Image on the Heart, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The train rolled into the little French town as if it were entering a dusty garden. As the floor of the railroad carriage trembled and shifted with the brakes, the stationary human figures outside the window became suddenly mobile as the train itself, and began running along beside it. The passengers seemed to blend right into the countryside as soon as the porters on the platform were running as fast as the train.

She was waiting for him—eight months was a long time and they were shy with each other for a moment. She had fair hair—delicate, shiny, essentially private hair—it was not arranged as blondes preferred at the moment but rather as if it were to be let down for someone alone sometime, somewhere. There was no direct challenge in it, and in her face there were the sort of small misproportions that kept her from being smooth and immediately pretty. But in her nineteen years she had managed to be a standard of beauty to two or three men—Tudy was lovely to those to whom she wanted to be lovely.

They got into one of those old-fashioned victorias that have a last refuge in the south of France; as the horse started off down the cobblestoned street, the man turned to the girl beside him and asked simply:

“Do you still want to marry me?”

“Yes, Tom.”

“Thank God.”

They interlaced hands and arms. Even though the cab was moving so slowly up a hill of the old town that pedestrians kept pace with them, it didn’t seem necessary to let go. Everything seemed all right in this mellow Provencal sunshine.

“It seemed forever till you’d come,” Tudy murmured. “Forever and forever. The University closes in another week—and that’s the end of my education.”

“You finish as a freshman.”

“Just a freshman. But I’d rather have had this than any finishing school—especially because you gave it to me.”

“I had to bring you up to my standard,” he said lightly. “Do you feel improved?”

“Do I! Maybe you think these French universities haven’t got standards. It’s—” She broke off to say suddenly: “There’s you, Tom— don’t you see? That French officer coming out of the magasin de tabac across the street—he’s your double.”

Tom looked over toward the sleepy sidewalk, picked out the man, and agreed. “He does look like me, at least like I looked ten years ago. We’ll have to look him up if he lives here.”

“I know him, he’s been here a week on leave. He’s a naval aviator from Toulon. I wanted to meet him because he looked so much like you.”

Like Tom the man was darkly blond and handsome with a flickering in his face, a firelight over high cheekbones. Not having thought much of the matter for years, he stared curiously at the naval officer—who recognized Tudy and waved at her—and said meditatively:

“So that’s what Hook like.”

A minute later the carriage clattered into a green cove under a roof of poplars; beneath the soft roof slept the Hotel des Thermes, tranquil as when it had been a Roman Bath two thousand years before.

“Of course, you’ll stay on at your pension until Mother comes,” he said.

“I have to, Tom. I’m still a student. Isn’t that absurd—when you think that I’m a widow?”

The carriage had drawn up at the door. The concierge was bowing.

“Mother will be here in ten days—then the wedding—then we’re off for Sicily.”

She pressed his hand.

“In half an hour at the Pension Duval,” she said. “I’ll be in the front garden waiting.”

“As soon as I snatch a bath,” he said.

As the cab started off without him, Tudy squeezed back in the corner. She was trying not to think too much but irresistibly she kept saying to herself:

“I’m a lost soul maybe—I don’t feel at all like I ought to feel. Oh, if he’d only come a week ago.”

They had known each other for many years before this rendezvous in France. Or rather Tom had known her people, for he had thought of her as a little girl until one day at Rehoboth Beach a year before. Then word had gone around the hotel that there was a bride of a week whose husband had been tragically drowned that morning. Tom took charge of the immediate situation—it developed that she had no one to turn to and that she was left penniless. He fell in love with her and with her helplessness, and after a few months he persuaded her to let him lend her the money to go abroad and study for a year—and put something between herself and the past. There were no strings attached—indeed, nothing had been said—but he knew that she responded to him in so far as her grief permitted, and there was correspondence more and more intimate and in a few months he wrote asking her to marry him.

She wrote him a glowing answer—and thus it was that he was here. Thus it was that she sat opposite him in an outdoor restaurant on the Rue de Provence that night. The electric lights behind the leaves swayed into sight sometimes in a faint wind, making her head into a ball of white gold.

