Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (401 page)

“What do you mean?” He knew with a start what she meant.

“Any ideas about Noel Garneau. You’ve got your own way to make.” Juan’s face burned. He was unable to answer. “I say that in all kindness. You’re not in any position to think anything serious about Noel Garneau.”

Her implications cut deeper than her words. Oh, he had seen well enough that he was not essentially of Noel’s sort, that being nice in Akron wasn’t enough at Culpepper Bay. He had that realization that comes to all boys in his position that for every advantage — that was what his mother called this visit to Cousin Cora’s — he paid a harrowing price in self-esteem. But a world so hard as to admit such an intolerable state of affairs was beyond his comprehension. His mind rejected it all completely, as it had rejected the dictionary name for the three spots on his face. He wanted to let go, to vanish, to be home. He determined to go home tomorrow, but after this heart-rending conversation he decided to put off the announcement until tonight.

That afternoon he took a detective story from the library and retired upstairs to read on his bed. He finished the book by four o’clock and came down to change it for another. Cousin Cora was on the veranda arranging three tables for tea.

“I thought you were at the club,” she exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you’d gone up to the club.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I thought I’d read.”

“Tired!” she exclaimed. “A boy your age! You ought to be out in the open air playing golf — that’s why you have that spot on your cheek” — Juan winced; his experiments with the black salve had irritated it to a sharp redness — “instead of lying around reading on a day like this.”

“I haven’t any clubs,” said Juan hurriedly.

“Mr Holyoke told you you could use his brother’s clubs. He spoke to the caddie master. Run on now. You’ll find lots of young people up there who want to play. I’ll begin to think you’re not having a good time.”

In agony Juan saw himself dubbing about the course alone — seeing Noel coming under his eye. He never wanted to see Noel again except out in Montana — some bright day, when she would come saying, “Juan, I never knew — never understood what your love was.”

Suddenly he remembered that Noel had gone into Boston for the afternoon. She would not be there. The horror of playing alone suddenly vanished.

The caddie master looked at him disapprovingly as he displayed his guest card, and Juan nervously bought a half-dozen balls at a dollar each in an effort to neutralize the imagined hostility. On the first tee he glanced around. It was after four and there was no one in sight except two old men practising drives from the top of a little hill. As he addressed his ball he heard someone come up on the tee behind him and he breathed easier at the sharp crack that sent his ball a hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

“Playing alone?”

He looked around. A stout man of fifty, with a huge face, high forehead, long wide upper lip and great undershot jaw, was taking a driver from a bulging bag. “Why — yes.”

“Mind if I go round with you?”

“Not at all.”

Juan greeted the suggestion with a certain gloomy relief. They were evenly matched, the older man’s steady short shots keeping pace with Juan’s occasional brilliancy. Not until the seventh hole did the conversation rise above the fragmentary boasting and formalized praise which forms the small talk of golf.

“Haven’t seen you around before.”

“I’m just visiting here,” Juan explained, “staying with my cousin, Miss Chandler.”

“Oh yes — know Miss Chandler very well. Nice old snob.”

“What?” inquired Juan.

“Nice old snob, I said. No offence… Your honour, I think.” Not for several holes did Juan venture to comment on his partner’s remark.

“What do you mean when you say she’s a nice old snob?” he inquired with interest.

“Oh, it’s an old quarrel between Miss Chandler and me,” answered the older man brusquely. “She’s an old friend of my wife’s. When we were married and came out to Culpepper Bay for the summer, she tried to freeze us out. Said my wife had no business marrying me. I was an outsider.”

“What did you do?”

“We just let her alone. She came round, but naturally I never had much love for her. She even tried to put her oar in before we were married.” He laughed. “Cora Chandler of Boston — how she used to boss the girls around in those days! At twenty-five she had the sharpest tongue in Back Bay. They were old people there, you know — Emerson and Whittier to dinner and all that. My wife belonged to that crowd too. I was from the Middle West… Oh, too bad. I should have stopped talking. That makes me two up again.”

