Save Me the Waltz: A Novel by Zelda Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

seriously.
    “Felix!” reproved Alabama, “you know I don’t mind people’s jabbering about us. Nobody will notice that we are together—it takes so many soldiers to make a good war.”
    She felt sorry for Felix; she was touched that he did not want to compromise her. In a wave of friendship and tenderness. “You mustn’t mind,” she said.
    “This time it’s my wife—she’s here,” Farreleigh said crisply, “and she might be there.”
    He offered no apology.
    Alabama hesitated.
    “Well, come on, let’s ride,” she said, at last. “We can dance another Saturday.”
    He was a tavern sort of man buckled into his uniform, strapped with the swagger of beef-eating England, buffeted by his incorruptible, insensitive, roistering gallantry. He sang “The Ladies” over and over again as they rode along the horizons of youth and a moonlit war. A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether. He closed his arms about the dry slender body. She smelled of Cherokee roses and harbors at twilight.
    “I’m going to get myself transferred,” said Felix impatiently.
    “Why?”
    “To avoid falling out of aeroplanes and cluttering up roadsides like your other beaux.”
    “Who fell out of an aeroplane?”
    “Your friend with the Dachshund face and the mustache, on his way to Atlanta. The mechanic was killed and they’ve got the lieutenant up for court-martial.”
    “Fear,” said Alabama as she felt her muscles tighten with a sense of disaster, “is nerves—maybe all emotions are. Anyway, we must hold on to ourselves and not care.
    “Oh—how did it happen?” she inquired casually.
    Felix shook his head.
    “Well, Alabama, I hope it was an accident.”
    “There isn’t any use worrying about the dog-one,” Alabama extricated herself. “Those people, Felix, who spread their sensibilities for the passage of events live like emotional prostitutes; they pay with a lack of responsibility on the part of others—no Walter Raleighing of the inevitable for me,” she justified.
    “You didn’t have the right to lead him on, you know.”
    “Well, it’s over now.”
    “Over in a hospital ward,” commented Felix, “for the poor mechanic.”
    Her high cheekbones carved the moonlight like a scythe in a ripe wheat field. It was hard for a man in the army to censure Alabama.
    “And the blond lieutenant who rode with me to town?” Farreleigh went on.
    “I’m afraid I can’t explain him away,” she said.
    Captain Farreleigh went through the convulsive movements of a drowning man. He grabbed his nose and sank to the floor of the car.
    “Heartless,” he said. “Well, I suppose I shall survive.”
    “Honor, Duty, Country, and West Point,” Alabama answered dreamily. She laughed. They both laughed. It was very sad.
    “Number five Beggs Street,” Captain Farreleigh directed the taximan, “immediately. The house is on fire.”
    The war brought men to the town like swarms of benevolent locusts eating away the blight of unmarried women that had overrun the South since its economic decline. There was the little major who stormed about like a Japanese warrior flashing his gold teeth, and an Irish captain with eyes like the Blarney stone and hair like burning peat, and aviation officers, white around their eyes from where their goggles had been with swollen noses from the wind and sun; and men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives communicating their consequent sense of a special occasion; men who smelled of Fitch’s hair tonic from the camp barber and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive, and trademark snobs naming things and men who waltzed in spurs and resented the cut-in system. Girls swung from one to another of the many men in