I’d Die for You, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Alternative title: The Legend of Lake Lure

I

Within a cup of the Carolina mountains lay the lake, a pink glow of summer evening on its surface. In the lake was a peninsula and on this an Italianate hotel of stucco turned to many colors with the progress of the sun. In the dining room of the hotel four moving picture people sat at table.

“If they can fake Venice or the Sahara—” the girl was saying, “—then I don’t see why they couldn’t fake Chimney Rock without sending us all the way East.”

“We’re going to fake it a lot,” said Roger Clark, the camera man. “We could fake Niagara Falls or the Yellowstone if it was just a question of background. But the hero of this story is the Rock.”

“We can be better than reality,” said Wilkie Prout, assistant director. “I was never so disillusioned as when I saw the real Versailles and thought of the one Conger built in twenty-nine—”

“But truth’s the foot rule,” Roger Clark continued. “That’s where other directors flop—”

The girl, Atlanta Downs, was not listening. Her eyes—eyes that had an odd sort of starlight in them which actually photographed—had left the table and come to rest upon a man who had just entered. After a minute Roger’s eyes followed hers. He stared.

“Who’s that number?” he said. “I know I’ve seen him somewhere. He’s somebody who’s been news.”

“He doesn’t look so hot to me,” Atlanta said.

“He’s somebody, though. Blast it, I know everything about him except I don’t know who he is. He’s somebody it was hard to photograph—broke cameras and that sort of thing. He’s not an author, not an actor—”

“Imagine an actor breaking cameras,” said Prout.

“—not a tennis player, not a Mdvanni—wait a minute—we’re getting warm.”

“He’s in hiding,” suggested Atlanta. “That’s it. Look, see how he’s got his hand over his eyes. He’s a criminal. Who’s wanted now? Anybody?”

The technician, Schwartz, was trying to help Roger remember—he suddenly exclaimed in a whisper:

“It’s that Delannux! Remember?”

“That’s it,” said Roger. “That’s just who it is. ‘Suicide Carley.’”

“What did he do?” Atlanta demanded. “Commit suicide?”

“Sure. That’s his ghost.”

“I mean did he try to?”

The people at the table had all bent slightly toward each other, though the man was too far away to hear. Roger elucidated.

“It was the other way around. His girls committed suicide—or were supposed to.”

“For that man? Why he’s—almost ugly.”

“Oh it’s probably the bunk. But some girl crashed an airplane and left a note, and some other girl—”

“Two or three,” Schwartz interrupted. “It was a great story.”

Atlanta considered.

“I can just barely imagine killing a man for love, but I can’t imagine slaying myself.”

After dinner she strolled with Roger Clark through the lakeside arcade past the little stores with the weavings and carvings of the mountaineers, and the semi-precious stones from the Great Smokies in their windows—until they came to the Post Office at the end and stood gazing at lake and mountains and sky. The scene was in full voice now, with beeches, pines, spruce and balsam fir become one massive reflector of changing light. The lake was a girl, aroused and alive with a rich blush of response to the masculine splendor of the Blue Ridge. Roger looked toward Chimney Rock, half a mile away.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll try a lot of shots from the plane. I’m going to circle around that thing till it gets dizzy. So put on your pioneer’s dress and be up there—I can maybe get some things by accident.”

That was as good as an order, for Roger was in control of the expedition; Prout was only a figure head. Roger had learned his trade at eighteen as an aerial photographer in France—for four years he had been top man in Hollywood in his line.

Atlanta liked him better than any man she knew. And in a moment, when he asked her something in a low voice, something he had asked her before, she answered him with just that information.

“But you don’t like me enough to marry me,” he objected. “I am getting old, Atlanta.”

“You’re only thirty-six.”

“That’s old enough. Can’t we do something about it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always thought—” She faced him in the full light. “You wouldn’t understand, Roger, but I’ve worked so hard—and I always thought I wanted to have some fun first.”

After a moment he said without smiling:

“That’s the first and the only terrible speech I’ve ever heard you make.”

“I’m sorry, Roger—”

But the habitually cheerful expression had come back into his face.

“Here comes Mr. Delannux, looking tired of himself. Let’s pick him up and see if he’ll give you a tumble.”

