is my trousseau, that I told you about. Be careful of them, porter — the strings won’t hold probably.”
“Put this luggage in the car,” he said to the porter. “We’re going to have coffee in the buffet.”
“Bien, Monsieur.”
In the buffet Tudy took smaller packages from her purse.
“This is for your mother. I spent a whole morning finding this for her and I wouldn’t show it to you for anything.”
She found another package.
“This for you, but I won’t open it now. Oh, I was going to be so economical, but I bought two presents for you. I haven’t ten francs left. It’s good you met me.”
“Darling, you’re talking so much you’re not eating.”
“I forgot.”
“Well, eat — and drink your coffee. I don’t mean hurry — it’s only half-past four in the morning.”
They drove back through a day that was already blooming; there were peasants in the fields who looked at them as they went by, crawling up on one knee to stare over the tips of the young vines.
“What do we do now?” she said. “Oh, yes, now we get married.”
“We certainly do — tomorrow morning. And when you get married in France, you know you’ve been married. I spent the whole first day you were away signing papers. Once I had to forge your signature, but I gave the man ten francs — “
“Oh, Tom — “ she interrupted softly. “Don’t talk for a minute. It’s so beautiful this morning, I want to look at it.”
“Of course, darling.” He looked at her. “Is something the matter?”
“Nothing. I’m just confused.” She smoothed her face with her hands as if she were parting it in the middle. “I’m almost sure I left something, but I can’t think what.”
“Weddings are always confusing,” he said consolingly. “I’m supposed to forget the ring or something by the best traditions. Now just think of that — the groom has to remember to forget the ring.”
She laughed and her mood seemed to change, but when Tom saw her at intervals in the packing and preparations of the day, he noticed that the air of confusion, of vagueness, remained about her. But next morning when he called at her pension at nine, she seemed so beautiful to him with her white-gold hair gleaming above her frail blue frock that he remembered only how much he loved her.
“But don’t crush my bouquet,” she said. “Are you sure you want me?”
“Perfectly sure.”
“Even if — even if I have been rather foolish?”
“Of course.”
“Even if — “
He kissed her lips gently.
“That’ll do,” he said. “I know you were a little in love with Riccard, but it’s all over and we won’t ever mention it again — is that agreed?”
Momentarily she seemed to hesitate. “Yes, Tom.”
So they were married. And it seemed very strange to be married in France. Afterward they gave a little breakfast for a few friends at the hotel and afterward Tudy, who had moved over from the pension the day before, went upstairs to change her clothes and do her last packing, while Tom went to his mother’s room and sat with her for a while. She was not starting off with them, but would rest here a day or two and then motor down to Marseilles to catch another boat.
“I worry about your being alone,” he said.
“I know my way about, son. You just think about Tudy — remember, you’ve given her her head for eight months and she may need a little firmness. You’re twelve years older than she is and you ought to be that much wiser — “ She broke off, “But every marriage works out in its own way.”
Leaving his mother’s room Tom went down to the office to pay his bill.
“Someone wishes to see Monsieur,” said the clerk.
It was a French railroad conductor carrying a package.
“Bonjour, Monsieur,” he said politely. “Is it you who has just been married to the young lady who traveled on the P. L. M. yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I did not like to disturb Madame on such a morning, but she left this on the train. It is a cloak.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tom. “She just missed it this morning.”
“I had a little time off duty so I thought I’d bring it myself.”
“We’re very much obliged. Here’s a fifty — no, here’s a hundred francs.”
The conductor looked at the size of Tom’s tip and sighed.
“I cannot keep all this. This is too generous.”
“Nonsense! I’ve been married this morning.”
He pressed the money into the man’s hand.
“You are very kind, Monsieur. Au revoir, Monsieur. But wait — “ He fumbled in his pocket. “I was so full of emotion at your generosity that I almost forgot. This is another article I found — it may belong to Madame or to her brother who got off at Lyons. I have not been able to figure what it is. Au revoir again, Monsieur, and thank you. I appreciate an American gentleman — “
He waved goodbye as he went down the stairs.
Tom was holding in his hands two bulbs of an apparatus that were connected by a long tube. If you pressed one bulb the air went through the tube and inflated the other.
When he came into Tudy’s room she was staring out the window in the direction of the University.
“Just taking a last look at my finishing school,” she said. “Why, what’s the matter?”
