The Swimmers, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

In the Place Benoit, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly by the June sun. It was a terrible thing, for, unlike pure heat, it held no promise of rural escape, but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. In the offices of The Promissory Trust Company, Paris Branch, facing the square, an American man of thirty-five inhaled it, and it became the odor of the thing he must presently do. A black horror suddenly descended upon him, and he went up to the washroom, where he stood, trembling a little, just inside the door.

Through the washroom window his eyes fell upon a sign—1000 Chemises. The shirts in question filled the shop window, piled, cravated and stuffed, or else draped with shoddy grace on the show-case floor. 1000 Chemises—Count them! To the left he read Papeterie, Patisserie, Solde, Reclame, and Constance Talmadge in Dejeuner de Soleil; and his eye, escaping to the right, met yet more somber announcements: Vetements Ecclesiastiques, Declaration de Deces, and Pompes Funebres. Life and Death.

Henry Marston’s trembling became a shaking; it would be pleasant if this were the end and nothing more need be done, he thought, and with a certain hope he sat down on a stool. But it is seldom really the end, and after a while, as he became too exhausted to care, the shaking stopped and he was better. Going downstairs, looking as alert and self-possessed as any other officer of the bank, he spoke to two clients he knew, and set his face grimly toward noon.

“Well, Henry Clay Marston!” A handsome old man shook hands with him and took the chair beside his desk.

“Henry, I want to see you in regard to what we talked about the other night. How about lunch? In that green little place with all the trees.”

“Not lunch, Judge Waterbury; I’ve got an engagement.”

“I’ll talk now, then; because I’m leaving this afternoon. What do these plutocrats give you for looking important around here?”

Henry Marston knew what was coming.

“Ten thousand and certain expense money,” he answered.

“How would you like to come back to Richmond at about double that? You’ve been over here eight years and you don’t know the opportunities you’re missing. Why both my boys——”

Henry listened appreciatively, but this morning he couldn’t concentrate on the matter. He spoke vaguely about being able to live more comfortably in Paris and restrained himself from stating his frank opinion upon existance at home.

Judge Waterbury beckoned to a tall, pale man who stood at the mail desk.

“This is Mr. Wiese,” he said. “Mr. Wiese’s from downstate; he’s a halfway partner of mine.”

“Glad to meet you, suh.” Mr. Wiese’s voice was rather too deliberately Southern. “Understand the judge is makin’ you a proposition.”

“Yes,” Henry answered briefly. He recognized and detested the type—the prosperous sweater, presumably evolved from a cross between carpet-bagger and poor white. When Wiese moved away, the judge said almost apologetically:

“He’s one of the richest men in the South, Henry.” Then, after a pause, “Come home, boy.”

“I’ll think it over, judge.” For a moment the gray and ruddy head seemed so kind; then it faded back into something one-dimensional, machine-finished, blandly and bleakly un-European. Henry Marston respected that open kindness—in the bank he touched it with daily appreciation, as a curator in a museum might touch a precious object removed in time and space; but there was no help in it for him; the questions which Henry Marston’s life propounded could be answered only in France. His seven generations of Virginia ancestors were definitely behind him every day at noon when he turned home.

Home was a fine high-ceiling apartment hewn from the palace of a Renaissance cardinal in the Rue Monsieur—the sort of thing Henry could not have afforded in America. Choupette, with something more than the rigid traditionalism of a French bourgeois taste, had made it beautiful, and moved through gracefully with their children. She was a frail Latin blonde with fine large features and vividly sad French eyes that had first fascinated Henry in a Grenoble pension in 1918. The two boys took their looks from Henry, voted the handsomest man at the University of Virginia a few years before the war.

Climbing the two broad flights of stairs, Henry stood panting a moment in the outside hall. It was quiet and cool here, and yet it was vaguely like the terrible thing that was going to happen. He heard a clock inside his apartment strike one, and inserted his key in the door.

The maid who had been in Choupette’s family for thirty years stood before him, her mouth open in the utterance of a truncated sigh.

“Bonjour, Louise.”

“Monsieur!” He threw his hat on a chair. “But, monsieur—but I thought monsieur said on the phone he was going to Tours for the children!”

