The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 15

  “Is this it? Is this where you’re going?”

  Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

  “You’ve got me.” He raised his voice and called up to the acting skipper: “Oh, Babe, is this your island?”

  The mulatto’s miniature head appeared from round the corner of the deck-house.

  “Yas-suh! This yeah’s it.”

  Carlyle joined Ardita.

  “Looks sort of sporting, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she agreed; “but it doesn’t look big enough to be much of a hiding-place.”

  “You still putting your faith in those wirelesses your uncle was going to have zigzagging round?”

  “No,” said Ardita frankly. “I’m all for you. I’d really like to see you make a get-away.”

  He laughed.

  “You’re our Lady Luck. Guess we’ll have to keep you with us as a mascot—for the present, anyway.”

  “You couldn’t very well ask me to swim back,” she said coolly. “If you do I’m going to start writing dime novels founded on that interminable history of your life you gave me last night.”

  He flushed and stiffened slightly.

  “I’m very sorry I bored you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t—until just at the end with some story about how furious you were because you couldn’t dance with the ladies you played music for.”

  He rose angrily.

  “You have got a darn mean little tongue.”

  “Excuse me,” she said, melting into laughter, “but I’m not used to having men regale me with the story of their life ambitions—especially if they’ve lived such deathly platonic lives.”

  “Why? What do men usually regale you with?”

  “Oh, they talk about me,” she yawned. “They tell me I’m the spirit of youth and beauty.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “Oh, I agree quietly.”

  “Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?”

  Ardita nodded.

  “Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—‘I love you.’ ”

  Carlyle laughed and sat down.

  “That’s very true. That’s—that’s not bad. Did you make that up?”

  “Yes—or rather I found it out. It doesn’t mean anything especially. It’s just clever.”

  “It’s the sort of remark,” he said gravely, “that’s typical of your class.”

  “Oh,” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t start that lecture on aristocracy again! I distrust people who can be intense at this hour in the morning. It’s a mild form of insanity—a sort of breakfast-food jag. Morning’s the time to sleep, swim, and be careless.”

  Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to approach the island from the north.

  “There’s a trick somewhere,” commented Ardita thoughtfully. “He can’t mean just to anchor up against this cliff.”

  They were heading straight in now toward the solid rock, which must have been well over a hundred feet tall, and not until they were within fifty yards of it did Ardita see their objective. Then she clapped her hands in delight. There was a break in the cliff entirely hidden by a curious overlapping of rock, and through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high gray walls. Then they were riding at anchor in a miniature world of green and gold, a gilded bay smooth as glass and set round with tiny palms, the whole resembling the mirror lakes and twig trees that children set up in sand piles.

  “Not so darned bad!” cried Carlyle excitedly.

  “I guess that little coon knows his way round this corner of the Atlantic.”

  His exuberance was contagious, and Ardita became quite jubilant.

  “It’s an absolutely sure-fire hiding-place!”

  “Lordy, yes! It’s the sort of island you read about.”

  The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled ashore.

  “Come on,” said Carlyle as they landed in the slushy sand, “we’ll go exploring.”

  The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of flat, sandy country. They followed it south and brushing through a farther rim of tropical vegetation came out on a pearl-gray virgin beach where Ardita kicked off her brown golf shoes—she seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings—and went wading. Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable Babe had luncheon ready for them. He had posted a lookout on the high cliff to the north to watch the sea on both sides, though he doubted if the entrance to the cliff was generally known—he had never even seen a map on which the island was marked.

  “What’s its name,” asked Ardita—“the island, I mean?”

  “No name ’tall,” chuckled Babe. “Reckin she jus’ island, ’at’s all.”

  In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great boulders on the highest part of the cliff and Carlyle sketched for her his vague plans. He was sure they were hot after him by this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off, and concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated as just under a million dollars. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward, keeping well outside the usual channels of travel, rounding the Horn and heading for Callao, in Peru. The details of coaling and provisioning he was leaving entirely to Babe, who, it seemed, had sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Brazilian pirate craft, whose skipper had long since been hung.