Suddenly Juan wanted to present his case to this man — not quite as it was, but adorned with a dignity and significance it did not so far possess. It began to round out in his mind as the sempiternal struggle of the poor young man against a snobbish, purse-proud world. This new aspect was comforting, and he put out of his mind the less pleasant realization that, superficially at least, money hadn’t entered into it. He knew in his heart that it was his unfortunate egotism that had repelled Noel, his embarrassment, his absurd attempt to make her jealous with Holly. Only indirectly was his poverty concerned; under different circumstances it might have given a touch of romance.

“I know exactly how you must have felt,” he broke out suddenly as they walked toward the tenth tee. “I haven’t any money and I’m in love with a girl who has — and it seems as if every busybody in the world is determined to keep us apart.”

For a moment Juan believed this. His companion looked at him sharply.

“Does the girl care about you?” he inquired.

“Yes.”

“Well, go after her, young man. All the money in this world hasn’t been made by a long shot.”

“I’m still in college,” said Juan, suddenly taken aback.

“Won’t she wait for you?”

“I don’t know. You see, the pressure’s pretty strong. Her family want her to many a rich man” — his mind visualized the tall well-dressed stranger of this morning and invention soared — “an easterner that’s visiting here, and I’m afraid they’ll all sweep her off her feet. If it’s not this man, it’s the next.”

His friend considered.

“You can’t have everything, you know,” he said presently. “I’m the last man to advise a young man to leave college, especially when I don’t know anything about him or his abilities; but if it’s going to break you up not to get her, you better think about getting to work.”

“I’ve been considering that,” said Juan frowning. The idea was ten seconds old in his mind.

“All girls are crazy now, anyhow,” broke out the older man. “They begin to think of men at fifteen, and by the time they’re seventeen they run off with the chauffeur next door.”

“That’s true,” agreed Juan absently. He was absorbed in the previous suggestion. “The trouble is that I don’t live in Boston. If I left college I’d want to be near her, because it might be a few months before I’d be able to support her. And I don’t know how I’d go about getting a position in Boston.”

“If you’re Cora Chandler’s cousin, that oughtn’t to be difficult. She knows everybody in town. And the girl’s family will probably help you out, once you’ve got her — some of them are fools enough for anything in these crazy days.”

“I wouldn’t like that.”

“Rich girls can’t live on air,” said the older man grimly.

They played for a while in silence. Suddenly, as they approached a green, Juan’s companion turned to him frowning.

“Look here, young man,” he said, “I don’t know whether you are really thinking of leaving college or whether I’ve just put the idea in your head. If I have, forget it. Go home and talk it over with your family. Do what they tell you to.”

“My father’s dead.”

“Well, then ask your mother. She’s got your best interest at heart.”

His attitude had noticeably stiffened, as if he were sorry he had become even faintly involved in Juan’s problem. He guessed that there was something solid in the boy, but he suspected his readiness to confide in strangers and his helplessness about getting a job. Something was lacking — not confidence, exactly — “It might be a few months before I was able to support her” — but something stronger, fiercer, more external. When they walked together into the caddie house he shook hands with him and was about to turn away, when impulse impelled him to add one word more.

“If you decide to try Boston come and see me,” he said. He pressed a card into Juan’s hand. “Good-bye. Good luck. Remember, a woman’s like a street car —  — “

He walked into the locker room. After paying his caddie, Juan glanced down at the card which he still held in his hand.

“Harold Garneau,” it read, “23-7 State Street.”

A moment later Juan was walking nervously and hurriedly from the grounds of the Culpepper Club, casting no glance behind.

V

One month later San Juan Chandler arrived in Boston and took an inexpensive room in a small downtown hotel. In his pocket was two hundred dollars in cash and an envelope full of liberty bonds aggregating fifteen hundred dollars more — the whole being a fund which had been started by his father when he was born, to give him his chance in life. Not without argument had he come into possession of this — not without tears had his decision to abandon his last year at college been approved by his mother. He had not told her everything; simply that he had an advantageous offer of a position in Boston; the rest she guessed and was tactfully silent. As a matter of fact, he had neither a position nor a plan, but he was twenty-one now, with the blemishes of youth departed for ever. One thing Juan knew — he was going to marry Noel Garneau. The sting and hurt and shame of that Sunday morning ran through his dreams, stronger than any doubts he might have felt, stronger even than the romantic boyish love for her that had blossomed one dry, still Montana night. That was still there, but locked apart; what had happened later overlay it, muffled it. It was necessary now to his pride, his self-respect, his very existence, that he have her, in order to wipe out his memory of the day on which he had grown three years.

