The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Evylyn had ceased accentuating her smile within a month after the Freddy Gedney affair. Externally things had gone on very much as they had before. But in those few minutes during which she had discovered how much she loved her husband Evylyn had realized how indelibly she had hurt him. For a month she struggled against aching silences, wild reproaches and accusations—she pled with him, made quiet, pitiful little love to him, and he laughed at her bitterly—and then she, too, slipped gradually into silence and a shadowy, unpenetrable barrier dropped between them. The surge of love that had risen in her she lavished on Donald, her little boy, realizing him almost wonderingly as a part of her life.
The next year a piling up of mutual interests and responsibilities and some stray flicker from the past brought husband and wife together again—but after a rather pathetic flood of passion Evylyn realized that her great opportunity was gone. There simply wasn’t anything left. She might have been youth and love for both—but that time of silence had slowly dried up the springs of affection and her own desire to drink again of them was dead.
She began for the first time to seek women friends, to prefer books she had read before, to sew a little where she could watch her two children to whom she was devoted. She worried about little things—if she saw crumbs on the dinner-table her mind drifted off the conversation: she was receding gradually into middle age.
Her thirty-fifth birthday had been an exceptionally busy one, for they were entertaining on short notice that night, and as she stood in her bedroom window in the late afternoon she discovered that she was quite tired. Ten years before she would have lain down and slept, but now she had a feeling that things needed watching: maids were cleaning down-stairs, bric-à-brac was all over the floor, and there were sure to be grocery-men that had to be talked to imperatively—and then there was a letter to write Donald, who was fourteen and in his first year away at school.
She had nearly decided to lie down, nevertheless, when she heard a sudden familiar signal from little Julie down-stairs. She compressed her lips, her brows twitched together, and she blinked.
“Julie!” she called.
“Ah-h-h-ow!” prolonged Julie plaintively. Then the voice of Hilda, the second maid, floated up the stairs.
“She cut herself a little, Mis’ Piper.”
Evylyn flew to her sewing-basket, rummaged until she found a torn handkerchief, and hurried downstairs. In a moment Julie was crying in her arms as she searched for the cut, faint, disparaging evidences of which appeared on Julie’s dress!
“My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.”
“It was the bowl here, the he one,” said Hilda apologetically. “It was waitin’ on the floor while I polished the sideboard, and Julie come along an’ went to foolin’ with it. She yust scratch herself.”
Evylyn frowned heavily at Hilda, and twisting Julie decisively in her lap, began tearing strips off the handkerchief.
“Now—let’s see it, dear.”
Julie held it up and Evylyn pounced.
“There!”
Julie surveyed her swathed thumb doubtfully. She crooked it; it waggled. A pleased, interested look appeared in her tear-stained face. She sniffled and waggled it again.
“You precious!” cried Evylyn and kissed her, but before she left the room she levelled another frown at Hilda. Careless! Servants all that way nowadays. If she could get a good Irishwoman—but you couldn’t any more—and these Swedes——
At five o’clock Harold arrived and, coming up to her room, threatened in a suspiciously jovial tone to kiss her thirty-five times for her birthday. Evylyn resisted.
“You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.”
“Evie,” he said, after a pause, seating himself in a chair by the window, “I can tell you something now. I guess you’ve known things haven’t been going quite right down-town.”
She was standing at the window combing her hair, but at these words she turned and looked at him.
“How do you mean? You’ve always said there was room for more than one wholesale hardware house in town.” Her voice expressed some alarm.
“There was,” said Harold significantly, “but this Clarence Ahearn is a smart man.”
“I was surprised when you said he was coming to dinner.”
“Evie,” he went on, with another slap at his knee, “after January first ‘The Clarence Ahearn Company’ becomes ‘The Ahearn, Piper Company’—and ‘Piper Brothers’ as a company ceases to exist.”
Evylyn was startled. The sound of his name in second place was somehow hostile to her; still he appeared jubilant.
“I don’t understand, Harold.”
“Well, Evie, Ahearn has been fooling around with Marx. If those two had combined we’d have been the little fellow, struggling along, picking up smaller orders, hanging back on risks. It’s a question of capital, Evie, and ‘Ahearn and Marx’ would have had the business just like ‘Ahearn and Piper’ is going to now.” He paused and coughed and a little cloud of whiskey floated up to her nostrils. “Tell you the truth, Evie, I’ve suspected that Ahearn’s wife had something to do with it. Ambitious little lady, I’m told. Guess she knew the Marxes couldn’t help her much here.”
“Is she—common?” asked Evie.
“Never met her, I’m sure—but I don’t doubt it. Clarence Ahearn’s name’s been up at the Country Club five months—no action taken.” He waved his hand disparagingly. “Ahearn and I had lunch together to-day and just about clinched it, so I thought it’d be nice to have him and his wife up to-night—just have nine, mostly family. After all, it’s a big thing for me, and of course we’ll have to see something of them, Evie.”
“Yes,” said Evie thoughtfully, “I suppose we will.”
Evylyn was not disturbed over the social end of it—but the idea of “Piper Brothers” becoming “The Ahearn, Piper Company” startled her. It seemed like going down in the world.
Half an hour later, as she began to dress for dinner, she heard his voice from down-stairs.
“Oh, Evie, come down!”
She went out into the hall and called over the banister:
“What is it?”
“I want you to help me