what it would have cost us if we had bought it ourselves.
Scott had obviously been drinking before I met him and, as he looked as though he
needed a drink, I asked him if he did not want one in the bar before we set out. He told
me he was not a morning drinker arid asked if I was. I told him it depended entirely on
how I felt and what I had to do and he said that if I felt that I needed a drink, he would
keep me company so I would not have to drink alone. So we had a whisky and Perrier in
the bar while we waited for the lunch and both felt much better.
I paid for the hotel room and the bar, although Scott wanted to pay for everything.
Since the start of the trip I had felt a little complicated about it emotionally and I found I
felt much better the more things I could pay for. I was using up the money we had saved
for Spain, but I knew I had good credit with Sylvia Beach and could borrow and repay
whatever I was wasting now.
At the garage where Scott had left the car, I was astonished to find that the small
Renault had no top. The top had been damaged in unloading the car in Marseilles, or it
had been damaged in Marseilles in some manner and Zelda had ordered it cut away and
refused to have it replaced. His wife hated car tops, Scott told me, and without the top
they had driven as far as Lyon where they were halted by the rain. The car was in fair
shape otherwise and Scott paid the bill after disputing several charges for washing,
greasing, and for adding two litres of oil. The garage man explained to me that the car
needed new piston rings and had evidently been run without sufficient oil and water. He
showed me how it had heated up and burned the paint off the motor. He said if I could
persuade Monsieur to have a ring job done in Paris, the car, which was a good little car,
would be able to give the service it was built for.
'Monsieur would not let me replace the top.'
'No?'
'One has an obligation to a vehicle.'
'One has.'
'You gentlemen have no waterproofs?'
'No,' I said. 'I did not know about the top.'
'Try and make Monsieur be serious,' he said pleadingly. 'At least about the vehicle.'
'Ah,' I said.
We were halted by rain about an hour north of Lyon.
In that day we were halted by rain possibly ten times. They were passing showers
and some of them were longer than others. If we had had waterproof coats it would have
been pleasant enough to drive in that spring rain. As it was we sought the shelter of trees
or halted at cafes alongside the road. We had a marvellous lunch from the hotel at Lyon,
an excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Macon wine and Scott was
very happy when we drank the white Maconnais at each of our stops. At Macon I had
bought four more bottles of excellent wine which I uncorked as we needed them.
I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to
him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the
first time without a bathing suit. But, by early afternoon, he had begun to worry about his
health. He told me about two people who had died of congestion of the lungs recently.
Both of them had died in Italy and he had been deeply impressed.
I told him that congestion of the lungs was an old-fashioned term for pneumonia, and
he told me that I knew nothing about it and was absolutely wrong. Congestion of the
lungs was a malady which was indigenous to Europe and I could not possibly know
anything about it even if I had read my father's medical books, since they dealt with
diseases that were strictly American. I said that my father had studied in Europe too. But
Scott explained that congestion of the lungs had only appeared in Europe recently and
that my father could not possibly have known anything about it. He also explained that
diseases were different in different parts of America, and if my father had practised
medicine in New York instead of in the Middle West, he would have known an entirely
different gamut of diseases. He used the word gamut.
I said he had a good point in the prevalence of certain diseases in one part of the
United States and their absence in others and cited the amount of leprosy in New Orleans
and its low incidence, then, in Chicago. But I said that doctors had a system of exchange
of knowledge and information among themselves and now that I remembered it after he
had brought it up, I had read the authoritative article on congestion of the lungs in Europe
in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which traced its history back to
Hippocrates himself. This held him for a while and I urged him to take another drink of
Macon, since a good white wine, moderately full-bodied but with a low alcoholic content,
was almost a specific against the disease.
Scott cheered a little after this but he began to fail again shortly and asked me if we
would make a big town before the onset of the fever and delirium by which, I had told
him, the true congestion of the lungs, European, announced itself. I was now translating
from an article which I had read in a French medical journal on the same malady while
waiting at the American Hospital in Neuilly to have my throat cauterized, I told him. A
word like cauterized had a comforting effect on Scott. But he wanted to know when we
would make the town. I said if we pushed on we should make it in twenty-five minutes to
an hour.
Scott then asked me if I were afraid to die and I said more at some times than at
others.
It now began to rain really heavily and we took refuge in the next village at a cafe. I
cannot remember all the details of that afternoon but when we were finally in a hotel at
what must have been Chalon-sur-Saone, it was so late that the drugstores were closed.
Scott had undressed and gone to bed as soon as we reached the hotel. He did not mind
dying of congestion of the lungs, he said. It was only the question of who was to look
after Zelda and young Scotty. I did not see very well how I could look after them since I
was having a healthily rough time looking after my wife Hadley and young son Bumby,
but I said I would do my best and Scott thanked me. I must see that Zelda did not drink
and that Scotty should have an English governess.
