Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Страница 192

He rode seventy miles that afternoon, while the rain dried up into rills of dust on the windows of the train and the country became green with vivid spring. When the sun was growing definitely crimson in the west he disembarked at a little lost town named Florence, just over the border of the next state. John Jackson had been born in this town; he had not been back here for twenty years.

The taxi-driver, whom he recognized, silently, as a certain George Stirling, playmate of his youth, drove him to a battered hotel, where, to the surprise of the delighted landlord, he engaged a room. Leaving his raincoat on the sagging bed, he strolled out through a deserted lobby into the street.

It was a bright, warm afternoon, and the silver sliver of a moon riding already in the east promised a clear, brilliant night. John Jackson walked along a somnolent Main Street, where every shop and hitching post and horse fountain made some strange thing happen inside him, because he had known these things for more than inanimate objects as a little boy. At one shop, catching a glimpse of a familiar face through the glass, he hesitated; but changing his mind, continued along the street, turning off at a wide road at the corner. The road was lined sparsely by a row of battered houses, some of them repainted a pale unhealthy blue and all of them set far back in large plots of shaggy and unkempt land.

He walked along the road for a sunny half-mile—a half-mile shrunk up now into a short green aisle crowded with memories. Here, for example, a careless mule had stamped permanently on his thigh the mark of an iron shoe. In that cottage had lived two gentle old maids, who gave brown raisin cakes every Thursday to John Jackson and his little brother—the brother who had died as a child.

As he neared the end of his pilgrimage his breath came faster and the house where he was born seemed to run up to him on living feet. It was a collapsed house, a retired house, set far back from the road and sunned and washed to the dull color of old wood.

One glance told him it was no longer a dwelling. The shutters that remained were closed tight, and from the tangled vines arose, as a single chord, a rich shrill sound of a hundred birds. John Jackson left the road and stalked across the yard knee-deep in abandoned grass. When he came near, something choked up his throat. He paused and sat down on a stone in a patch of welcome shade.

This was his own house, as no other house would ever be; within these plain walls he had been incomparably happy. Here he had known and learned that kindness which he had carried into life. Here he had found the secret of those few simple decencies, so often invoked, so inimitable and so rare, which in the turmoil of competitive industry had made him to coarser men a source of half-scoffing, half-admiring surprise. This was his house, because his honor had been born and nourished here; he had known every hardship of the country poor, but no preventable regret.

And yet another memory, a memory more haunting than any other, and grown strong at this crisis in his life, had really drawn him back. In this yard, on this battered porch, in the very tree over his head, he seemed still to catch the glint of yellow hair and the glow of bright childish eyes that had belonged to his first love, the girl who had lived in the long-vanished house across the way. It was her ghost who was most alive here, after all.

He got up suddenly, stumbling through the shrubbery, and followed an almost obliterated path to the house, starting at the whirring sound of a blackbird which rose out of the grass close by. The front porch sagged dangerously at his step as he pushed open the door. There was no sound inside, except the steady slow throb of silence; but as he stepped in a word came to him, involuntary as his breath, and he uttered it aloud, as if he were calling to someone in the empty house.

“Alice,” he cried; and then louder, “Alice!”

From a room at the left came a short, small, frightened cry. Startled, John Jackson paused in the door, convinced that his own imagination had evoked the reality of the cry.

“Alice!” he called doubtfully.

“Who’s there?”

There was no mistake this time. The voice, frightened, strange, and yet familiar, came from what had once been the parlor, and as he listened John Jackson was aware of a nervous step within. Trembling a little, he pushed open the parlor door.

A woman with alarmed bright eyes and reddish-gold hair was standing in the center of the bare room. She was of that age that trembles between the enduring youth of a fine, unworried life and the imperative call of forty years, and there was that indefinable loveliness in her face that youth gives sometimes just before it leaves a dwelling it has possessed for long. Her figure, just outside of slenderness, leaned with dignified grace against the old mantel on which her white hand rested, and through a rift in the shutter a shaft of late sunshine fell through upon her gleaming hair.

When John Jackson came in the doorway her large grey eyes closed and then opened again, and she gave another little cry. Then a curious thing happened; they stared at each other for a moment without a word, her hand dropped from the mantel and she took a swaying step toward him. And, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, John Jackson came forward, too, and took her into his arms and kissed her as if she were a little child.

“Alice!” he said huskily.

She drew a long breath and pushed herself away from him.

“I’ve come back here,” he muttered unsteadily, “and find you waiting in this room where we used to sit, just as if I’d never been away.”

“I only dropped in for a minute,” she said, as if that was the most important thing in the world. “And now, naturally, I’m going to cry.”

“Don’t cry.”

“I’ve got to cry. You don’t think”—she smiled through wet eyes—“you don’t think that things like this hap—happen to a person every day.”

John Jackson walked in wild excitement to the window and threw it open to the afternoon.

“What were you doing here?” he cried, turning around. “Did you just come by accident today?”

“I come every week. I bring the children sometimes, but usually I come alone.”

“The children!” he exclaimed. “Have you got children?”

She nodded.

“I’ve been married for years and years.”

They stood there looking at each other for a moment; then they both laughed and glanced away.

“I kissed you,” she said.

