The Women in The House, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

This is one of those stories that ought to begin by calling the hero “X” or “H—B—”—because there were so many people drawn into it that at least one of them will read this and claim to have been a leading character. And as for that current dodge “No reference to any living character is intended”—there’s no use even trying that.

Instead we come right out and state that the man in the case was Emmet Monsen, because that is (or almost is) his real name. Three months ago you could consult the pictorials and news magazines and discover that he was just returning from the Omigis on the L.A. Fumataki Nagursha and landing at the port of Los Angeles with notable information on tropical tides and fungi. He was in the pictorials because he was notably photogenic, being thirty-one, slender and darkly handsome, with the sort of expression that made photographers say:

“Mr. Monsen—could you manage to smile once more?”

—but I am going to take the modern privilege of starting a story twice, and begin again—at a medical laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, forty-eight hours after Emmet Monsen left the dock.

A girl, a pretty girl (but not the leading girl) was talking to a young man whose business was developing electro-cardiograph or heart charts—automatic recordings of that organ which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.

“Eddie hasn’t phoned today,” she said.

“Excuse these tears,” he answered. “It’s my old sinus. And here’re the charts for your candid camera album.”

“Thanks—but don’t you think when a girl is going to be married in a month, or at least before Christmas, he could phone her every morning.”

“Listen—if he loses that job at Wadford Dunn Sons, you won’t be able to afford a Mexican marriage.”

The laboratory girl carefully wrote the name “Wadford Dunn Sons” at the top of the first heart chart, swore in a short but vicious California idiom, erased, and substituted the name of the patient.

“Maybe you better think about your job here,” added the laboratory man. “Those cardiographs are supposed to go out by—”

Telephones interrupted him—but they by no means bore a message from Eddie; it was two doctors, both very angry at once. The young lady was galvanized into frantic activity which landed her a few minutes later in a 1931 model, bound for one of those suburbs which make Los Angeles the most far-flung city in the world.

Her first destination was exciting for it was the country estate of young Carlos Davis, whom, so far, she had seen only in flicker form and once in Technicolor. Not that there was anything the matter with Carlos Davis’ heart—it worked the other way—but she was delivering the cardiograph to the tenant of a smaller house on his estate, originally built for his mother—and if Davis happened not to be at the studio she might glimpse him in passing.

She didn’t, and for the present—after she delivered the cardiograph at the proper door—she passes out of the story.

And at this point, as they say in picture making, the Camera Goes into the House, and we go with it.

The tenant was Emmet Monsen. At the moment he sat in an easy chair looking out into the sunny May-time garden, while Doctor Henry Cardiff opened the big envelope with his huge hands to examine the chart and the report that went with it.

“I stayed out there one year too long,” said Emmet, “and like a fool I drank water! Man I worked with had the idea—he hadn’t touched water in twenty years, only whiskey. He was a little dried up—skin like parchment—but no more than the average Englishman.”

The maid flashed darkly in the dining-room doorway and Emmet called to her.

“Marguerite? Have I got that name right?”

“Margerilla, Mist Monsen.”

“Margerilla, if Miss Elsa Halliday calls up, I’m at home to her. But to nobody else—not a soul. Remember that name—Miss Elsa Halliday.”

“Yes suh, I won’t be like to forget that. I seen her in the moving picture. Frank and I—”

“All right, Margerilla,” he interrupted politely. “Just remember I’m not home to anyone else.”

Dr. Cardiff, having finished his reading, arose in half a dozen gigantic sections and paced up and down meditatively, his chin alternately resting on his necktie or following his gaze toward the chandelier, as if he thought his eight years of training were lurking there like guardian angels, ready to fly down to his assistance. When Margerilla had gone he sat down in his chair, interlocking his hands in a way that to Emmet vaguely suggested the meeting of two spans of The Grand Coulee.

“So what?” Emmet asked. “Maybe it’s a growth? I swallowed a piece of fungi once—I thought it was a shrimp. Maybe it’s attached itself to me. You know—like women. I mean like women are supposed to do.”

