F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night [97]
The Englishman suddenly borrowed his magazines with a little small change of conversation, and Dick, glad to see them go, thought of the voyage ahead of him. Wolf-like under his sheep’s clothing of long-staple Australian wool, he considered the world of pleasure— the incorruptible Mediterranean with sweet old dirt caked in the olive trees, the peasant girl near Savona with a face as green and rose as the color of an illuminated missal. He would take her in his hands and snatch her across the border . . .
. . . but there he deserted her—he must press on toward the Isles of Greece, the cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports, the lost girl on shore, the moon of popular songs. A part of Dick’s mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his boyhood. Yet in that somewhat littered Five-and-Ten, he had managed to keep alive the low painful fire of intelligence.
XVII
Tommy Barban was a ruler, Tommy was a hero—Dick happened upon him in the Marienplatz in Munich, in one of those cafés, where small gamblers diced on “tapestry” mats. The air was full of politics, and the slap of cards.
Tommy was at a table laughing his martial laugh: “Um-buh—ha-ha! Um-buh—ha-ha!” As a rule, he drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always a little afraid of him. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.
“—this is Prince Chillicheff—” A battered, powder-gray Russian of fifty, “—and Mr. McKibben—and Mr. Hannan—” the latter was a lively ball of black eyes and hair, a clown; and he said immediately to Dick:
“The first thing before we shake hands—what do you mean by fooling around with my aunt?”
“Why, I—”
“You heard me. What are you doing here in Munich anyhow?”
“Um-bah—ha-ha!” laughed Tommy.
“Haven’t you got aunts of your own? Why don’t you fool with them?”
Dick laughed, whereupon the man shifted his attack:
“Now let’s not have any more talk about aunts. How do I know you didn’t make up the whole thing? Here you are a complete stranger with an acquaintance of less than half an hour, and you come up to me with a cock-and-bull story about your aunts. How do I know what you have concealed about you?”
Tommy laughed again, then he said good-naturedly, but firmly, “That’s enough, Carly. Sit down, Dick—how’re you? How’s Nicole?”
He did not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity—he was all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.
Hannan, not entirely suppressed, moved to an adjoining piano, and with recurring resentment on his face whenever he looked at Dick, played chords, from time to time muttering, “Your aunts,” and, in a dying cadence, “I didn’t say aunts anyhow. I said pants.”
“Well, how’re you?” repeated Tommy. “You don’t look so—” he fought for a word, “—so jaunty as you used to, so spruce, you know what I mean.”
The remark sounded too much like one of those irritating accusations of waning vitality and Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff, suits of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down