The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 14

  Pigs in the seas,

  Lucky fellows!

  Blow us a breeze,

  Blow us a breeze,

  Blow us a breeze,

  With your bellows.”

  Ardita’s brow wrinkled in astonishment. Sitting very still she listened eagerly as the chorus took up a second verse.

  “Onions and beans,

  Marshalls and Deans,

  Goldbergs and Greens

  And Costellos.

  Blow us a breeze,

  Blow us a breeze,

  Blow us a breeze,

  With your bellows.”

  With an exclamation she tossed her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song with an orchestra leader’s baton.

  “Oysters and rocks,

  Sawdust and socks,

  Who could make clocks

  Out of cellos?—”

  The leader’s eyes suddenly rested on Ardita, who was leaning over the rail spellbound with curiosity. He made a quick movement with his baton and the singing instantly ceased. She saw that he was the only white man in the boat—the six rowers were negroes.

  “Narcissus ahoy!”3 he called politely.

  “What’s the idea of all the discord?” demanded Ardita cheerfully. “Is this the varsity crew from the county nut farm?”

  By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a great hulking negro in the bow turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the ladder and stood breathless before her on the deck.

  “The women and children will be spared!” he said briskly. “All crying babies will be immediately drowned and all males put in double irons!”

  Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment.

  He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly—the hair of a Grecian statue gone brunette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed, and graceful as an agile quarter-back.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!” she said dazedly.

  They eyed each other coolly.

  “Do you surrender the ship?”

  “Is this an outburst of wit?” demanded Ardita. “Are you an idiot— or just being initiated to some fraternity?”

  “I asked you if you surrendered the ship.”

  “I thought the country was dry,” said Ardita disdainfully. “Have you been drinking finger-nail enamel? You better get off this yacht!”

  “What?” The young man’s voice expressed incredulity.

  “Get off the yacht! You heard me!”

  He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.

  “No,” said his scornful mouth slowly; “no, I won’t get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish.”

  Going to the rail he gave a curt command and immediately the crew of the rowboat scrambled up the ladder and ranged themselves in line before him, a coal-black and burly darky at one end and a miniature mulatto of four feet nine at the other. They seemed to be uniformly dressed in some sort of blue costume ornamented with dust, mud, and tatters; over the shoulder of each was slung a small, heavy-looking white sack, and under their arms they carried large black cases apparently containing musical instruments.

  “ ’Ten-shun! ” commanded the young man, snapping his own heels together crisply. “Right driss! Front! Step out here, Babe!”

  The smallest negro took a quick step forward and saluted.

  “Yas-suh!”

  “Take command, go down below, catch the crew and tie ’em up— all except the engineer. Bring him up to me. Oh, and pile those bags by the rail there.”

  “Yas-suh!”

  Babe saluted again and wheeling about motioned for the five others to gather about him. Then after a short whispered consultation they all filed noiselessly down the companionway.

  “Now,” said the young man cheerfully to Ardita, who had witnessed this last scene in withering silence, “if you will swear on your honor as a flapper—which probably isn’t worth much—that you’ll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise you’re going to sea in a ship.”

  With a little sigh as for a crisis well passed, the young man sank into the settee Ardita had lately vacated and stretched his arms lazily. The corners of his mouth relaxed appreciatively as he looked round at the rich striped awning, the polished brass, and the luxurious fittings of the deck. His eye fell on the book, and then on the exhausted lemon.

  “Hm,” he said, “Stonewall Jackson4 claimed that lemon-juice cleared his head. Your head feel pretty clear?”

  Ardita disdained to answer.

  “Because inside of five minutes you’ll have to make a clear decision whether it’s go or stay.”

  He picked up the book and opened it curiously.

  “The Revolt of the Angels. Sounds pretty good. French, eh?” He stared at her with new interest. “You French?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Farnam.”

  “Farnam what?”

  “Ardita Farnam.”

  “Well, Ardita, no use standing up there and chewing out the insides of your mouth. You ought to break those nervous habits while you’re young. Come over here and sit down.”

  Ardita took a carved jade case from her pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a conscious coolness, though she knew her hand was trembling a little; then she crossed over with her supple, swinging walk, and sitting down in the other settee blew a mouthful of smoke at the awning.

  “You can’t get me off this yacht,” she said steadily; “and you haven’t got very much sense if you think you’ll get far with it. My uncle’ll have wirelesses zigzagging all over this ocean by half past six.”

  “Hm.”

  She looked quickly at his face, caught anxiety stamped there plainly in the faintest depression of the mouth’s corners.

