[PDF]Excerpt Babylon Revisited

Babylon Revisited

and Other Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald



ALMA CLASSICS


ALMA CLASSICS LTD
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United Kingdom

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This collection first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2014
Extra Material © Richard Parker

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4 YY
ISBN: 978-1-84749-380-4

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Contents


Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

i

Babylon Revisited

3

A New Leaf

2-7

A Freeze-out

44

Six of One...

69

Family in the Wind

86

What a Handsome Pair!

108

Crazy Sunday

131

One Intern

151

More than Just a House

174

The Fiend

200

The Night at Chancellorsville

207

Afternoon of an Author

213

Financing Finnegan

220

The Lost Decade

23 1

Last Kiss

2 35

Note on the Texts

256

Notes

256

Extra Material

261

F. Scott Fitzgeralds Life

263

F. Scott Fitzgeralds Works

2-73

Select Bibliography

278


Other books by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
published by Alma Classics


All the Sad Young Men
Basil and Josephine
The Beautiful and Damned
Flappers and Philosophers
The Great Gatsby
The Last Tycoon
The Pat Hobby Stories
Tales of the Jazz Age
Tender Is the Night
This Side of Paradise


Babylon Revisited

and Other Stories


Babylon Revisited


1



nd where’s mr Campbell?” Charlie asked.
“Gone to Switzerland. Mr Campbell’s a pretty


sick man, Mr


Wales.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie enquired.

“Back in America, gone to work.”

“And where is the Snow Bird?”

“He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr Schaeffer, is in Paris.”

Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie
scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.

“If you see Mr Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-
law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.”

He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the still¬
ness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American
bar any more - he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone
back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the
taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour,
gossiping with a chasseur by the servants’ entrance.

Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in
the once clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he
travelled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight ahead
by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and
surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered
up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman,


3


BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES


Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his
own custom-built car - disembarking, however, with due nicety at the
nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house today and Alix giving
him information.

“No, no more,” Charlie said, “I’m going slow these days.”

Alix congratulated him: “You were going pretty strong a couple of
years ago.”

“I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over
a year and a half now.”

“How do you find conditions in America?”

“I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague,
representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me
down there.”

Alix smiled.

“Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here?” said
Charlie. “By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?”

Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t
come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty
thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his
dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to
pay, he gave him a bad cheque.”

Alix shook his head sadly.

“I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up.

He made a plump apple of his hands.

Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves in
a corner.

“Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf
or work, but they go on for ever.” The place oppressed him. He called
for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.

“Here for long, Mr Wales?”

“I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.”


4


BABYLON REVISITED


“Oh-h! You have a little girl?”

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily
through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were
in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des
Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink
majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden
provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of
his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent
fafade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few
bars of ‘La plus que lente’,* were the trumpets of the Second Empire.
They were closing the iron grille in front of Brentano’s bookstore, and
people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of
Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-
course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some
odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincial¬
ism, he thought, “I spoilt this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the
days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and
everything was gone, and I was gone.”

He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his
face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his
brother-in-law’s bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it
pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly. From
behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine
who shrieked “Daddy!” and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms.
She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.

“My old pie,” he said.

“Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Dads, Dads, Dads!”

She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and girl
his daughter’s age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted Marion


5


BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES


with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or
dislike, but her response was more frankly tepid, though she minimized
her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her regard towards his
child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly way, and Lincoln Peters
rested his for a moment on Charlie’s shoulder.

The room was warm and comfortably American. The three children
moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs that led to
other rooms; the cheer of six o’clock spoke in the eager smacks of the
fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen. But Charlie did not
relax; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and he drew confidence from
his daughter, who from time to time came close to him, holding in her
arms the doll he had brought.

“Really extremely well,” he declared in answer to Lincoln’s question.
“There’s a lot of business there that isn’t moving at all, but we’re doing
even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I’m bringing my sister over
from America next month to keep house for me. My income last year
was bigger than it was when I had money. You see, the Czechs...”

His boasting was for a specific purpose, but after a moment, seeing a
faint restiveness in Lincoln’s eye, he changed the subject.

“Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners.”

“We think Honoria’s a great little girl too.”

Marion Peters came back from the kitchen. She was a tall woman
with worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveliness.
Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised when
people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there had been
an instinctive antipathy between them.

“Well, how do you find Honoria?” she asked.

“Wonderful. I was astonished how much she’s grown in ten months.
All the children are looking well.”

“We haven’t had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back in
Paris?”


6


BABYLON REVISITED


“It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.”

“I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go
into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered
like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”

“But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of
royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar
this afternoon” - he stumbled, seeing his mistake - “there wasn’t a
man I knew.”

She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of
bars.”

“I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and no
more.”

“Don’t you want a cocktail before dinner?” Lincoln asked.

“I take only one drink every afternoon, and I’ve had that.”

“I hope you keep to it,” said Marion.

Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but
Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness gave
hint an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted them to
initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him to Paris.

At dinner he couldn’t decide whether Honoria was most like him or
her mother. Fortunate if she didn’t combine the traits of both that had
brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went over him.
He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he
wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again
as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.

He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see
Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other
days. He bought a strapontin * for the Casino and watched Josephine
Baker* go through her chocolate arabesques.

After an hour he left and strolled towards Montmartre, up the Rue
Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few


7


BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES


people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets,
and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed
a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of
familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours
and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient
rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager
orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leapt to their
feet and a rnaitre d’hotel swooped towards him, crying, “Crowd just
arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.

“You have to be damn drunk,” he thought.

Zelli’s was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding
it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local,
colloquial French crowd. The Poet’s Cave had disappeared, but the two
great mouths of the Cafe of Heaven and the Cafe of Hell still yawned -
even devoured, as he watched, the meagre contents of a tourist bus - a
German, a Japanese and an American couple who glanced at him with
frightened eyes.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering
to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly real¬
ized the meaning of the word “dissipate” - to dissipate into thin air; to
make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every
move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase
of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing
a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling
a cab.

But it hadn’t been given for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering
to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remember¬
ing, the things that now he would always remember - his child taken
from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.


8


BABYLON REVISITED


In the glare of a brasserie a woman spoke to him. He bought her
some eggs and coffee, and then, eluding her encouraging stare, gave her
a twenty-franc note and took a taxi to his hotel.


2


H e woke upon a fine fall day -football weather. The depres¬
sion of yesterday was gone, and he liked the people on the streets.
At noon he sat opposite Honoria at Le Grand Vatel, the only restau¬
rant he could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long
luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight.
“Now, how about vegetables? Oughtn’t you to have some vegetables?”
“Well, yes.”

“Here’s epinards and cbou-fleur and carrots and haricots.”*

“ I’d like chou-fleur.”

“Wouldn’t you like to have two vegetables?”

“I usually only have one at lunch.”

The waiter was pretending to be inordinately fond of children. “Qu’elle
est mignonne la petite! Elle parle exactement comme une franpaise.”*
“How about dessert? Shall we wait and see?”

The waiter disappeared. Honoria looked at her father expectantly.
“What are we going to do?”

“First we’re going to that toy store in the Rue Saint-Honore and buy
you anything you like. And then we’re going to the vaudeville at the
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