“Where’d you get it?” she said.
“Get what?”
“All the happiness.”
Before he could answer, someone cut in. For a moment he imagined that the boy had said, “Part of this dance, daddy?” but his annoyance at May’s indifference drove the idea from his mind. Next time he went to the point at once.
“I live near here,” he said. “I’d be awfully pleased if I could call and drive you over for a week-end sometime.”
“What?” she asked vaguely. Again she was listening to a miniature farce being staged in the corner.
“My wife would like so much to have you,” went on Bill. Great dreams of what he could do for this girl for old times’ sake rose in his mind.
Her head swung toward him curiously. “Why, Mr. McVitty told somebody your wife was dead.”
“She isn’t,” said Bill.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the inevitable catapult coming and danced quickly away from it.
A voice rang out: “Just look at old daddy step.”
“Ask him if I can have some of this dance.”
Afterward Bill only remembered the evening up to that point. A crowd swirled around him and someone kept demanding persistently who was a young boiler maker.
He decided, naturally enough, to teach them a lesson, as he had done before, and he told them so. Then there was a long discussion as to whether he could swim. After that the confusion deepened; there were blows and a short sharp struggle. He picked up the story himself in what must have been several minutes later, when his head emerged from the cool waters of the Thames River.
The river was white with the moon, which had changed from rosy gold to a wafer of shining cheese on high. It was some time before he could locate the direction of the shore, but he moved around unworried in the water. The boat was a mere speck now, far down the river, and he laughed to think how little it all mattered, how little anything mattered. Then, feeling sure that he had his wind and wondering if the taxi was still waiting at Wheatly Village, he struck out for the dark shore.
IV
He was worried as he drew near home next afternoon, possessed of a dark, unfounded fear. It was based, of course, on his own silly transgression. Stella would somehow hear of it. In his reaction from the debonair confidence of last night, it seemed inevitable that Stella would hear of it.
“Who’s here?” he asked the butler immediately.
“No one, sir. The Ameses came about an hour ago, but there was no word, so they went on. They said——-”
“Isn’t my wife here?”
“Mrs. Frothington left yesterday just after you.”
The whips of panic descended upon him.
“How long after me?”
“Almost immediately, sir. The telephone rang and she answered it, and almost immediately she had her bag packed and left the house.”
“Mr. Ad Haughton didn’t come?”
“I haven’t seen Mr. Haughton.”
It had happened. The spirit of adventure had seized Stella too. He knew that her life had been not without a certain pressure from sentimental men, but that she would ever go anywhere without telling him——-
He threw himself face downward on a couch. What had happened? He had never meant things to happen. Was that what she had meant when she had looked at him in that peculiar way the other night?
He went upstairs. Almost as soon as he entered the big bedroom he saw the note, written on blue stationery lest he miss it against the white pillow. In his misery an old counsel of his mother’s came back to him: “The more terrible things seem the more you’ve got to keep yourself in shape.”
Trembling, he divested himself of his clothes, turned on a bath and lathered his face. Then he poured himself a drink and shaved. It was like a dream, this change in his life. She was no longer his; even if she came back she was no longer his. Everything was different—this room, himself, everything that had existed yesterday. Suddenly he wanted it back. He got out of the bathtub and knelt down on the bath mat beside it and prayed. He prayed for Stella and himself and Ad Haughton; he prayed crazily for the restoration of his life—the life that he had just as crazily cut in two. When he came out of the bathroom with a towel around him, Ad Haughton was sitting on the bed.
“Hello, Bill. Where’s your wife?”
“Just a minute,” Bill answered. He went back into the bathroom and swallowed a draught of rubbing alcohol guaranteed to produce violent gastric disturbances. Then he stuck his head out the door casually.
“Mouthful of gargle,” he explained. “How are you, Ad? Open that envelope on the pillow and we’ll see where she is.”
“She’s gone to Europe with a dentist. Or rather her dentist is going to Europe, so she had to dash to New York——”
He hardly heard. His mind, released from worry, had drifted off again. There would be a full moon tonight, or almost a full moon. Something had happened under a full moon once. What it was he was unable for the moment to remember.
His long, lanky body, his little lost soul in the universe, sat there on the bathroom window seat.
“I’m probably the world’s worst guy,” he said, shaking his head at himself in the mirror—“probably the world’s worst guy. But I can’t help it. At my age you can’t fight against what you know you are.”
Trying his best to be better, he sat there faithfully for an hour. Then it was twilight and there were voices downstairs, and suddenly there it was, in the sky over his lawn, all the restless longing after fleeing youth in all the world—the bright uncapturable moon.
Notes
The story was written in August 1927 at “Ellerslie,” a rented mansion near Wilmington, Delaware. Fitzgerald had returned to America to write Tender Is the Night, but the work on the novel was interrupted and postponed while he wrote money-making stories.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (8 October 1927).