  “It’s all the same to me,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “ ’Tisn’t my yacht. I don’t mind going for a coupla hours’ cruise. I’ll even lend you that book so you’ll have something to read on the revenue boat that takes you up to Sing Sing.”5

  He laughed scornfully.

  “If that’s advice you needn’t bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn’t been this one it’d have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast.”

  “Who are you?” demanded Ardita suddenly. “And what are you?”

  “You’ve decided not to go ashore?”

  “I never even faintly considered it.”

  “We’re generally known,” he said, “all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic.”6

  “You’re singers?”

  “We were until to-day. At present, due to those white bags you see there, we’re fugitives from justice, and if the reward offered for our capture hasn’t by this time reached twenty thousand dollars I miss my guess.”

  “What’s in the bags?” asked Ardita curiously.

  “Well,” he said, “for the present we’ll call it—mud—Florida mud.”

  III

  Within ten minutes after Curtis Carlyle’s interview with a very frightened engineer the yacht Narcissus was under way, steaming south through a balmy tropical twilight. The little mulatto, Babe, who seemed to have Carlyle’s implicit confidence, took full command of the situation. Mr. Farnam’s valet and the chef, the only members of the crew on board except the engineer, having shown fight, were now reconsidering, strapped securely to their bunks below. Trombone
Mose, the biggest negro, was set busy with a can of paint obliterating the name Narcissus from the bow, and substituting the name Hula Hula, and the others congregated aft and became intently involved in a game of craps.

  Having given orders for a meal to be prepared and served on deck at seven-thirty, Carlyle rejoined Ardita, and, sinking back into his settee, half closed his eyes and fell into a state of profound abstraction.

  Ardita scrutinized him carefully—and classed him immediately as a romantic figure. He gave the effect of towering self-confidence erected on a slight foundation—just under the surface of each of his decisions she discerned a hesitancy that was in decided contrast to the arrogant curl of his lips.

  “He’s not like me,” she thought. “There’s a difference somewhere.”

  Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently thought about herself; never having had her egotism disputed she did it entirely naturally and with no detraction from her unquestioned charm. Though she was nineteen she gave the effect of a high-spirited precocious child, and in the present glow of her youth and beauty all the men and women she had known were but driftwood on the ripples of her temperament. She had met other egotists—in fact she found that selfish people bored her rather less than unselfish people—but as yet there had not been one she had not eventually defeated and brought to her feet.

  But though she recognized an egotist in the settee next to her, she felt none of that usual shutting of doors in her mind which meant clearing ship for action; on the contrary her instinct told her that this man was somehow completely pregnable and quite defenseless. When Ardita defied convention—and of late it had been her chief amusement—it was from an intense desire to be herself, and she felt that this man, on the contrary, was preoccupied with his own defiance.

  She was much more interested in him than she was in her own situation, which affected her as the prospect of a matinée might affect a ten-year-old child. She had implicit confidence in her ability to take care of herself under any and all circumstances.

  The night deepened. A pale new moon smiled misty-eyed upon the sea, and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown like leaves along the far horizon a great haze of moonshine suddenly bathed the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail in her swift path. From time to time there was the bright flare of a match as one of them lighted a cigarette, but except for the low undertone of the throbbing engines and the even wash of the waves about the stern the yacht was quiet as a dream boat star-bound through the heavens. Round them flowed the smell of the night sea, bringing with it an infinite languor.

  Carlyle broke the silence at last.

  “Lucky girl,” he sighed, “I’ve always wanted to be rich—and buy all this beauty.”

  Ardita yawned.

  “I’d rather be you,” she said frankly.

  “You would—for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve for a flapper.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “Beg your pardon.”

  “As to nerve,” she continued slowly, “it’s my one redeeming feature. I’m not afraid of anything in heaven or earth.”

  “Hm, I am.”

  “To be afraid,” said Ardita, “a person has either to be very great and strong—or else a coward. I’m neither.” She paused for a moment, and eagerness crept into her tone. “But I want to talk about you. What on earth have you done—and how did you do it?”

  “Why?” he demanded cynically. “Going to write a movie about me?”

  “Go on,” she urged. “Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

  A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while they ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes, and strawberry jam from the plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk, hesitatingly at first, but eagerly as he saw she was interested. Ardita scarcely touched her food as she watched his dark young face—handsome, ironic, faintly ineffectual.

  He began life as a poor kid in a Tennessee town, he said, so poor that his people were the only white family in their street. He never remembered any white children—but there were inevitably a dozen pickaninnies streaming in his trail, passionate admirers whom he kept in tow by the vividness of his imagination and the amount of trouble he was always getting them in and out of. And it seemed that this association diverted a rather unusual musical gift into a strange channel.