“Oh, you’ve been so good to me,” she said. “And I really have worked hard, and I’ve loved it here.”

“That’s why I want to be married here, because I’ve so often thought of you in this old town—my heart’s been here for eight months.”

“And I’ve pictured you stopping here when you were a boy, and loving it so much you wanted to send me here.”

“Did you really think of me—like your letters said?”

“Every day,” she answered quickly. “Every letter was true. Sometimes I couldn’t get home fast enough to write you.”

If only he had come a week ago!

Tom talked on:

“And you like the idea of Sicily? I have two months. If you have any other place—”

“No, Sicily’s all right—I mean Sicily’s wonderful.”

Four men, two of them naval officers, and a girl had come into the little cafe. One face among them emerged in the hundred little flashlights and dark patches of leaves—it was that of Lieutenant de Marine Riccard, the man Tudy had pointed out that afternoon. The party settled themselves at a table opposite, grouping and regrouping with laughter.

“Let’s go,” Tudy said suddenly. “We’ll ride up to the University.”

“But isn’t that my double? I’m curious to meet him.”

“Oh, he’s very—young. He’s just here on leave and he’s going back soon, I think—he probably wants to talk to his friends. Do let’s go.”

Obediently he signaled for the check, but it was too late. Riccard has risen from the table, with him two of the other men.

“—’Sieu Croirier.”

“—’Sieu Silve.”

“—soir.”

“—chantee.”

“Why, we do look alike,” Tom said to Riccard.

Riccard smiled politely.

“Excuse me? Oh, yes—I see—a little bit of a bit.” Then he conceded rather haughtily, “I am the English type, I had a Scotswoman for a grandmother.”

“You speak English well.”

“I have known English and American people.” Fragmentarily his eyes strayed towards Tudy. “You speak French well, I wish I could speak so good English. Tell me,” he said intently, “do you know any tricks?”

“Tricks?” Tom asked in surprise.

“Americans all know tricks and I am like an American that way. We have been doing tricks this evening before we came here. Do you know the trick with the fork where you hit it so”—he illustrated with graphic gesturing—“and it lands here in the glass?”

“I’ve seen it. I can’t do it.”

“Neither can I mostly, but sometimes though. Garcon, bring a fork. Also there are some tricks with matches—very interesting. They make you think, these tricks.”

Suddenly Tom remembered that though tricks were no hobby of his, he did happen to have with him something of the sort bought for a nephew and undelivered. It was in his trunk in the hotel, and it was plain that Riccard would consider it a prince among jests. Pleased by the thought, he watched the French people bring their ready concentration, their delight in simple things made complex, to bear upon the forks and matches and handkerchiefs that presently came into play. He liked watching them; he felt young with them; he laughed in tune to Tudy’s laughter—it was fine to be sitting beside her in the soft balm of a Provencal night watching French people make nonsense at the day’s end…

He was an astute man, but he was so wrapped up in his dream of Tudy that it was not until two nights later that he realized something was not as it should be. They had invited several of her friends from the University and Lieutenant Riccard to dine with them in the same little cafe. Tom did the trick that he had recovered from his trunk, a familiar old teaser that depended on two little rubber bulbs connected by a thin cord two yards long.

One of the bulbs was planted under the table cloth beneath Riccard’s plate, and by squeezing the other bulb from across the table, Tom was able to make the Frenchman’s plate rise and fall inexplicably, jiggle, bump, tilt, and conduct itself in a generally supernatural manner. It was not Tom’s notion of the cream of human wit, but Riccard had asked for it and so far as practical jokes go it was a decided success.

“I don’t know what can be the matter with my fork tonight,” Riccard said mournfully. “You Americans will think I am barbarian. There! I have done it again! Can it be that my hand is trembling?” He looked anxiously at his hands. “No—yet there it is—I am destined to spill things tonight. It is one of those matters in life