“I changed my mind, Louise.”

He had taken a step forward, his last doubt melting away at the constricted terror in the woman’s face.

“Is madame home?”

Simultaneously he perceived a man’s hat and stick on the hall table and for the first time in his life he heard silence—a loud, singing silence, oppressive as heavy guns or thunder. Then, as the endless moment was broken by the maid’s terrified little cry, he pushed through the portieres into the next room.

An hour later Doctor Derocco, de la Faculte de Medecine, rang the apartment bell. Choupette Marston, her face a little drawn and rigid, answered the door. For a moment they went through French forms; then:

“My husband has been feeling unwell for some weeks,” she said concisely. “Nevertheless, he did not complain in a way to make me uneasy. He has suddenly collapsed; he cannot articulate or move his limbs. All this, I must say, might have been precipitated by a certain indiscretion of mine—in all events, there was a violent scene, a discussion, and sometimes when he is agitated, my husband cannot comprehend well in French.”

“I will see him,” said the doctor; thinking: “Some things are comprehended instantly in all languages.”

During the next four weeks several people listened to strange speeches about one thousand chemises, and heard how all the population of Paris was becoming etherized by cheap gasoline—there was a consulting psychiatrist, not inclined to believe in any underlying mental trouble; there was a nurse from the American Hospital, and there was Choupette, frightened, defiant and, after her fashion, deeply sorry. A month later, when Henry awoke to his familiar room, lit with a dimmed lamp, he found her sitting beside his bed and reached out for her hand.

“I still love you,” he said—“that’s the odd thing.”

“Sleep, male cabbage.”

“At all costs,” he continued with a certain feeble irony, “you can count on me to adopt the Continental attitude.”

“Please! You tear at my heart.”

When he was sitting up in bed they were ostensibly close together again—closer than they had been for months.

“Now you’re going to have another holiday,” said Henry to the boys, back from the country. “Papa has got to go to the seashore and get really well.”

“Will we swim?”

“And get drowned, my darlings?” Choupette cried. “But fancy, at your age. Not at all!”

So, at St. Jean de Luz they sat on the shore instead, and watched the English and Americans and a few hardy French pioneers of le sport voyage between raft and diving tower, motorboat and sand. There were passing ships, and bright islands to look at, and mountains reaching into cold zones, and red and yellow villas, called Fleur des Bois, Mon Nid, or Sans-Souci; and farther back, tired French villages of baked cement and grey stone.

Choupette sat at Henry’s side, holding a parasol to shelter her peach-bloom skin from the sun.

“Look!” she would say, at the sight of tanned American girls. “Is that lovely? Skin that will be leather at thirty—a sort of brown veil to hide all blemishes, so that everyone will look alike. And women of hundred kilos in such bathing suits! Weren’t clothes intended to hide Nature’s mistakes?”

Henry Clay Marston was a Virginian of the kind who are prouder of being Virginians than of being Americans. That mighty word printed across a continent was less to him than the memory of his grandfather, who freed his slaves in ’58, fought from Manassas to Appomattox, knew Huxley and Spencer as light reading, and believed in caste only when it expressed the best of race.

To Choupette all this was vague. Her more specific criticisms of his compatriots were directed against the women.

“How would you place them?” she exclaimed. “Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses—they are all the same. Look! Where would I be if I tried to act like your friend, Madame de Richepin? My father was a professor in a provincial university, and I have certain things I wouldn’t do because they wouldn’t please my class, my family. Madame de Richepin has other things she wouldn’t do because of her class, her family.” Suddenly she pointed to an American girl going into the water: “But that young lady may be a stenographer and yet be compelled to warp herself, dressing and acting as if she had all the money in the world.”

“Perhaps she will have, some day.”

“That’s the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine. That’s why all their faces over thirty are discontented and unhappy.”

Though Henry was in general agreement, he could not help being amused at Choupette’s choice of target this afternoon. The girl—she was perhaps eighteen—was obviously acting like nothing but herself—she was what his father would have called a thoroughbred. A deep, thoughtful face that was pretty only because of the irrepressible determination of the perfect features to be recognized,