  There had been a colored woman named Belle Pope Calhoun who played the piano at parties given for white children—nice white children that would have passed Curtis Carlyle with a sniff. But the ragged little “poh white” used to sit beside her piano by the hour and try to get in an alto with one of those kazoos that boys hum through. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a living teasing ragtime out of a battered violin in little cafés round Nashville. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the country, and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit.7 Five of them were boys he had grown up with; the other was the little mulatto, Babe Divine, who was a wharf nigger round New York, and long before that a plantation hand in Bermuda, until he stuck an eight-inch stiletto in his master’s back. Almost before Carlyle realized his good fortune he was on Broadway, with offers of engagements on all sides, and more money than he had ever dreamed of.

  It was about then that a change began in his whole attitude, a rather curious, embittering change. It was when he realized that he was spending the golden years of his life gibbering round a stage with a lot of black men. His act was good of its kind—three trombones, three saxophones, and Carlyle’s flute—and it was his own peculiar sense of rhythm that made all the difference; but he began to grow strangely sensitive about it, began to hate the thought of appearing, dreaded it from day to day.

  They were making money—each contract he signed called for more—but when he went to managers and told them that he wanted to separate from his sextet and go on as a regular pianist, they laughed at him and told him he was crazy—it would be an artistic suicide. He used to laugh afterward at the phrase “artistic suicide.” They all used it.

  Half a dozen times they played at private dances at three thousand dollars a night, and it seemed as if these crystallized all his distaste for his mode of livelihood. They took place in clubs and houses that he couldn’t have gone into in the daytime. After all, he was merely playing the rôle of the eternal monkey, a sort of sublimated chorus man. He was sick of the very smell of the theatre, of powder and rouge and the chatter of the greenroom, and the patronizing approval of the boxes. He couldn’t put his heart into it any more. The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child, eating his ice-cream so slowly that he couldn’t taste it at all.

  He wanted to have a lot of money and time, and opportunity to read and play, and the sort of men and women round him that he could never have—the kind who, if they thought of him at all, would have considered him rather contemptible; in short he wanted all those things which he was beginning to lump under the general head of aristocracy, an aristocracy which it seemed almost any money could buy except money made as he was making it. He was twenty-five then, without family or education or any promise that he would succeed in a business career. He began speculating wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every cent he had saved.

  Then the war came. He went to Plattsburg,8 and even there his profession followed him. A brigadier-general called him up to headquarters and told him he could serve the country better as a band leader— so he spent the war entertaining celebrities behind the line with a headquarters band. It was not so bad—except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him.

  “It was the private dances that did it. After I came back from the war the old routine started. We had an offer from a syndicate of Florida hotels. It
was only a question of time then.”

  He broke off and Ardita looked at him expectantly, but he shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you about it. I’m enjoying it too much, and I’m afraid I’d lose a little of that enjoyment if I shared it with any one else. I want to hang on to those few breathless, heroic moments when I stood out before them all and let them know I was more than a damn bobbing, squawking clown.”

  From up forward came suddenly the low sound of singing. The negroes had gathered together on the deck and their voices rose together in a haunting melody that soared in poignant harmonics toward the moon. And Ardita listened in enchantment.

  “Oh down—

  Oh down,

  Mammy wanna take me downa milky way,

  Oh down—

  Oh down,

  Pappy say to-morra-a-a-ah!

  But mammy say to-day,

  Yes—mammy say to-day!”

  Carlyle sighed and was silent for a moment, looking up at the gathered host of stars blinking like arclights in the warm sky. The negroes’ song had died away to a plaintive humming and it seemed as if minute by minute the brightness and the great silence were increasing until he could almost hear the midnight toilet of the mermaids as they combed their silver dripping curls under the moon and gossiped to each other of the fine wrecks they lived in on the green opalescent avenues below.

  “You see,” said Carlyle softly, “this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding—it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”

  He turned to her, but she was silent.

  “You see, don’t you, Anita—I mean, Ardita?”

  Again she made no answer. She had been sound asleep for some time.

  IV

  In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea before them resolved casually into a green-and-gray islet, apparently composed of a great granite cliff at its northern end which slanted south through a mile of vivid coppice and grass to a sandy beach melting lazily into the surf. When Ardita, reading in her favorite seat, came to the last page of The Revolt of the Angels, and slamming the book shut looked up and saw it, she gave a little cry of delight, and called to Carlyle, who was standing moodily by the rail.