“He can call for Noël,” she decided. “I’ve done my best all through. If he’s so wise, he ought not to put me in such a situation.”
An hour later, René was still unable to think where he had put her at all. He had planned the days for her, but he had never really thought before about how she would fill them up. Returning to his laboratory in a state of profound gloom, he increased his pace as he came in sight of the building, cursed with a new anxiety. He had been absent more than three hours, with the barometer steadily falling and three windows open; he could not remember whether he or Charles was to have spoken to the janitor about continuing the heat over the week-end. His jars, the precious water in his jars—— He ran up the icy stairs of the old building, afraid of what he was going to see.
One closed jar went with a cracking plop as he stood panting inside the door. One thousand of them glistened in tense rows through three long rooms, and he held his breath, waiting for them to go off together, almost hearing the crackling, despairing sound they would make. He saw that another one was broken, and then another in a far row. The room was like ice, with a blizzard seeping through eight corners of every window; there was ice formed on the faucet.
On tiptoe, lest even a faint movement precipitate the nine hundred and ninety-seven catastrophes, he retreated to the hall; then his heart beat again as he heard the dull, reassuring rumble of the janitor’s shovel in the cellar.
“Fire it up as far as you can!” he called down, and then descended another flight so as to be sure he was understood. “Make it as hot a blaze as possible, even if it is all”—he could not think of the word for kindling—“even if it is all small wood.”
He hurried back to the laboratory, entering again on tiptoe. As he entered, two jars beside a north window cracked, but his hand, brushing the radiator, felt just the beginning of a faint and tepid warmth. He took off his overcoat, and then his coat, and tucked them in across one window, dragged out an emergency electric heater, and then turned on every electric appliance in the room. From moment to moment, he stopped and listened ominously, but there were no more of the short, disastrous dying cries. By the time he had isolated the five broken jars and checked up on the amount of ice in the others, there was a definite pulse of heat coming off the radiators.
As he still fussed mechanically around the room, his hands shaking, he heard Noël’s voice in a lower hall, and she came upstairs with Dolores Hume, both of them bundled to the ears against the cold.
“Here you are, René,” Dolores said cheerfully. “We’ve phoned here three times and all over town. We wanted Noël to stay to dinner, but she keeps thinking you’d be worried. What is all this about a schedule? Are you all catching trains?”
“What is what?” he answered dazedly. “You realize, Dolores, what has happened here in this room?”
“It’s got very cold.”
“The water in our jars froze. We almost lost them all!”
He heard the furnace door close, and then the janitor coming upstairs.
Furious at what seemed the indifference of the world, he repeated:
“We nearly lost them all!”
“Well, as long as you didn’t——” Dolores fixed her eyes upon a vague spot far down the late battlefield of gleaming jars. “Since we’re here, René, I want to say something to you—a thing that seems to me quite as important as your jars. There is something very beautiful about a widower being left alone with a little daughter to care for and to protect and to guide. It doesn’t seem to me that anything so beautiful should be lightly destroyed.”
For the second time that day, René started to throw his hands up in the air, but he had stretched his wrists a little the last time, and in his profound agitation he was not at all sure that he could catch them.
“There is no answer,” he groaned. “Listen, Dolores; you must come to my laboratory often. There is something very beautiful in a platinum electrode.”
“I am thinking only of Noël,” said Dolores serenely.
At this point, the janitor, effectually concealed beneath a thick mask of coal dust, came into the room. It was Noël who first divined the fact that the janitor was Becky Snyder.
IV
Under those thoroughly unmethodical circumstances, the engagement of René and Becky was announced to the world—the world as personified and represented by Dolores Hume. But for René even that event was overshadowed by his astonishment at learning that the first jar had burst at the moment Becky came into his laboratory; that she had remembered that water expanded as it froze and guessed at the danger; that she had been working for three-quarters of an hour to start the furnace before he had arrived; and, finally, that she had taken care of the furnace for two years back in Bingham—“because there was nothing much else to do.”
Dolores took it nicely, though she saw fit to remind Becky that she would be somewhat difficult to recognize if constantly observed under such extremely contrary conditions.
“I suppose it all has something to do with this schedule I hear so much about.”
“I started the fire with the schedule,” remarked Becky, and then amended herself when René jumped up with a suddenly agonized expression: “Not the one with the notes on it—that was behind the cushions of the car.”
“It’s too much for me,” Dolores admitted. “I suppose you’ll all end by sleeping here tonight—probably in the jars.”
Noël bent double with laughter.
“Why don’t we? Look on the schedule, daddy, and see if that’s the thing to do.”
“On Schedule” was written at “La Paix,” on the outskirts of Baltimore in December 1932. The Post paid $3000. After Zelda Fitzgerald entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in February, Fitzgerald rented “La Paix.” Although he was making his successful effort to complete Tender Is the Night, it was necessary for him to write stories for ready income.
This story draws upon Fitzgerald’s experiences as a sole parent while his wife was hospitalized and was also a private joke about his own penchant for making schedules. René is a widower; commencing with “On Schedule” the mothers in Fitzgerald’s domestic stories are either dead or hospitalized, reflecting his own domestic situation.