We had sent our clothes to be dried and were in our pyjamas. It was still raining
outside but it was cheerful in the room with the electric light on. Scott was lying in bed to
conserve his strength for his battle against the disease. I had taken his pulse, which was
seventy-two, and had felt his forehead, which was cool. I had listened to his chest and
had him breathe deeply, and his chest sounded all right.
'Look, Scott,' I said. 'You're perfectly OK. If you want to do the best thing to keep
from catching cold, just stay in bed and I'll order us each a lemonade and a whisky and
you take an aspirin with yours and you'll feel fine and won't even get a cold in your head.'
"Those old wives' remedies,' Scott said.
'You haven't any temperature. How the hell are you going to have congestion of the
lungs without a temperature?'
'Don't swear at me,' Scott said. 'How do you know I haven't a temperature?'
'Your pulse is normal and you haven't any fever to the touch.'
'To the touch,' Scott said bitterly. 'If you're a real friend, get me a thermometer.'
'I'm in pyjamas.'
'Send for one.'
I rang for the waiter. He didn't come and I rang again and then went down the
hallway to look for him. Scott was lying with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and
carefully and, with his waxy colour and his perfect features, he looked like a little dead
crusader. I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was
leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the
end of every day that is wasted in your life. I was very tired of Scott and of this silly
comedy, but I found the waiter and gave him money to buy a thermometer and a tube of
aspirin, and ordered two citrons presses and two double whiskies. I tried to order a bottle
of whisky but they would only sell it by the drink.
Back in the room Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a
monument to himself, his eyes closed and breathing with exemplary dignity.
Hearing me come in the room, he spoke. 'Did you get the thermometer?'
I went over and put my hand on his forehead. It was not as cold as the tomb. But it
was cool and not clammy.
'Nope,' I said.
'I thought you'd brought it.'
'I sent out for it.'
'It's not the same thing.'
'No. It isn't, is it?'
You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone
who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the
whole silliness. He did have a point though, and I knew it very well. Most drunkards in
those days died of pneumonia, a disease which has now been almost eliminated. But it
was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of
alcohol.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and
also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a
snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as
necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or
cider or beer. I loved all wines except sweet or sweetish wines and wines that were too
heavy, and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white
Macon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool. There had
been the whisky and Perrier in the morning but, in my ignorance of alcoholics then, I
could not imagine one whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain.
The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.
While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and
finished one of the bottles of Macon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are
always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when
you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have
read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in
American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical
unless you have read the all-important first chapter. When you are travelling through
France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different
crimes, affaires, or scandales, and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from
reading about them in a cafe. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a cafe where
I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink
something a little more authoritative than the Macon in preparation for dinner. But I was
riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.
When the waiter arrived with the two glasses with the pressed lemon juice and ice,
the whiskies, and the bottle of Perrier water, he told me that the pharmacy was closed and
he could not get a thermometer. He had borrowed some aspirin. I asked him to see if he
could borrow a thermometer. Scott opened his eyes and gave a baleful Irish look at the
waiter.
'Have you told him how serious it is?' he asked.
'I think he understands.'
'Please try to make it clear.'
I tried to make it clear and the waiter said, 'I'll bring what I can.'
'Did you tip him enough to do any good? They only work for tips.'
'I didn't know that,' I said. 'I thought the hotel paid them something on the side.'
'I mean they will only do something for you for a substantial tip. Most of them are
rotten clean through.'
I thought of Evan Shipman and I thought of the waiter at the Closerie des Lilas who
had been forced to cut his moustache when they made the American bar at the Closerie,
and of how Evan had been working out at his garden in Montrouge long before I had met
Scott, and what good friends we all were and had been for a long time at the Lilas and of
all of the moves that had been made and what they meant to all of us. I thought of telling
Scott about this whole problem of the Lilas, although I had probably mentioned it to him
before, but I knew he did not care about waiters nor their problems nor their great
kindness and affections. At that time Scott hated the French, and since almost the only
French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers,
garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.
He hated the Italians even more than the French and could not talk about them
calmly even when he was sober. The English he often hated but he sometimes tolerated
them and occasionally looked up to them. I do not know how he felt about the Germans
and the Austrians. I do not know whether he had ever met any then or any Swiss.
On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed
the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the
aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes
were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime in the inside of the
paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.
'You're a cold one, aren't you?' Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been
wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working
against us.
'How do you mean, Scott?'
'You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn't mean a
thing to you that I am dying.'
'Do you want me to call a doctor?'
'No. I don't want a dirty French provincial doctor.'
'What do you want?'
'I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an