  “If he’d been white he’d have been king of South America long ago,” said Carlyle emphatically. “When it comes to intelligence he makes Booker T. Washington9 look like a moron. He’s got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that’s half a dozen or I’m a liar. He worships me because I’m the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he can. We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we’d blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and squeaking like dogs will in front of a phonograph.”

  Ardita roared.

  “How you can tell ’em!”

  Carlyle grinned.

  “I swear that’s the gos——”

  “What you going to do when you get to Callao?” 10 she interrupted.

  “Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah.11 I mean it. My idea is to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a reputation, and then after about five years appear in England with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India. Something fascinating about that to me. And I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”

  “How about after that?”

  “Then,” he answered defiantly, “comes aristocracy. Laugh if you want to—but at least you’ll have to admit that I know what I want— which I imagine is more than you do.”

  “On the contrary,” contradicted Ardita, reaching in her pocket for her cigarette case, “when I met you I was in the midst of a great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know what I wanted.”

  “What was it?”

  “A man.”

  He started.

  “You mean you were engaged?”

  “After a fashion. If you hadn’t come aboard I had every intention of slipping ashore yesterday evening—how long ago it seems—and meeting him in Palm Beach. He’s waiting there for me with a bracelet that once belonged to Catharine of Russia.12 Now don’t mutter anything about aristocracy,” she put in quickly. “I liked him simply because he had had an imagination and the utter courage of his convictions.”

  “But your family disapproved, eh?”

  “What there is of it—only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt. It seems he got into some scandal with a red-haired woman named Mimi something—it was frightfu
lly exaggerated, he said, and men don’t lie to me—and anyway I didn’t care what he’d done; it was the future that counted. And I’d see to that. When a man’s in love with me he doesn’t care for other amusements. I told him to drop her like a hot cake, and he did.”

  “I feel rather jealous,” said Carlyle, frowning—and then he laughed. “I guess I’ll just keep you along with us until we get to Callao. Then I’ll lend you enough money to get back to the States. By that time you’ll have had a chance to think that gentleman over a little more.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” fired up Ardita. “I won’t tolerate the parental attitude from anybody! Do you understand me?”

  He chuckled and then stopped, rather abashed, as her cold anger seemed to fold him about and chill him.

  “I’m sorry,” he offered uncertainly.

  “Oh, don’t apologize! I can’t stand men who say ‘I’m sorry’ in that manly, reserved tone. Just shut up!”

  A pause ensued, a pause which Carlyle found rather awkward, but which Ardita seemed not to notice at all as she sat contentedly enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over the edge looking down. Carlyle, watching her, reflected how it seemed impossible for her to assume an ungraceful attitude.

  “Oh, look!” she cried. “There’s a lot of sort of ledges down there. Wide ones of all different heights.”

  He joined her and together they gazed down the dizzy height.

  “We’ll go swimming to-night!” she said excitedly. “By moonlight.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather go in at the beach on the other end?”

  “Not a chance. I like to dive. You can use my uncle’s bathing-suit, only it’ll fit you like a gunny sack, because he’s a very flabby man. I’ve got a one-piece affair that’s shocked the natives all along the Atlantic coast from Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine.” 13

  “I suppose you’re a shark.”

  “Yes, I’m pretty good. And I look cute too. A sculptor up at Rye last summer told me my calves were worth five hundred dollars.”

  There didn’t seem to be any answer to this, so Carlyle was silent, permitting himself only a discreet interior smile.

  V

  When the night crept down in shadowy blue and silver they threaded the shimmering channel in the rowboat and, tying it to a jutting rock, began climbing the cliff together. The first shelf was ten feet up, wide, and furnishing a natural diving platform. There they sat down in the bright moonlight and watched the faint incessant surge of the waters, almost stilled now as the tide set seaward.

