THE COMPLETE WORKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

      “Who’s there?” he cried in an awful voice.

      Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from the bedside into that ominous dark.

      The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before — then Anthony pouring words in at the telephone.

      “Some one just tried to get into the room! …

      “There’s some one at the window!” His voice was emphatic now, faintly terrified.

      “All right! Hurry!” He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

      … There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking — Anthony went to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bellboys grouped staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bellboys had seized a telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man they surged into the room.

      Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

      … The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

      “Nobody out there,” he declared conclusively; “my golly, nobody could be out there. This here’s a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind.”

      “Oh.”

      Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bellboy.

      “I’ve been nervous as the devil all evening,” Anthony was saying; “somehow that noise just shook me — I was only about half awake.”

      “Sure, I understand,” said the night clerk with comfortable tact; “been that way myself.”

      The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep, gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

      “What was it, dear?”

      “Nothing,” he answered, his voice still shaken; “I thought there was somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn’t see any one and the noise kept up, so I phoned downstairs. Sorry if I disturbed you, but I’m awfully darn nervous tonight.”

      Catching the lie, she gave an interior start — he had not gone to the window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in his call of fear.

      “Oh,” she said — and then: “I’m so sleepy.”

      For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

      After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it — whenever that overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

      “I’ll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody’s ever going to harm my Anthony!”

      He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled her temper.

      The management of Gloria’s temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony’s day. It must be done just so — by this much silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave, because she was “spoiled,” because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

      There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead of celery.

      “We always serve it that way, madame,” he quavered to the gray eyes that regarded him wrathfully.

      Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

      “Poor Gloria!” laughed Anthony unwittingly, “you can’t get what you want ever, can you?”

      “I can’t eat stuff!” she flared up.

      “I’ll call back the waiter.”

      “I don’t want you to! He doesn’t know anything, the darn fool!”

      “Well, it isn’t the hotel’s fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be a sport and eat it.”

      “Shut up!” she said succinctly.

      “Why take it out on me?”

      “Oh, I’m not,” she wailed, “but I simply can’t eat it.”

      Anthony subsided 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.