Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (262 page)

“The Captured Shadow” filled the rest of the book and ran over into several loose sheets at the end. When it broke off Basil sat for a while in thought. This had been a season of “crook comedies” in New York, and the feel, the swing, the exact and vivid image of the two he had seen, were in the foreground of his mind. At the time they had been enormously suggestive, opening out into a world much larger and more brilliant than themselves that existed outside their windows and beyond their doors, and it was this suggested world rather than any conscious desire to imitate “Officer 666,” that had inspired the effort before him. Presently he printed Act II at the head of a new tablet and began to write.

An hour passed. Several times he had recourse to a collection of joke books and to an old Treasury of Wit and Humor which embalmed the faded Victorian cracks of Bishop Wilberforce and Sydney Smith. At the moment when, in his story, a door moved slowly open, he heard a heavy creak upon the stairs. He jumped to his feet, aghast and trembling, but nothing stirred; only a white moth bounced against the screen, a clock struck the half-hour far across the city, a bird whacked its wings in a tree outside.

Voyaging to the bathroom at half-past four, he saw with a shock that morning was already blue at the window. He had stayed up all night. He remembered that people who stayed up all night went crazy, and transfixed in the hall, he tried agonizingly to listen to himself, to feel whether or not he was going crazy. The things around him seemed preternaturally unreal, and rushing frantically back into his bedroom, he began tearing off his clothes, racing after the vanishing night. Undressed, he threw a final regretful glance at his pile of manuscript--he had the whole next scene in his head. As a compromise with incipient madness he got into bed and wrote for an hour more.

Late next morning he was startled awake by one of the ruthless Scandinavian sisters who, in theory, were the Lees’ servants. “Eleven o’clock!” she shouted. “Five after!”

“Let me alone,” Basil mumbled. “What do you come and wake me up for?”

“Somebody downstairs.” He opened his eyes. “You ate all the cream last night,” Hilda continued. “Your mother didn’t have any for her coffee.”

“All the cream!” he cried. “Why, I saw some more.”

“It was sour.”

“That’s terrible,” he exclaimed, sitting up. “Terrible!”

For a moment she enjoyed his dismay. Then she said, “Riply Buckner’s downstairs,” and went out, closing the door.

“Send him up!” he called after her. “Hilda, why don’t you ever listen for a minute? Did I get any mail?”

There was no answer. A moment later Riply came in.

“My gosh, are you still in bed?”

“I wrote on the play all night. I almost finished Act Two.” He pointed to his desk.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Riply. “Mother thinks we ought to get Miss Halliburton.”

“What for?”

“Just to sort of be there.”

Though Miss Halliburton was a pleasant person who combined the occupations of French teacher and bridge teacher, unofficial chaperon and children’s friend, Basil felt that her superintendence would give the project an unprofessional ring.

“She wouldn’t interfere,” went on Riply, obviously quoting his mother. “I’ll be the business manager and you’ll direct the play, just like we said, but it would be good to have her there for prompter and to keep order at rehearsals. The girls’ mothers’ll like it.”

“All right,” Basil agreed reluctantly. “Now look, let’s see who we’ll have in the cast. First, there’s the leading man--this gentleman burglar that’s called The Shadow. Only it turns out at the end that he’s really a young man about town doing it on a bet, and not really a burglar at all.”

“That’s you.”

“No, that’s you.”

“Come on! You’re the best actor,” protested Riply.

“No, I’m going to take a smaller part, so I can coach.”

“Well, haven’t I got to be business manager?”

Selecting the actresses, presumably all eager, proved to be a difficult matter. They settled finally on Imogene Bissel for leading lady; Margaret Torrence for her friend, and Connie Davies for “Miss Saunders, an old maid very kittenish.”

On Riply’s suggestion that several other girls wouldn’t be pleased at being left out, Basil introduced a maid and a cook, “who could just sort of look in from the kitchen.” He rejected firmly Riply’s further proposal that there should be two or three maids, “a sort of sewing woman,” and a trained nurse. In a house so clogged with femininity even the most umbrageous of gentleman burglars would have difficulty in moving about.

“I’ll tell you two people we won’t have,” Basil said meditatively--”that’s Joe Gorman and Hubert Blair.”