  “Are you happy?” he asked suddenly.

  She nodded.

  “Always happy near the sea. You know,” she went on, “I’ve been thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We’re both rebels— only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was just eighteen, and you were——”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “—well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly devastating débutante and you were a prosperous musician just commissioned in the army——”

  “Gentleman by act of Congress,” he put in ironically.

  “Well, at any rate, we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn’t know what I wanted. I went from man to man, restless, impatient, month by month getting less acquiescent and more dissatisfied. I used to sit sometimes chewing at the insides of my mouth and thinking I was going crazy—I had a frightful sense of transiency. I wanted things now—now—now! Here I was—beautiful—I am, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” agreed Carlyle tentatively.

  Ardita rose suddenly.

  “Wait a second. I want to try this delightful-looking sea.”

  She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the sea, doubling up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering the water straight as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.

  In a minute her voice floated up to him.

  “You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began to resent society——”

  “Come on up here,” he interrupted. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Just floating round on my back. I’ll be up in a minute. Let me tell you. The only thing I enjoyed was shocking people; wearing something quite impossible and quite charming to a fancy-dress party, going round with the fastest men in New York, and getting into some of the most hellish scrapes imaginable.”

  The sounds of splashing mingled with her words, and then he heard her hurried breathing as she began climbing up the side to the ledge.

  “Go on in!” she called.

  Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and made the climb he found that she was no longer on the ledge, but after a frightened second he heard her light laughter from another shelf ten feet up. There he joined her and they both sat quietly for a moment, their arms clasped round their knees, panting a little from the climb.

  “The family were wild,” she said suddenly. “They tried to marry me off. And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something”—her eyes went skyward exultantly— “I found something!”

  Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.

  “Courage—just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage— the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more—I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people’s opinions—just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way— Did you bring up the cigarettes?”

  He handed one over and held a match for her silently.

  “Still,” Ardita continued, “the men kept gathering—old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me—to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I’d built up round me. Do you see?”

  “Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized.”

  “Never!”

  She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

  Her voice floated up to him again.

  “And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.”

  She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back, appeared on his level.

  “All very well,” objected Carlyle. “You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that’s gray and lifeless.”

  She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.

  “I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna,”14 she began, “but you haven’t grasped me yet. My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”

  “But supposing,” suggested Carlyle, “that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?”


  Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.

  “Why,” she called back, “then I’d have won!”

  He edged out till he could see her.

  “Better not dive from there! You’ll break your back,” he said quickly.

  She laughed.

  “Not I!”

  Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swanlike, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle’s heart.

  “We’re going through the black air with our arms wide,” she called, “and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin’s tail, and we’re going to think we’ll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it’ll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves.”

  Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea.

  And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.

  VI

  Time, having no axe to grind, showered down upon them three days of afternoons. When the sun cleared the port-hole of Ardita’s cabin an hour after dawn she rose cheerily, donned her bathing-suit, and went up on deck. The negroes would leave their work when they saw her, and crowd, chuckling and chattering, to the rail as she floated, an agile minnow, on and under the surface of the clear water. Again in the cool of the afternoon she would swim—and loll and smoke with Carlyle upon the cliff; or else they would lie on their sides in the sands of the southern beach, talking little, but watching the day fade colorfully and tragically into the infinite languor of a tropical evening.

  And with the long, sunny hours Ardita’s idea of the episode as incidental, madcap, a sprig of romance in a desert of reality, gradually left her. She dreaded the time when he would strike off southward; she dreaded all the eventualities that presented themselves to her; thoughts were suddenly troublesome and decisions odious. Had prayers found place in the pagan rituals of her soul she would have asked of life only to be unmolested for a while, lazily acquiescent to the ready, naïf flow of Carlyle’s ideas, his vivid boyish imagination, and the vein of monomania that seemed to run crosswise through his temperament and colored his every action.