Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Страница 173

About five o’clock she hurried back to the hotel, demanding feverishly at the desk if there had been a telephone message for her. To her profound disappointment there was nothing. A minute after she had entered her room the phone rang.

“This is Scott Kimberly.”

At the words a call to battle echoed in her heart.

“Oh, how do you do?”

Her tone implied that she had almost forgotten him. It was not frigid—it was merely casual.

As she answered the inevitable question as to the hour when she had arrived, a warm glow spread over her. Now that, from a personification of all the riches and pleasure she craved, he had materialized as merely a male voice over the telephone, her confidence became strengthened. Male voices were male voices. They could be managed; they could be made to intone syllables of which the minds behind them had no approval. Male voices could be made sad or tender or despairing at her will. She rejoiced. The soft clay was ready to her hand.

“Won’t you take dinner with me tonight?” Scott was suggesting.

“Why”—perhaps not, she thought; let him think of her tonight—“I don’t believe I’ll be able to,” she said. “I’ve got an engagement for dinner and the theatre. I’m terribly sorry.”

Her voice did not sound sorry—it sounded polite. Then as though a happy thought had occurred to her as to a time and place where she could work him into her list of dates, “I’ll tell you: Why don’t you come around here this afternoon and have tea with me?”

He would be there immediately. He had been playing squash and as soon as he took a plunge he would arrive. Yanci hung up the phone and turned with a quiet efficiency to the mirror, too tense to smile.

She regarded her lustrous eyes and dusky hair in critical approval. Then she took a lavender tea gown from her trunk and began to dress.

She let him wait seven minutes in the lobby before she appeared; then she approached him with a friendly, lazy smile.

“How do you do?” she murmured. “It’s marvelous to see you again. How are you?” And, with a long sigh, “I’m frightfully tired. I’ve been on the go ever since I got here this morning; shopping and then tearing off to luncheon and a matinée. I’ve bought everything I saw. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it all.”

She remembered vividly that when they had first met she had told him, without expecting to be believed, how unpopular she was. She could not risk such a remark now, even in jest. He must think that she had been on the go every minute of the day.

They took a table and were served with olive sandwiches and tea. He was so good-looking, she thought, and marvelously dressed. His grey eyes regarded her with interest from under immaculate ash-blond hair. She wondered how he passed his days, how he liked her costume, what he was thinking of at that moment.

“How long will you be here?” he asked.

“Well, two weeks, off and on. I’m going down to Princeton for the February prom and then up to a house party in Westchester County for a few days. Are you shocked at me for going out so soon? Father would have wanted me to, you know. He was very modern in all his ideas.”

She had debated this remark on the train. She was not going to a house party. She was not invited to the Princeton prom. Such things, nevertheless, were necessary to create the illusion. That was everything—the illusion.

“And then,” she continued, smiling, “two of my old beaus are in town, which makes it nice for me.”

She saw Scott blink and she knew that he appreciated the significance of this.

“What are your plans for this winter?” he demanded. “Are you going back West?”

“No. You see, my aunt returns from India this week. She’s going to open her Florida house, and we’ll stay there until the middle of March. Then we’ll come up to Hot Springs and we may go to Europe for the summer.”

This was all the sheerest fiction. Her first letter to her aunt, which had given the bare details of Tom Bowman’s death, had at last reached its destination. Her aunt had replied with a note of conventional sympathy and the announcement that she would be back in America within two years if she didn’t decide to live in Italy.

“But you’ll let me see something of you while you’re here,” urged Scott, after attending to this impressive program. “If you can’t take dinner with me tonight, how about Wednesday—that’s the day after tomorrow?”

“Wednesday? Let’s see.” Yanci’s brow was knit with imitation thought. “I think I have a date for Wednesday, but I don’t know for certain. How about phoning me tomorrow, and I’ll let you know? Because I want to go with you, only I think I’ve made an engagement.”

“Very well, I’ll phone you.”

“Do—about ten.”

“Try to be able to—then or any time.”

“I’ll tell you—if I can’t go to dinner with you Wednesday I can go to lunch surely.”

“All right,” he agreed. “And we’ll go to a matinée.”

They danced several times. Never by word or sign did Yanci betray more than the most cursory interest in him until just at the end, when she offered him her hand to say good-bye.

“Good-bye, Scott.”

For just the fraction of a second—not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard—she looked into his eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried away.

She took her dinner in a little tea room around the corner. It was an economical dinner which cost a dollar and a half. There was no date concerned in it at all, and no man except an elderly person in spats who tried to speak to her as she came out the door.