“Are you sorry?”

She shook her head.

“And the last time I kissed you was down by that gate ten thousand years ago.”

He took her hand, and they went out and sat side by side on the broken stoop. The sun was painting the west with sweeping bands of peach bloom and pigeon blood and golden yellow.

“You’re married,” she said. “I saw in the paper—years ago.”

He nodded.

“Yes, I’ve been married,” he answered gravely. “My wife went away with someone she cared for many years ago.”

“Ah, I’m sorry.” And after another long silence—“It’s a gorgeous evening, John Jackson.”

“It’s a long time since I’ve been so happy.”

There was so much to say and to tell that neither of them tried to talk, but only sat there holding hands, like two children who had wandered for a long time through a wood and now came upon each other with unimaginable happiness in an accidental glade. Her husband was poor, she said; he knew that from the worn, unfashionable dress which she wore with such an air. He was George Harland—he kept a garage in the village.

“George Harland—a red-headed boy?” he asked wonderingly.

She nodded.

“We were engaged for years. Sometimes I thought we’d never marry. Twice I postponed it, but it was getting late to just be a girl—I was twenty-five, and so finally we did. After that I was in love with him for over a year.”

When the sunset fell together in a jumbled heap of color in the bottom of the sky, they strolled back along the quiet road, still hand in hand.

“Will you come to dinner? I want you to see the children. My oldest boy is just fifteen.”

She lived in a plain frame house two doors from the garage, where two little girls were playing around a battered and ancient but occupied baby carriage in the yard.

“Mother! Oh Mother!” they cried.

Small brown arms swirled around her neck as she knelt beside them on the walk.

“Sister says Anna didn’t come, so we can’t have any dinner.”

“Mother’ll cook dinner. What’s the matter with Anna?”

“Anna’s father’s sick. She couldn’t come.”

A tall, tired man of fifty, who was reading a paper on the porch, rose and slipped a coat over his suspenders as they mounted the steps.

“Anna didn’t come,” he said in a noncommittal voice.

“I know. I’m going to cook dinner. Who do you suppose this is here?”

The two men shook hands in a friendly way, and with a certain deference to John Jackson’s clothes and his prosperous manner, Harland went inside for another chair.

“We’ve heard about you a great deal, Mr. Jackson,” he said as Alice disappeared into the kitchen. “We heard about a lot of ways you made them sit up and take notice over yonder.”

John nodded politely, but at the mention of the city he had just left a wave of distaste went over him.

“I’m sorry I ever left here,” he answered frankly. “And I’m not just saying that either. Tell me what the years have done for you, Harland. I hear you’ve got a garage.”

“Yeah—down the road a ways. I’m doing right well, matter of fact. Nothing you’d call well in the city,” he added in hasty depreciation.

“You know, Harland,” said John Jackson, after a moment, “I’m very much in love with your wife.”

“Yeah?” Harland laughed. “Well, she’s a pretty nice lady, I find.”

“I think I always have been in love with her, all these years.”

“Yeah?” Harland laughed again. That someone should be in love with his wife seemed the most casual pleasantry. “You better tell her about it. She don’t get so many nice compliments as she used to in her young days.”

Six of them sat down at table, including an awkward boy of fifteen, who looked like his father, and two little girls whose faces shone from a hasty toilet. Many things had happened in the town, John discovered; the factitious prosperity which had promised to descend upon it in the late nineties had vanished when two factories had closed up and moved away, and the population was smaller now by a few hundred than it had been a quarter of a century ago.

After a plentiful plain dinner they all went to the porch, where the children silhouetted themselves in silent balance on the railing and unrecognizable people called greeting as they passed along the dark, dusty street. After awhile the younger children went to bed, and the boy and his father arose and put on their coats.

“I guess I’ll run up to the garage,” said Harland. “I always go up about this time every night. You two just sit here and talk about old times.”

As father and son moved out of sight along the dim street John Jackson turned to Alice and slipped his arm about her shoulder and looked into her eyes.

“I love you, Alice.”

“I love you.”

Never since his marriage had he said that to any woman except his wife. But this was a new world tonight, with spring all about him in the air, and he felt as if he were holding his own lost youth in his arms.

“I’ve always loved you,” she murmured. “Just before I go to sleep every night, I’ve always been able to see your face. Why didn’t you come back?”

Tenderly he smoothed her hair. He had never known such happiness before. He felt that he had established dominance over time itself, so that it rolled away for him, yielding up one vanished springtime after another to the mastery of his overwhelming emotion.

“We’re still young, we two people,” he said exultantly. “We made a silly mistake a long, long time ago, but we found out in time.”

“Tell me about it,” she whispered.

“This morning, in the rain, I heard your voice.”

“What did my voice say?”

“It said, ‘Come home.’”

“And here you are, my dear.”

“Here I am.”

Suddenly he got to his feet.

“You and I are going away,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

“I always knew that when you came for me I’d go.”

Later, when the moon had risen, she walked with him to the gate.

“Tomorrow!” he whispered.

“Tomorrow!”

His heart was going like mad, and he stood carefully away from her to let foot-steps across the way approach, pass and fade out down the dim street. With a sort of wild innocence he kissed her once more and held her close to his heart under the April moon.