Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (321 page)

The couple ahead reached the entrance to the Old Mill and waited for them. It was an off hour, and half a dozen scows bumped in the wooden offing, swayed by the mild tide of the artificial river. Elwood and his girl got into the front seat and he promptly put his arm around her. Basil helped the other girl into the rear seat, but, dispirited, he offered no resistance when Riply wedged in and sat down between.

They floated off, immediately entering upon a long echoing darkness. Somewhere far ahead a group in another boat were singing, their voices now remote and romantic, now nearer and yet more mysterious, as the canal doubled back and the boats passed close to each other with an invisible veil between.

The three boys yelled and called, Basil attempting by his vociferousness and variety to outdo Riply in the girl’s eyes, but after a few moments there was no sound except his own voice and the continual bump-bump of the boat against the wooden sides, and he knew without looking that Riply had put his arm about the girl’s shoulder.

They slid into a red glow--a stage set of hell, with grinning demons and lurid paper fires--he made out that Elwood and his girl sat cheek to cheek--then again into the darkness, with the gently lapping water and the passing of the singing boat now near, now far away. For a while Basil pretended that he was interested in this other boat, calling to them, commenting on their proximity. Then he discovered that the scow could be rocked and took to this poor amusement until Elwood Leaming turned around indignantly and cried:

“Hey! What are you trying to do?”

They came out finally to the entrance and the two couples broke apart. Basil jumped miserably ashore.

“Give us some more tickets,” Riply cried. “We want to go around again.”

“Not me,” said Basil with elaborate indifference. “I have to go home.”

Riply began to laugh in derision and triumph. The girl laughed too.

“Well, so long, little boy,” Riply cried hilariously.

“Oh, shut up! So long, Elwood.”

“So long, Basil.”

The boat was already starting off; arms settled again about the girls’ shoulders.

“So long, little boy!”

“So long, you big cow!” Basil cried. “Where’d you get the pants? Where’d you get the pants?”

But the boat had already disappeared into the dark mouth of the tunnel, leaving the echo of Riply’s taunting laughter behind.

It is an ancient tradition that all boys are obsessed with the idea of being grown. This is because they occasionally give voice to their impatience with the restraints of youth, while those great stretches of time when they are more than content to be boys find expression in action and not in words. Sometimes Basil wanted to be just a little bit older, but no more. The question of long pants had not seemed vital to him--he wanted them, but as a costume they had no such romantic significance as, for example, a football suit or an officer’s uniform, or even the silk hat and opera cape in which gentlemen burglars were wont to prowl the streets of New York by night.

But when he awoke next morning they were the most important necessity in his life. Without them he was cut off from his contemporaries, laughed at by a boy whom he had hitherto led. The actual fact that last night some chickens had preferred Riply to himself was of no importance in itself, but he was fiercely competitive and he resented being required to fight with one hand tied behind his back. He felt that parallel situations would occur at school, and that was unbearable. He approached his mother at breakfast in a state of wild excitement.

“Why, Basil,” she protested in surprise, “I thought when we talked it over you didn’t especially care.”

“I’ve got to have them,” he declared. “I’d rather be dead than go away to school without them.”

“Well, there’s no need of being silly.”

“It’s true--I’d rather be dead. If I can’t have long trousers I don’t see any use in my going away to school.”

His emotion was such that the vision of his demise began actually to disturb his mother.

“Now stop that silly talk and come and eat your breakfast. You can go down and buy some at Barton Leigh’s this morning.”

Mollified, but still torn by the urgency of his desire, Basil strode up and down the room.

“A boy is simply helpless without them,” he declared vehemently. The phrase pleased him and he amplified it. “A boy is simply and utterly helpless without them. I’d rather be dead than go away to school--”

“Basil, stop talking like that. Somebody has been teasing you about it.”

“Nobody’s been teasing me,” he denied indignantly--”nobody at all.”

After breakfast, the maid called him to the phone.

