The Love Boat, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

The boat floated down the river through the summer night like a Fourth of July balloon footloose in the heavens. The decks were brightly lit and restless with dancers, but bow and stern were in darkness; so the boat had no more outline than an accidental cluster of stars. Between the black banks it floated, softly parting the mild dark tide from the sea and leaving in its wake small excited gusts of music—“Babes in the Woods” over and over, and “Moonlight Bay.” Past the scattered lights of Pokus Landing, where a poet in an attic window saw yellow hair gleam in the turn of a dance. Past Ulm, where the moon came up out of a boiler works, and West Esther, where it slid, unregretted, behind a cloud.

The radiance of the boat itself was enough for, among others, the three young Harvard graduates; they were weary and a little depressed and they gave themselves up promptly to its enchantment. Their own boat was casually drifting and a collision was highly possible, but no one made a movement to start the engine and get out of the way.

“It makes me very sad,” one of them said. “It is so beautiful that it makes me want to cry.”

“Go on and cry, Bill.”

“Will you cry too?”

“We’ll all cry.”

His loud, facetious “Boo-hoo!” echoed across the night, reached the steamer and brought a small lively crowd to the rail.

“Look! It’s a launch.”

“Some guys in a launch.”

Bill got to his feet. The two crafts were scarcely ten feet apart.

“Throw us a hempen rope,” he pleaded eloquently. “Come on—be impulsive. Please do.”

Once in a hundred years there would have been a rope at hand. It was there that night. With a thud the coil struck the wooden bottom and in an instant the motorboat was darting along behind the steamer, as if in the wake of a harpooned whale.

Fifty high-school couples left the dance and scrambled for a place around the suddenly interesting stern rail. Fifty girls gave forth immemorial small cries of excitement and sham fright. Fifty young men forgot the mild exhibitionism which had characterized their manner of the evening and looked grudgingly at the more effectual show-off of three others. Mae Purley, without the involuntary quiver of an eyelash, fitted the young man standing in the boat into her current dream, where he displaced Al Fitzpatrick with laughable ease. She put her hand on Al Fitzpatrick’s arm and squeezed it a little because she had stopped thinking about him entirely and felt that he must be aware of it. Al, who had been standing with his eyes squinted up, watching the towed boat, looked tenderly at Mae and tried to put his arm about her shoulder. But Mae Purley and Bill Frothington, handsome and full of all the passionate promise in the world, had locked eyes across the intervening space.

They made love. For a moment they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was closer than an embrace, more urgent than a call. There were no words for it. Had there been, and had Mae heard them, she would have fled to the darkest corner of the ladies’ washroom and hid her face in a paper towel.

“We want to come on board!” Bill called. “We’re life-preserver salesmen! How about pulling us around to the side?”

Mr. McVitty, the principal, arrived on the scene too late to interfere. The three young Harvard graduates—Ellsworth Ames soaking wet, unconsciously Byronic with his dark curls plastered damply to his forehead, Hamilton Abbot and Bill Frothington surer-footed and dry—climbed and were hoisted over the side. The motorboat bobbed on behind.

With a sort of instinctive reverence for the moment, Mae Purley hung back in the shadow, not through lack of confidence but through excess of it. She knew that he would come straight to her. That was never the trouble and never had been—the trouble was in keeping up her own interest after she had satisfied the deep but casual curiosity of her lips. But tonight was going to be different. She knew this when she saw that he was in no hurry; he was leaning against the rail making a couple of high-school seniors—who suddenly seemed very embryonic to themselves—feel at ease.

He looked at her once.

“It’s all right,” his eyes said, without a movement of his face, “I understand as well as you. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

Life burned high in them both; the steamer and its people were at a distance and in darkness. It was one of those times.

“I’m a Harvard man,” Mr. McVitty was saying, “class of 1907.” The three young men nodded with polite indifference. “I’m glad to know we won the race,” continued the principal, simulating a reborn enthusiasm which had never existed. “I haven’t been to New London in fifteen years.”

“Bill here rowed Number Two,” said Ames. “That’s a coaching launch we’ve got.”

“Oh. You were on the crew?”

“Crew’s over now,” said Bill impatiently. “Everything’s over.”

“Well, let me congratulate you.”

Shortly they froze him into silence. They were not his sort of Harvard man; they wouldn’t have known his name in four years there together. But they would have been much more gracious and polite about it had it not been this particular night. They hadn’t broken away from the hilarious mobs of classmates and relatives at New London to exchange discomfort with the master of a mill-town high school.

“Can we dance?” they demanded.

A few minutes later Bill and Mae Purley were walking down the deck side by side. Life had met over the body of Al Fitzpatrick, engulfing him. The two clear voices:

“Perhaps you’ll dance with me,” with the soft assurance of the moonlight itself, and: “I’d love to,” were nothing that could be argued about, not by twice what Al Fitzpatrick pretended to be. The most consoling thought in Al’s head was that they might be fought over.

What was it they said? Did you hear it? Can you remember? Later that night she remembered only his pale wavy hair and the long limbs that she followed around the dancing floor.

She was thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, then with a rush, pouring out of her heart, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips alone had escaped metamorphosis, whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

“Then you live near?”

“Only about twenty-five miles from you,” Bill said. “Isn’t it funny?”

“Isn’t it funny?”

They looked at each other, a trifle awed in the face of such manifest destiny. They stood between two lifeboats on the top deck. Mae’s hand lay on his arm, playing with a loose ravel of his tweed coat. They had not kissed yet—that was coming in a minute. That was coming any time now, as soon as every cup of emotional moonlight had been drained of its possibilities and cast aside. She was seventeen.

“Are you glad I live near?”

She might have said “I’m delighted” or “Of course I am.” But she whispered, “Yes; are you?”

“Mae—with an e,” he said and laughed in a husky whisper. Already they had a joke together. “You look so darn beautiful.”

She accepted the compliment in silence, meeting his eyes. He pressed her to him by her merest elbow in a way that would have been impossible had she not been eager too. He never expected to see her after tonight.

“Mae.” His whisper was urgent. Mae’s eyes came nearer, grew larger, dissolved against his face, like eyes on a screen. Her frail body breathed imperceptibly in his arms.

A dance stopped. There was clapping for an encore. Then clapping for another encore with what had seemed only a poor bar of music in between. There was another dance, scarcely longer than a kiss. They were heavily endowed for love, these two, and both of them had played with it before.

Down below, Al Fitzpatrick’s awareness of time and space had reached a pitch that would have been invaluable to an investigator of the new mathematics. Bit by bit the boat presented itself to him as it really was, a wooden hulk garish with forty-watt bulbs, peopled by the commonplace young people of a commonplace town. The river was water, the moon was a flat meaningless symbol in the sky. He was in agony—which is to speak tritely. Rather, he was in deadly fear; his throat was dry, his mouth drooped into a hurt half moon as he tried to talk to some of the other boys—shy unhappy boys, who loitered around the stern.

Al was older than the rest—he was twenty-two, and out in the world for seven years. He worked in the Hammacker Mills and attended special high-school classes at night. Another year might see him assistant manager of the shops, and Mae Purley, with about as much eagerness as was to be expected in a girl who was having everything her own way, had half promised to marry him when she was eighteen. His wasn’t a temperament to go to pieces. When he had brooded up to the limit of his nature he felt a necessity for action. Miserably and desperately he climbed up to the top deck to make trouble.

Bill and Mae were standing close together by the lifeboat, quiet, absorbed and happy. They moved a little apart as he came near. “Is that you, Mae?” called Al in a hard voice. “Aren’t you