“These,” said Dr. Cardiff in a kind voice—too kind, Emmet thought, “are not radio plates. This is the cardiograph. When I made you lie down yesterday and attached the wires to you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Emmet, “and forgot to slit my trousers—and get a last minute confession.”

“Huh-huh,” uttered the doctor, a laugh so mechanical that Emmet half rose from his chair, suggesting:

“Let’s open some windows.”

—but instantly the doctor’s great bulk loomed over him and forced him gently down.

“Mr. Monsen, I want you to sit absolutely in place. Later we’ll arrange a means of transportation.”

He gave a quick glance about, as if expecting a subway entrance, or at least a small personal derrick, to be in a corner of the room. Emmet watched him—many thoughts crowding swiftly across his mind. Much too young for the world war he had been brought up on tales of it, and most of his thirty-one years had been spent along the fringe of danger. He was one of those Americans who seem left over from the days when there was a frontier, and he had chosen to walk, ride or fly along that thin hair line which separates the unexplored and menacing from the safe, warm world. Or is there such a world—

Emmet Monsen sat immobile waiting for the doctor to speak, but the expression in his handsome eyes was alert and wide-awake.

“I knew on the boat I was running a fever—that’s why I’m laying up in California, but if this chart proves something serious I want to know about that too. Don’t worry—I’m not going to go to pieces.”

Dr. Cardiff decided to tell all.

“Your heart is apparently enlarged to a—to a—”

He hesitated.

“To a dangerous degree?” Emmet said.

“But not to a fatal degree,” answered Dr. Cardiff hastily.

“Obviously,” said Emmet, “since I can still hear my own voice. Come on Doctor, what is it? Is the heart quitting?”

“Oh, now!” protested Cardiff. “That’s no way to look at it. I’ve seen cases where I wouldn’t have given the man two hours—”

“Damn it, please get to the point,” Emmet exclaimed. “And I’m going to smoke”—as he saw the doctor’s eye follow his reaching hand. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but what’s the prognosis? I’m no child—I’ve taken people through typhoid and dysentery myself. What’s my chance—ten per-cent? One per-cent? When and under what conditions am I leaving this very beautiful scenery?”

“It depends, Mr. Monsen, to a great extent on yourself.”

“All right. I’ll do anything you say. Not much exercise I suppose, no highballs, stick around the house till we see what nature—”

The colored maid was in the doorway.

“Mist Monsen, that there Miss Halliday’s on the phone and it sure did thrill me down to my marrow—”

Emmet was up before the doctor could hoist himself from his chair and on his way to the phone in the butler’s pantry.

“Well, you did get a minute off,” he said.

“I’ve thought of you all morning, Emmet, and I’m coming out this afternoon. What did the doctor say?”

“He says I’m fine—little run down, wants me to take it easy a few days. What time are you coming out?”

A pause.

“Can I speak to the doctor?” Elsa asked.

“Sure you can. What? What do you want to speak to the doctor about?”

He said “Excuse me” as he realized that someone had brushed by him from behind and gone on into the living room; he caught a glimpse of a white starched uniform as he continued into the telephone:

“Sure you can. But he isn’t here now. Elsa, do you know that except for those few minutes at the dock I haven’t seen you for two years?”

“Two years is a long time, Emmet.”

“Don’t say it quite that way,” he objected. “Anyhow come as soon as you can.”

As he hung up the phone he realized that once more he was not alone in the pantry. There was the face of Margerilla and at her shoulder quite a different face that he stared at absently and abstractedly for a moment, as if it had no more reality than a magazine cover. It belonged to a girl wearing a powder-blue dress. Her face was roundish and her eyes were round—after all, not so astonishing—but the expression with which she regarded him was so full of a sort of beautiful attention, a fascinated and amused surprise that he wanted to say something back to it. It did not quite ask, “Can it be you?” like some girls’ faces do; rather it asked: “Are you having fun out of all this nonsense?” Or else it said, “We seem to be pardners for this dance,” adding: “—and this is the dance I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

To these questions or statements hinted at in the girl’s smile, Emmet made a response which he later decided was not brilliant.

“What can I do for you?” he