“This is Riply,” said a tentative voice. Basil acknowledged the fact coldly. “You’re not sore about last night, are you?” Riply asked.

“Me? No. Who said I was sore?”

“Nobody. Well, listen, you know about us going to the fireworks together tonight.”

“Yes.” Basil’s voice was still cold.

“Well, one of those girls--the one Elwood had--has got a sister that’s even nicer than she is, and she can come out tonight and you could have her. And we thought we could meet about eight, because the fireworks don’t start till nine.”

“What do?”

“Well, we could go on the Old Mill again. We went around three times more last night.”

There was a moment’s silence. Basil looked to see if his mother’s door was closed.

“Did you kiss yours?” he demanded into the transmitter.

“Sure I did!” Over the wire came the ghost of a silly laugh. “Listen, El thinks he can get his auto. We could call for you at seven.”

“All right,” agreed Basil gruffly, and he added, “I’m going down and get some long pants this morning.”

“Are you?” Again Basil detected ghostly laughter. “Well, you be ready at seven tonight.”

Basil’s uncle met him at Barton Leigh’s clothing store at ten, and Basil felt a touch of guilt at having put his family to all this trouble and expense. On his uncle’s advice, he decided finally on two suits--a heavy chocolate brown for every day and a dark blue for formal wear. There were certain alterations to be made but it was agreed that one of the suits was to be delivered without fail that afternoon.

His momentary contriteness at having been so expensive made him save carfare by walking home from downtown. Passing along Crest Avenue, he paused speculatively to vault the high hydrant in front of the Van Schellinger house, wondering if one did such things in long trousers and if he would ever do it again. He was impelled to leap it two or three times as a sort of ceremonial farewell, and was so engaged when the Van Schellinger limousine turned into the drive and stopped at the front door.

“Oh, Basil,” a voice called.

A fresh delicate face, half buried under a mass of almost white curls, was turned toward him from the granite portico of the city’s second largest mansion.

“Hello, Gladys.”

“Come here a minute, Basil.”

He obeyed. Gladys Van Schellinger was a year younger than Basil--a tranquil, carefully nurtured girl who, so local tradition had it, was being brought up to marry in the East. She had a governess and always played with a certain few girls at her house or theirs, and was not allowed the casual freedom of children in a Midwestern city. She was never present at such rendezvous as the Whartons’ yard, where the others played games in the afternoons.

“Basil, I wanted to ask you something--are you going to the State Fair tonight?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to come and sit in our box and watch the fireworks?”

Momentarily he considered the matter. He wanted to accept, but he was mysteriously impelled to refuse--to forgo a pleasure in order to pursue a quest that in cold logic did not interest him at all.

“I can’t. I’m awfully sorry.”

A shadow of discontent crossed Gladys’ face. “Oh? Well, come and see me sometime soon, Basil. In a few weeks I’m going East to school.”

He walked on up the street in a state of dissatisfaction. Gladys Van Schellinger had never been his girl, nor indeed anyone’s girl, but the fact that they were starting away to school at the same time gave him a feeling of kinship for her--as if they had been selected for the glamorous adventure of the East, chosen together for a high destiny that transcended the fact that she was rich and he was only comfortable. He was sorry that he could not sit with her in her box tonight.

By three o’clock, Basil, reading the Crimson Sweater up in his room, began giving attentive ear to every ring at the bell. He would go to the head of the stairs, lean over and call, “Hilda, was that a package for me?” And at four, dissatisfied with her indifference, her lack of feeling for important things, her slowness in going to and returning from the door, he moved downstairs and began attending to it himself. But nothing came. He phoned Barton Leigh’s and was told by a busy clerk: “You’ll get that suit. I’ll guarantee that you’ll get that suit.” But he did not believe in the clerk’s honor and he moved out on the porch and watched for Barton Leigh’s delivery wagon.

