F. Scott Fitzgerald: Complete Works. F. Scott FitzgeraldЧитать онлайн книгу.
helplessly.
“We’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.
“I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’m tired of being trotted around to a dozen cafés and not getting one thing fit to eat.”
“When did we go around to a dozen cafés?”
“You’d have to in this town,” insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.
Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.
“Why don’t you try to eat it? It can’t be as bad as you think.”
“Just—because—I—don’t—like—chicken!”
She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato, and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had ever been—for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as much toward him as toward any one else—and Gloria angry was, for the present, unapproachable.
Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to breathe. She tasted another forkful—in another moment she was eating. With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.
This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a decisive defeat for him.
One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the Unfinished Masterpiece.
“Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?” he asked. Gloria shook her golden head.
“Not a one. I’m using one of yours.”
“The last one, I deduce.” He laughed dryly.
“Is it?” She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her lips.
“Isn’t the laundry back?”
“I don’t know.”
Anthony hesitated—then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes—he had put them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an astonishing mass of finery—lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns, and pajamas—most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably under the general heading of Gloria’s laundry.
He stood holding the closet door open.
“Why, Gloria!”
“What?”
The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.
“Haven’t you ever sent out the laundry?”
“Is it there?”
“It most certainly is.”
“Well, I guess I haven’t, then.”
“Gloria,” began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her mirrored eyes, “you’re a nice fellow, you are! I’ve sent it out every time it’s been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you promised you’d do it for a change. All you’d have to do would be to cram your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid.”
“Oh, why fuss about the laundry?” exclaimed Gloria petulantly, “I’ll take care of it.”
“I haven’t fussed about it. I’d just as soon divide the bother with you, but when we run out of handkerchiefs it’s darn near time something’s done.”
Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him her back.
“Hook me up,” she suggested; “Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I meant to, honestly, and I will to-day. Don’t be cross with your sweetheart.”
What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a shade of color from her lips.
“But I don’t mind,” she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous. “You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want.”
They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store near by. All was forgotten.
But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had increased surprisingly in height.
“Gloria!” he cried.
“Oh—” Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to the phone and called the chambermaid.
“It seems to me,” he said impatiently, “that you expect me to be some sort of French valet to you.”
Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. Anthony watched her—ashamed of himself.
“There!” she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.
He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning. Laundry pile followed laundry pile—at long intervals; dearth of handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief—at short ones; not to mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at length that either he must send it out himself or go through the increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.
Gloria and General Lee.
On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor—it seemed a pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an ill-advised trip to General Lee’s old home at Arlington.
The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo, where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.
Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing sign announced in large red letters “Ladies’ Toilet.” At this final blow Gloria broke down.
“I think it’s perfectly terrible!” she said furiously, “the idea of letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these houses show-places.”
“Well,” objected Anthony, “if they weren’t kept up they’d go to pieces.”
“What if they did!” she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared porch. “Do you think they’ve left a breath of 1860 here? This has become a thing of 1914.”
“Don’t you want to preserve old things?”