He hadn’t seen her since. The following morning he had left Culpepper Bay and gone home.

Yes, he had a wonderful time. Yes, Cousin Cora had been very nice. Nor had he written, though a week later a surprised but somehow flippant and terrible note had come from her, saying how pleasant it was to have seen him again and how bad it was to leave without saying good-bye.

“Holly Morgan sends her best,” it concluded, with kind, simulated reproach. “Perhaps she ought to be writing instead of me. I always thought you were fickle, and now I know it.”

The poor effort which she had made to hide her indifference made him shiver. He did not add the letter to a certain cherished package tied with blue ribbon, but burned it up in an ash tray — a tragic gesture which almost set his mother’s house on fire.

So he began his life in Boston, and the story of his first year there is a fairy tale too immoral to be told. It is the story of one of those mad, illogical successes upon whose substantial foundations ninety-nine failures are later reared. Though he worked hard, he deserved no special credit for it — no credit, that is, commensurate with the reward he received. He ran into a man who had a scheme, a preposterous scheme, for the cold storage of sea food which he had been trying to finance for several years. Juan’s inexperience allowed him to be responsive and he invested twelve hundred dollars. In his first year this appalling indiscretion paid him 400 per cent. His partner attempted to buy him out, but they reached a compromise and Juan kept his shares.

The inner sense of his own destiny which had never deserted him whispered that he was going to be a rich man. But at the end of that year an event took place which made him think that it didn’t matter after all.

He had seen Noel Garneau twice — once entering a theatre and once riding through a Boston street in the back of her limousine, looking, he thought afterwards, bored and pale and tired. At the time he had thought nothing; an overwhelming emotion had seized his heart, held it helpless, suspended, as though it were in the grasp of material fingers. He had shrunk back hastily under the awning of a shop and waited trembling, horrified, ecstatic, until she went by. She did not know he was in Boston — he did not want her to know until he was ready. He followed her every move in the society columns of the papers. She was at school, at home for Christmas, at Hot Springs for Easter, coming out in the fall. Then she was a debutante, and every day he read of her at dinners and dances and assemblies and balls and charity functions and theatricals of the Junior

League. A dozen blurred newspaper unlikenesses of her filled a drawer of his desk. And still he waited. Let Noel have her fling.

When he had been sixteen months in Boston, and when Noel’s first season was dying away in the hum of the massed departure for Florida, Juan decided to wait no longer. So on a raw, damp February day, when children in rubber boots were building darns in the snow-filled gutters, a blond, handsome, well-dressed young man walked up the steps of the Garneau’s Boston house and handed his card to the maid. With his heart beating loud, he went into a drawing-room and sat down.

A sound of a dress on the stairs, light feet in the hall, an exclamation — Noel!

“Why, Juan,” she exclaimed, surprised, pleased, polite, “I didn’t know you were in Boston. It’s so good to see you. I thought you’d thrown me over for ever.”

In a moment he found voice — it was easier now than it had been. Whether or not she was aware of the change, he was a nobody no longer. There was something solid behind him that would prevent him ever again from behaving like a self-centred child.

He explained that he might settle in Boston, and allowed her to guess that he had done extremely well; and, though it cost him a twinge of pain, he spoke humourously of their last meeting, implying that he had left the swimming party on an impulse of anger at her. He could not confess that the impulse had been one of shame. She laughed. Suddenly he grew curiously happy.

Half an hour passed. The fire glowed in the hearth. The day darkened outside and the room moved into that shadowy twilight, that weather of indoors, which is like a breathless starshine. He had been standing; now he sat down beside her on the couch.