“I wouldn’t be in it if we had Hubert Blair,” asserted Riply.

“Neither would I.”

Hubert Blair’s almost miraculous successes with girls had caused Basil and Riply much jealous pain.

They began calling up the prospective cast and immediately the enterprise received its first blow. Imogene Bissel was going to Rochester, Minnesota, to have her appendix removed, and wouldn’t be back for three weeks.

They considered.

“How about Margaret Torrence?”

Basil shook his head. He had vision of Leilia Van Baker as someone rarer and more spirited than Margaret Torrence. Not that Leilia had much being, even to Basil--less than the Harrison Fisher girls pinned around his wall at school. But she was not Margaret Torrence. She was no one you could inevitably see by calling up half an hour before on the phone.

He discarded candidate after candidate. Finally a face began to flash before his eyes, as if in another connection, but so insistently that at length he spoke the name.

“Evelyn Beebe.”

“Who?”

Though Evelyn Beebe was only sixteen, her precocious charms had elevated her to an older crowd and to Basil she seemed of the very generation of his heroine, Leilia Van Baker. It was a little like asking Sarah Bernhardt for her services, but once her name had occurred to him, other possibilities seemed pale.

At noon they rang the Beebes’ door-bell, stricken by a paralysis of embarrassment when Evelyn opened the door herself and, with politeness that concealed a certain surprise, asked them in.

Suddenly, through the portière of the living room, Basil saw and recognized a young man in golf knickerbockers.

“I guess we better not come in,” he said quickly.

“We’ll come some other time,” Riply added.

Together they started precipitately for the door, but she barred their way.

“Don’t be silly,” she insisted. “It’s just Andy Lockheart.”

Just Andy Lockheart--winner of the Western Golf Championship at eighteen, captain of his freshman baseball team, handsome, successful at everything he tried, a living symbol of the splendid, glamorous world of Yale. For a year Basil had walked like him and tried unsuccessfully to play the piano by ear as Andy Lockheart was able to do.

Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the room. Their plan suddenly seemed presumptuous and absurd.

Perceiving their condition Evelyn tried to soothe them with pleasant banter.

“Well it’s about time you came to see me,” she told Basil. “Here I’ve been sitting at home every night waiting for you--ever since the Davies dance. Why haven’t you been here before?”

He stared at her blankly, unable even to smile, and muttered: “Yes, you have.”

“I have though. Sit down and tell me why you’ve been neglecting me! I suppose you’ve both been rushing the beautiful Imogene Bissel.”

“Why, I understand--” said Basil. “Why, I heard from somewhere that she’s gone up to have some kind of an appendicitis--that is--” He ran down to a pitch of inaudibility as Andy Lockheart at the piano began playing a succession of thoughtful chords, which resolved itself into the maxixe, an eccentric stepchild of the tango. Kicking back a rug and lifting her skirts a little, Evelyn fluently tapped out a circle with her heels around the floor.

They sat inanimate as cushions on the sofa watching her. She was almost beautiful, with rather large features and bright fresh color behind which her heart seemed to be trembling a little with laughter. Her voice and her lithe body were always mimicking, ceaselessly caricaturing every sound and movement near by, until even those who disliked her admitted that “Evelyn could always make you laugh.” She finished her dance now with a false stumble and an awed expression as she clutched at the piano, and Basil and Riply chuckled. Seeing their embarrassment lighten, she came and sat down beside them, and they laughed again when she said: “Excuse my lack of self-control.”

“Do you want to be the leading lady in a play we’re going to give?” demanded Basil with sudden desperation. “We’re going to have it at the Martindale School, for the benefit of the Baby Welfare.”

“Basil, this is so sudden.”

Andy Lockheart turned around from the piano.

“What’re you going to give--a minstrel show?”

“No, it’s a crook play named The Captured Shadow. Miss Halliburton is going to coach it.” He suddenly realized the convenience of that name to shelter himself behind.

“Why don’t you give something like ‘The Private Secretary’?” interrupted Andy. “There’s a good play for you. We gave it my last year at school.”

“Oh, no, it’s all settled,” said Basil quickly. “We’re going to put on this play that I wrote.”

“You wrote it yourself?” exclaimed Evelyn.