He was thinking faster than he ever had in his life.
“Here’s your cloak,” he said. “The conductor brought it.”
“Oh, good! It was an old cloak but — “
“And here’s this — “ He showed her what he held in his hand. “It seems your brother left it on the train.”
; The comers of her mouth fell and her eyes pulled her young forehead into a hundred unfamiliar lines. In one moment her face took on all the anguish in the world.
“All right,” she said, after a minute. “I knew I should have told you. I tried to tell you this morning. Riccard flew up to Paris in time to meet me in the station and ride south with me. I had no idea he was coming.”
“But no doubt you were pleasantly surprised,” he said dryly.
“No, I wasn’t, I was furious. I didn’t see how he knew I was coming south on that train. That’s all there was to it, Tom — he rode down as far as Lyons with me. I started to tell you but you were so happy this morning and I couldn’t bear to.”
Their eyes met, hers wavered away from his out into the great soft-shaking poplar trees.
“I know I can never make you believe it was all right,” she said dully. “I suppose we can get an annulment.”
The sunlight fell on the square corners of her bags, parked and ready to go.
“I was just getting on the train when I saw him,” she said. “There was nothing I could do. Oh, it’s so awful — and if he just hadn’t dropped that terrible trick you’d never have known.”
Tom walked up and down the room a minute.
“I know you’re through with me,” Tudy said. “Anyhow, you’d just reproach me all the rest of my life. So we’d better quit. We can call it off.”
…We can die, too, he was thinking. He had never wanted anything so much in his life as he wanted to believe her. But he had to decide now not upon what was the truth, for that he would never know for certain, but upon the question as to whether he could now and forever put the matter out of his mind, or whether it would haunt their marriage like a ghost. Suddenly he decided:
“No, we won’t quit — we’ll try it. And there’ll never be any word of reproach.”
Her face lighted up; she rose and came toward him and he held her close for a minute.
“We’ll go right now,” he said.
An hour later they drove away from the hotel, both of them momentarily cheered by the exhilaration of starting a journey, with the little car bulging with bags and new vistas opening up ahead. But in the afternoon as they curved down through Provence, they were silent for a while each with a separate thought. His thought was that he would never know — what her thought was must be left unfathomed — and perhaps unfathomable in that obscure pool in the bottom of every woman’s heart.
Toward evening as they reached the seaboard and turned east following a Riviera that twinkled with light, they came out of their separate selves and were cheerful together. When the stars were bright on the water he said:
“We’ll build our love up and not down.”
“I won’t have to build my love up,” she said loyally. “It’s up in the skies now.”
They came to the end of France at midnight and looked at each other with infinite hope as they crossed the bridge over into Italy, into the new sweet warm darkness.
A FULL LIFE
At twilight on September 3d, 1923, a girl jumped from the fifty-third-story window of a New York office building. She wore a patented inflatable suit of rubber composition which had just been put on the novelty market for purposes of having fun — the wearer by a mere jump or push could supposedly sail over fences or street intersections. It was fully blown up when she jumped. The building was a set-back and she landed on the projecting root of the fiftieth floor. She was bruised and badly shaken but not seriously hurt.
She recovered consciousness in the ambulance and gave the name Gwendolyn Davies but in the emergency room when the intern so addressed her she denied it, and insisted on leaving the hospital after necessary stitches had been taken. Several inquiries that were undoubtedly for this girl asked for a different name. The intern, Dr. Wilkinson, gathered that a little orgy after hours had been taking place in the office at the time.
A week later Dr. Wilkinson took out a library book that he had borrowed there some time before. It was a collection of mysterious cases re-written from contemporary newspaper accounts, and the third story, entitled The Vanished Girl, read as follows:
In 1915 Delphis, N.Y., was an old town of large, faded houses, built far back on shady lawns — not at all like the Long Island and New Jersey villages where even Sunday is only a restless lull between the crash of trains. During the war there was a murder there, and in 1922 bandits held up a garage. After that nothing happened for a long time till Gwendolyn Davies walked out of her father’s house one day and disappeared off the face of the earth.
She was the daughter of a poor doctor and the prettiest girl in town. She had a brave, bright face that made you look at her, yellow hair and a beggar’s lips that would not beg in vain. The last person who ever laid eyes on Gwen Davies was the station master who put her suitcase on the train. She told him lightly that she was leaving for her family’s own good — she didn’t want to “raise the roof,” but no scandal ever developed about her. When she reached New York she was to go directly to a recommended boarding house adjacent to the college. She didn’t appear there — she simply melted like a shadow into the warm September night.
