The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald Page 6

  ‘What’s in the bags?’ asked Ardita curiously.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘for the present we’ll call it – 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.

  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 distraction 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 defenceless. 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.

  The night deepened. A pale new moon rose slowly out of 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.’

  ‘H’m, 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 story about me?’

  ‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘Lie to me by the moonlight. Tell a fabulous story.’

  A sailor 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 in effectual.

  He began life as a poor kid, he said. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a living coaxing ragtime out of a battered violin in little cafés. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the country and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. They were making money – each contract he signed called for more – but, getting tired of troupe work, he went to managers and told them that he wanted to 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.

  Then he began speculating wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every farthing he had saved.

  Presently, in the recital of his adventures, he put a question to the girl.

  There was no answer. He looked. She had fallen asleep.

  IV

  In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea before them resolved casually into a green-and-grey 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 favourite 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.

  ‘Is this it? Is this where you’re going?’

  Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He raised his voice and called up to the acting skipper. ‘Babe, is this your island?’

  The mulatto’s miniature head appeared from round the corner of the deckhouse.

  ‘Yes, sir! This is 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 get away.’

  He laughed.

  ‘You’re our Lucky Lady. 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 shilling shockers, founded on that history of your life you gave me last night.’

  He flushed and stiffened slightly. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘I suppose every other man you meet tells 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. 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 off 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 rocks, and through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high grey 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 ba
d!’ cried Carlyle excitedly. ‘That little half-breed knows his way round this corner of the planet.’

  His exuberance was contagious and Ardita became quite jubilant.

  ‘It’s an absolutely topping 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-grey 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.

  ‘What’s its name?’ asked Ardita – ‘the island, I mean?’

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

  Ardita thought for a moment.

  ‘I’ll name it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the Isle of Illusion.’

  ‘Or of Disillusion,’ murmured Carlyle.

  ‘Disillusion, if more people know about it than Babe seems to think.’

  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 quarter of a million. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward. 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 Chilian 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’s A number 1 at Lloyds. 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.’

  ‘What you going to do when you get south?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. 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.’

  ‘But your family disapproved, eh?’

  ‘What there is of it – only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt.’

  ‘I feel rather jealous,’ said Carlyle, frowning – and then he laughed.

  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.

  ‘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 sack, because he’s a very fat man. I’ve got a one-piece affair that’s shocked the natives everywhere I’ve shown it.’

  ‘I suppose you’re a shark?’

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty good. And I look nice, too. A sculptor last summer told me my calves were worth one hundred pounds.’

  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 debutante and you were a prosperous musician. 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 water, 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 fancy-dress parties, going round with the fastest men in Town 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 s
eparating 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 splash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

  Her voice floated up to him again.

  ‘And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull grey mist that comes down on life. 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 swan-like, radiating a pride in the young life within her that lit a warm glow in Carlyle’s heart.