“Yes.”

“My-y gosh!” said Andy. He began to play again.

“Look, Evelyn,” said Basil. “It’s only for three weeks, and you’d be the leading lady.”

She laughed. “Oh, no. I couldn’t. Why don’t you get Imogene?”

“She’s sick, I tell you. Listen--”

“Or Margaret Torrence?”

“I don’t want anybody but you.”

The directness of this appeal touched her and momentarily she hesitated. But the hero of the Western Golf Championship turned around from the piano with a teasing smile and she shook her head.

“I can’t do it, Basil. I may have to go East with the family.”

Reluctantly Basil and Riply got up.

“Gosh, I wish you’d be in it, Evelyn.”

“I wish I could.”

Basil lingered, thinking fast, wanting her more than ever; indeed, without her, it scarcely seemed worth while to go on with the play. Suddenly a desperate expedient took shape on his lips:

“You certainly would be wonderful. You see, the leading man is going to be Hubert Blair.”

Breathlessly he watched her, saw her hesitate.

“Good-by,” he said.

She came with them to the door and then out on the veranda, frowning a little.

“How long did you say the rehearsals would take?” she asked thoughtfully.

II

On an August evening three days later Basil read the play to the cast on Miss Halliburton’s porch. He was nervous and at first there were interruptions of “Louder” and “Not so fast.” Just as his audience was beginning to be amused by the repartee of the two comic crooks--repartee that had seen service with Weber and Fields--he was interrupted by the late arrival of Hubert Blair.

Hubert was fifteen, a somewhat shallow boy save for two or three felicities which he possessed to an extraordinary degree. But one excellence suggests the presence of others, and young ladies never failed to respond to his most casual fancy, enduring his fickleness of heart and never convinced that his fundamental indifference might not be overcome. They were dazzled by his flashing self-confidence, by his cherubic ingenuousness, which concealed a shrewd talent for getting around people, and by his extraordinary physical grace. Long-legged, beautifully proportioned, he had that tumbler’s balance usually characteristic only of men “built near the ground.” He was in constant motion that was a delight to watch, and Evelyn Beebe was not the only older girl who had found in him a mysterious promise and watched him for a long time with something more than curiosity.

He stood in the doorway now with an expression of bogus reverence on his round pert face.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Is this the First Methodist Episcopal Church?” Everybody laughed--even Basil. “I didn’t know. I thought maybe I was in the right church, but in the wrong pew.”

They laughed again, somewhat discouraged. Basil waited until Hubert had seated himself beside Evelyn Beebe. Then he began to read once more, while the others, fascinated, watched Hubert’s efforts to balance a chair on its hind legs. This squeaky experiment continued as an undertone to the reading. Not until Basil’s desperate “Now, here’s where you come in, Hube,” did attention swing back to the play.

Basil read for more than an hour. When, at the end, he closed the composition book and looked up shyly, there was a burst of spontaneous applause. He had followed his models closely, and for all its grotesqueries, the result was actually interesting--it was a play. Afterward he lingered, talking to Miss Halliburton, and he walked home glowing with excitement and rehearsing a little by himself into the August night.

The first week of rehearsal was a matter of Basil climbing back and forth from auditorium to stage, crying, “No! Look here, Connie; you come in more like this.” Then things began to happen. Mrs. Van Schellinger came to rehearsal one day, and lingering afterward, announced that she couldn’t let Gladys be in “a play about criminals.” Her theory was that this element could be removed; for instance, the two comic crooks could be changed to “two funny farmers.”

Basil listened with horror. When she had gone he assured Miss Halliburton that he would change nothing. Luckily Gladys played the cook, an interpolated part that could be summarily struck out, but her absence was felt in another way. She was tranquil and tractable, “the most carefully brought-up girl in town,” and at her withdrawal rowdiness appeared during rehearsals. Those who had only such lines as “I’ll ask Mrs. Van Baker, sir,” in Act I and “No, ma’am,” in Act III showed a certain tendency to grow restless in between. So now it was:

“Please keep that dog quiet or else send him home!” or:

“Where’s that maid? Wake up, Margaret, for heaven’s sake!” or:

“What is there to laugh at that’s so darn funny?”