Hearing me come in the room, he spoke. “Did you get the thermometer?”
I went over and put my hand on his forehead. It was not as cold as the tomb. But it was cool and not clammy.
“Nope,” I said.
“I thought you’d brought it.”
“I sent out for it.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No. It isn’t, is it?”
You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness. He did have a point though, and I knew it very well. Most drunkards in those days died of pneumonia, a disease which has now been almost eliminated. But it was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.
I loved all wines except sweet or sweetish wines and wines that were too heavy, and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white Mâcon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool. There had been the whisky and Perrier in the morning but, in my ignorance of alcoholics then, I could not imagine one whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.
While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and finished one of the bottles of Mâcon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical unless you have read the all-important first chapter.
When you are traveling through France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different crimes, affaires, or scandales, and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from reading about them in a café. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a café where I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink something a little more authoritative than the Mâcon in preparation for dinner. But I was riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.
When the waiter arrived with the two glasses with the pressed lemon juice and ice, the whiskies, and the bottle of Perrier water, he told me that the pharmacy was closed and he could not get a thermometer. He had borrowed some aspirin. I asked him to see if he could borrow a thermometer. Scott opened his eyes and gave a baleful Irish look at the waiter.
“Have you told him how serious it is?” he asked.
“I think he understands.”
“Please try to make it clear.”
I tried to make it clear and the waiter said, “I’ll bring what I can.”
“Did you tip him enough to do any good? They only work for tips.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought the hotel paid them something on the side.”
“I mean they will only do something for you for a substantial tip. Most of them are rotten clean through.”
I thought of Evan Shipman and I thought of the waiter at the Closerie des Lilas who had been forced to cut his mustache when they made the American bar at the Closerie, and how Evan had been working out at his garden in Montrouge long before I had met Scott, and what good friends we all were and had been for a long time at the Lilas and of all of the moves that had been made and what they meant to all of us.
I thought of telling Scott about this whole problem of the Lilas, although I had probably mentioned it to him before, but I knew he did not care about waiters nor their problems nor their great kindnesses and affections. At that time Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.
He hated the Italians even more than the French and could not talk about them calmly even when he was sober. The English he often hated but he sometimes tolerated them and occasionally looked up to them. I do not know how he felt about the Germans and the Austrians. I do not know whether he had ever met any then or any Swiss.
On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime in the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.
“You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.
“How do you mean, Scott?”
“You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor?”
“No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.”
“What do you want?”
“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.”
“Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,” I said. “Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?”
“I want my temperature taken.”
After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.
“Is this the only one you could get?” I asked. Scott had shut his eyes when the waiter came in and he did look at least as far gone as Camille. I have never seen a man who lost the blood from his face so fast and I wondered where it went.
“It is the only one in the hotel,” the waiter said and handed me the thermometer. It was a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath. I took a quick gulp of the whisky sour and opened the window a moment to look out at the rain. When I turned Scott was watching me.
I shook the thermometer down professionally and said, “You’re lucky it’s not a rectal thermometer.”
“Where does this kind go?”
“Under the arm,” I told him and tucked it under my arm.
“Don’t upset the temperature,” Scott said. I shook the thermometer again with a single sharp downward twitch and unbuttoned his pajama jacket and put the instrument under his armpit while I felt his cool forehead and then took his pulse again. He stared straight ahead. The pulse was seventy-two. I kept the thermometer in for four minutes.
“I thought they only kept them in for one minute,” Scott said.
“This is a big thermometer,” I explained. “You multiply by the square of the size of the thermometer. It’s a centigrade thermometer.”
Finally I took the thermometer out and carried it over by the reading light.
“What is it?”
“Thirty-seven and six-tenths.”
“What’s normal?”
“That’s normal.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“Try it on yourself. I have to be sure.”
I shook the thermometer down and opened my pajamas and put the thermometer in my armpit and held it there while I watched the time. Then I looked at it.
“What is it?” I studied it.
“Exactly the same.”
“How do you feel?”
“Splendid,” I said. I was trying to remember whether thirty-seven six was really normal or not. It did not matter, for the thermometer, unaffected, was steady at thirty.
Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.
“No,” he said. “We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I’ve always had great recuperative power.”
“You’re fine,” I said. “But I think it would be just as well if you stayed in bed and had a light supper, and then we can start early in the morning.” I had planned to buy us raincoats but I would have to borrow money from him for that and I did not want to start arguing about that now.
Scott did not want to stay in bed. He wanted to get up and get dressed and go downstairs and call Zelda so she would know he was all right.
“Why would she think you weren’t all right?”
“This is the first night I have ever slept away from her since we were married and I have to talk to her. You can see what it means to us both, can’t you?”
I could, but I could not see how he and Zelda could have slept together on the night just past; but it was nothing