“Height, five feet five inches, weight, one hundred and sixteen pounds. Features, regular and pleasing. Left eye slighty larger than the right. Wearing a blue traveling suit and a red, leather-trimmed hat. Bright personality. We ask everyone to keep an eye out for this girl whose parents are prostrated by her disappearance.”
She was one of many thousands of lost girls, but her beauty and the fact that her father was a reputable physician made it news. There was a “ring” said the tabloids; there was original sin, said the pulpit; and “mark my words,” said the citizens of Delphis, their words being wild suppositions about somebody knowing something more than he or she saw fit to tell. For awhile the town of Delphis was as sad as the village of Hamlin after the Pied Piper had come and gone — there were young men who forgot their partners entirely when the orchestra played “Babes in the Woods” or “Underneath the Stars,” and fanned they had loved Gwen and would never love another.
After a few years a New York judge walked away into the blue and the case of Gwen Davies was revived for a day in the newspapers, with a note that someone had lately seen her or her double in a New York surface car; after that the waters closed over her, apparently forever.
Dr. Wilkinson was sure it was the same girl — he thought for awhile of trying to trace her by going to a newspaper with the story but he was a retiring young man and the idea became shelved like the play he was always going to write and the summer he was going to spend on the Riviera.
But he never forgot — he was forever haunted by the picture of the girl floating slowly out over the city at dusk, buoyed up by delicious air, by a quintessence of golden hope, like a soaring and unstable stock issue. She was the girl for whom a part of him was always searching at cafes and parties and theatres, when his practical wife would ask:
“Why are you staring around, Harvey? Do you see anybody we know?”
He did not explain.
II
Five years later the following story appeared in the New York papers:
This afternoon at four o’clock the Comptesse de Frejus jumped from the deck of the liner Stacia one day out from New York. She was rescued after the ship had turned around and searched for two hours through a fortunately calm sea. The Comptesse is an American, the farmer Mrs. Cornelius B. Hasbrouk. who obtained her divorce in Reno last year and then married Rene. Compt de Frejus, in fans. She gave out no statement but said to an officer of the cutter which picked her up that her chief thought in the water was to beat off the huge birds who attempted to perch on her head and peck at her eyes. The passengers with whom she had been talking had no warning of her sudden act nor any explanation.
There were no pictures of the Comptesse de Frejus and when Dr. Wilkinson went to the newspaper files at the public library he found that there were no pictures of Mrs. Cornelius B. Hasbrouk either, save with
her arm covering her face. But there were a great many columns about Mrs. Hasbrouk’s first marriage and one of them mentioned a scar on her forehead — a scar that corresponded to a suture he had performed himself.
The columns had been written two years before. Mrs. Hasbrouk’s first marriage had begun stormily. The groom, a junior at Harvard, was twenty and had just inherited a fortune of twenty million dollars from his father, the powder manufacturer. The bride was a voting lady of no background, not even the stage. The story ran that when Mr. Hasbrouk was located the next morning in a barber shop he had to be shown his picture in the paper before he realized that he was married.
The new Mrs. Hasbrouk was the cross of the cameramen but the reporters did rather well by her. She was described as lovely, modest, well-bred, and charming. There was a vague impression that she was either horn the South, North or West, though one paper announced her birthplace as New York City. She said rather cryptically that she had married the young munitions magnate because she had “always really belonged to him” but that she would give him up it he preferred. Pending an annulment the couple departed for a trip to the South Seas.
Dr. Wilkinson was rather relieved that this marriage had not lasted and that her subsequent union with a member of the French nobility had led her to jump into the Atlantic. He fell that he knew her, in some such manner as one might know a composer or a writer one had never seen — he knew her though she had written only on air and there was a mysterious compulsion that made him follow her career with admiration and curiosity. He made certain notes from these newspaper files and settled down to wait for her to become news again.
III
At two o’clock on a June afternoon in 1937 Dr. Wilkinson, now a stout baldish man of forty, parked his car by a circus which had pitched on the shores of Long Island. The performance was not to begin until three but there were certain preliminary attractions and it was one of these which had attracted him to the spot. A little aside from the main tent stretched a large white banner on which was lettered:
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 349