His mother came home at five. “There were probably more alterations than they thought,” she suggested helpfully. “You’ll probably get it tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning!” he exclaimed incredulously. “I’ve got to have that suit tonight.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I were you, Basil. The stores all close at half-past five.”

Basil took one agitated look up and down Holly Avenue. Then he got his cap and started on a run for the street car at the corner. A moment later a cautious afterthought caused him to retrace his steps with equal rapidity.

“If they get here, keep them for me,” he instructed his mother--a man who thought of everything.

“All right,” she promised dryly, “I will.”

It was later than he thought. He had to wait for a trolley, and when he reached Barton Leigh’s he saw with horror that the doors were locked and the blinds drawn. He intercepted a last clerk coming out and explained vehemently that he had to have his suit tonight. The clerk knew nothing about the matter. . . . Was Basil Mr. Schwartze?

No, Basil was not Mr. Schwartze. After a vague argument wherein he tried to convince the clerk that whoever promised him the suit should be fired, Basil went dispiritedly home.

He would not go to the fair without his suit--he would not go at all. He would sit at home and luckier boys would go adventuring along its Great White Way. Mysterious girls, young and reckless, would glide with them through the enchanted darkness of the Old Mill, but because of the stupidity, selfishness and dishonesty of a clerk in a clothing store he would not be there. In a day or so the fair would be over--forever--those girls, of all living girls the most intangible, the most desirable, that sister, said to be nicest of all--would be lost out of his life. They would ride off in Blatz Wildcats into the moonlight without Basil having kissed them. No, all his life--though he would lose the clerk his position: “You see now what your act did to me”--he would look back with infinite regret upon that irretrievable hour. Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.

He reached home; the package had not arrived. He moped dismally about the house, consenting at half-past six to sit silently at dinner with his mother, his elbows on the table.

“Haven’t you any appetite, Basil?”

“No, thanks,” he said absently, under the impression he had been offered something.

“You’re not going away to school for two more weeks. Why should it matter--”

“Oh, that isn’t the reason I can’t eat. I had a sort of headache all afternoon.”

Toward the end of the meal his eye focused abstractedly on some slices of angel cake; with the air of a somnambulist, he ate three.

At seven he heard the sounds that should have ushered in a night of romantic excitement.

The Leaming car stopped outside, and a moment later Riply Buckner rang the bell. Basil rose gloomily.

“I’ll go,” he said to Hilda. And then to his mother, with vague impersonal reproach, “Excuse me a minute. I just want to tell them I can’t go to the fair tonight.”

“But of course you can go, Basil. Don’t be silly. Just because--”

He scarcely heard her. Opening the door, he faced Riply on the steps. Beyond was the Leaming limousine, an old high car, quivering in silhouette against the harvest moon.

Clop-clop-clop! Up the street came the Barton Leigh delivery wagon. Clop-clop! A man jumped out, dumped an iron anchor to the pavement, hurried along the street, turned away, turned back again, came toward them with a long square box in his hand.

“You’ll have to wait a minute,” Basil was calling wildly. “It can’t make any difference. I’ll dress in the library. Look here, if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll wait a minute.” He stepped out on the porch. “Hey, El, I’ve just got my--got to change my clothes. You can wait a minute, can’t you?”

The spark of a cigarette flushed in the darkness as El spoke to the chauffeur; the quivering car came to rest with a sigh and the skies filled suddenly with stars.

Once again the fair--but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.

The boys hurried to their rendezvous, finding the girls in the deep shadow of the Temple of Wheat. Their forms had scarcely merged into a group when Basil became aware that something was wrong. In growing apprehension, he glanced from face to face and, as the introductions were made, he realized the appalling truth--the younger sister was, in point of fact, a fright, squat and dingy, with a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder and a shapeless mouth that tried ceaselessly to torture itself into the mold of charm.

In a daze he heard Riply’s girl say, “I don’t know whether I ought to go with you. I had a sort of date with another fellow I met this afternoon.”