THE UNCOLLECTED TALES OF 1926-1934 (38 Short Stories in One Edition). F. Scott FitzgeraldЧитать онлайн книгу.
Europe which was not for pink lemonade, it came to twice that. The buying agent for the British Government arrived, followed by the buying agents for the French, Belgian, Russian and Serbian Governments, and a share of the commodities required were assembled under the stewardship of Drinkwater and McComas. There was a chance that they would be rich men. Then suddenly this eventually began to turn on the woman Henry McComas had married.
Stella McComas was the daughter of a small hay and grain dealer of upper New York. Her father was unlucky and always on the verge of failure, so she grew up in the shadow of worry. Later, while Henry McComas got his start in New York, she earned her living by teaching physical culture in the public schools of Utica. In consequence she brought to her marriage a belief in certain stringent rules for the care of the body and an exaggerated fear of adversity.
For the first years she was so impressed with her husband’s rapid rise and so absorbed in her babies that she accepted Henry as something infallible and protective, outside the scope of her provincial wisdom. But as her little girl grew into short dresses and hair ribbons, and her little boy into the custody of an English nurse she had more time to look closely at her husband. His leisurely ways, his corpulency, his sometimes maddening deliberateness, ceased to be the privileged idiosyncrasies of success, and became only facts.
For a while he paid no great attention to her little suggestions as to his diet, her occasional crankiness as to his hours, her invidious comparisons between his habits and the fancied habits of other men. Then one morning a peculiar lack of taste in his coffee precipitated the matter into the light.
“I can’t drink the stuff—it hasn’t had any taste for a week,” he complained. “And why is it brought in a cup from the kitchen? I like to put the cream and sugar in myself.”
Stella avoided an answer but later he reverted to the matter.
“About my coffee. You’ll remember—won’t you?—to tell Rose.”
Suddenly she smiled at him innocently.
“Don’t you feel better, Henry?” she asked eagerly.
“What?”
“Less tired, less worried?”
“Who said I was tired and worried? I never felt better in my life.”
“There you are.” She looked at him triumphantly. “You laugh at my theories but this time you’ll have to admit there’s something in them. You feel better because you haven’t had sugar in your coffee for over a week.”
He looked at her incredulously.
“What have I had?”
“Saccharine.”
He got up indignantly and threw his newspaper on the table.
“I might have known it,” he broke out. “All that bringing it out from the kitchen. What the devil is saccharine?”
“It’s a substitute, for people who have a tendency to run to fat.”
For a moment he hovered on the edge of anger, then he sat down shaking with laughter.
“It’s done you good,” she said reproachfully.
“Well, it won’t do me good any more,” he said grimly. “I’m thirty-four years old and I haven’t been sick a day in ten years. I’ve forgotten more about my constitution than you’ll ever know.”
“You don’t live a healthy life, Henry. It’s after forty that things begin to tell.”
“Saccharine!” he exclaimed, again breaking into laughter. “Saccharine! I thought perhaps it was something to keep me from drink. You know they have these—”
Suddenly she grew angry.
“Well why not? You ought to be ashamed to be so fat at your age. You wouldn’t be if you took a little exercise and didn’t lie around in bed all morning.”
Words utterly failed her,
“If I wanted to be a farmer,” said her husband quietly, “I wouldn’t have left home. This saccharine business is over today—do you see?”
Their financial situation rapidly improved. By the second year of the war they were keeping a limousine and chauffeur and began to talk vaguely of a nice summer house on Long Island Sound. Month by month a swelling stream of materials flowed through the ledgers of Drinkwater and McComas to be dumped on the insatiable bonfire across the ocean. Their staff of clerks tripled and the atmosphere of the office was so charged with energy and achievement that Stella herself often liked to wander in on some pretext during the afternoon.
One day early in 1916 she called to learn that Mr. McComas was out and was on the point of leaving when she ran into Ted Drinkwater coming out of the elevator.
“Why, Stella,” he exclaimed, “I was thinking about you only this morning.”
The Drinkwaters and the McComases were close if not particularly spontaneous friends. Nothing but their husbands’ intimate association would have thrown the two women together, yet they were “Henry, Ted, Mollie, and Stella” to each other and in ten years scarcely a month had passed without their partaking in a superficially cordial family dinner. The dinner being over, each couple indulged in an unsparing post-mortem over the other without, however, any sense of disloyalty. They were used to each other—so Stella was somewhat surprised by Ted Drinkwater’s personal eagerness at meeting her this afternoon.
“I want to see you,” he said in his intent direct way. “Have you got a minute, Stella? Could you come into my office?”
“Why, yes.”
As they walked between rows of typists toward the glassed privacy of THEODORE DRINKWATER, PRESIDENT, Stella could not help thinking that he made a more appropriate business figure than her husband. He was lean, terse, quick. His eye glanced keenly from right to left as if taking the exact measure of every clerk and stenographer in sight.
“Sit down, Stella.”
She waited, a feeling of vague apprehension stealing over her.
Drinkwater frowned.
“It’s about Henry,” he said.
“Is he sick?” she demanded quickly.
“No. Nothing like that.” He hesitated. “Stella, I’ve always thought you were a woman with a lot of common sense.”
She waited.
“This is a thing that’s been on my mind for over a year,” he continued. “He and I have battled it out so often that—that a certain coldness has grown up between us.”
“Yes?” Stella’s eyes blinked nervously.
“It’s about the business,” said Drinkwater abruptly. “A coldness with a business partner is a mighty unpleasant thing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The old story, Stella. These are big years for us and he thinks business is going to wait while he carries on in the old country-store way. Down at eleven, hour and a half for lunch, won’t be nice to a man he doesn’t like for love or money. In the last six months he’s lost us about three sizable orders by things like that.”
Instinctively she sprang to her husband’s defense.
“But hasn’t he saved money too by going slow? On that thing about the copper, you wanted to sign right away and Henry—”
“Oh, that—” He waved it aside a little hurriedly. “I’m the last man to deny that Henry has a wonderful instinct in certain ways—”
“But it was a great big thing,” she interrupted, “It would have practically ruined you if he hadn’t put his foot down. He said—”
She pulled herself up short.
“Oh,