Atlanta drew back.

“I hate professional heart-breakers.”

But as if in revenge for her recent remark Roger addressed the advancing figure, asking for a match. A few minutes later the three of them were strolling back along the beach toward the hotel.

“I couldn’t make out your party,” said Delannux. “You didn’t exactly have a vacation air about you.”

“We thought maybe you were Dillinger,” Atlanta answered, “or whoever it is now.”

“As a matter of fact I am in hiding. Did you ever try to hide? It’s awful—I’m beginning to see why they come out and give themselves up.”

“Are you a criminal?”

“I don’t know—and I don’t want to find out. I’m hiding from a civil suit and as long as they can’t serve the papers on me I’m all right. For awhile I hid in a hospital but I got too well to stay there. Now you tell me why you’re going to photograph this rock.”

“That’s easy,” answered Roger. “In the picture Atlanta plays the part of a mother eagle who doesn’t know where to build her nest—”

“Shut up, idiot!” To Delannux she said: “It’s a pioneer picture—about the Indian wars. The heroine signals from the rock and that sort of thing.”

“How long will you be here?”

“That’s my clue to go in,” Roger said. “I ought to be working on a broken camera. Staying out, Atlanta?”

“Do you think I’d go in unless I had to—on a night like this?”

“Well, you and Prout be up on the rock at eight o’clock—and better not try to climb it in one breath.”

She sat with Delannux on the side of a beached raft while the sunset broke into pink picture puzzle pieces that solved themselves in the dark west.

“It’s strange how quick everything is nowadays,” said Delannux. “Here we are, suddenly sitting on the shore of a lake—”

—He’s one of those quick workers, she thought.

But the detached tone of his voice disarmed her, and she looked at him more closely. Plain he was—only his eyes were large and fine. His nose was bent sideways in a fashion that gave him a humorous expression from one angle and a sardonic one from the other. His body was slender with long arms and big hands.

“—a lake without a history,” he continued. “It ought to have a legend.”

“But it has one,” she said. “Something about an Indian maiden who drowned herself for love—” At the look in his face she stopped suddenly and finished,“—but I’m no good at stories. Did I hear you say you’d been in the hospital?”

“Yes—over in Asheville. I had the whooping cough.”

“What?”

“Oh, all the absurd things happen to me.” He changed the subject. “Is Atlanta really your name?”

“Yes, I was born there.”

“It’s a lovely name. It reminds me of a great poem, Atlanta in Calydon.” He recited gravely:

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s Traces
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Tills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain—

A little later he was somehow talking about the war.

“—I hadn’t been within miles of the line and I was very bored and had nothing to write home. I wrote my mother that I’d just saved the lives of Pershing and Foch—that a bomb had fallen on them and I’d picked it up and thrown it away. And what did mother do but telephone the news about her brave boy to every paper in Philadelphia.”

She felt suddenly at home with this man yet utterly unable to imagine his causing any devastation in the feminine heart. He seemed to have none of that quality that was once called “It” about him, only an amusing frankness and a politeness that made him easy to be with.

After awhile people came out to swim, and their voices sounded strange in the dark as they experimented with the cooling water. Then there were splashing crawls, and after that their voices again, far away on the diving tower. When they came in and hurried shivering up to the hotel, the moon was showing over the mountains—just like a child’s drawing of the moon. Behind the hotel, a choir was rehearsing in a negro church but after midnight it stopped and there were only the frogs and a few restless birds and the sound of automobiles far away.

Atlanta stretched, and in doing so saw her watch.

“It’s after one! And I’m working tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry—it’s my fault. I’ve talked and talked.”

“I love to hear you talk. But I must go, really. Why don’t you have lunch with us at Chimney Rock tomorrow?”

“I’d like to.”

As they said goodbye amid the ghostly wicker of the lobby Atlanta was conscious of what a nice evening she had with him—later, before she went to sleep, she remembered a dozen indirect little compliments he had given her—the kind that one could remember with a pleasant shimmer. He made her laugh and he made her feel attractive. Had he possessed the special quality of being “thrilling” she could even imagine some girl falling for him a little.

“But not me,” she thought sleepily. “No