Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (403 page)

He handed no card to the butler, but it occurred to him that he must be expected, for he was shown immediately into the drawing-room. When, after a short wait, Mrs Poindexter entered he experienced for the first time in five days a touch of uncertainty.

Mrs Poindexter was perhaps thirty-five, and of that immaculate fashion which the French describe as bien soignee. The inexpressible loveliness of her face was salted with another quality which for want of a better word might be called dignity. But it was more than dignity, for it wore no rigidity, but instead a softness so adaptable, so elastic, that it would withdraw from any attack which life might bring against it, only to spring back at the proper moment, taut, victorious and complete. San Juan saw that even though his guess was correct as to Noel’s being in the house, he was up against a force with which he had no contact before. This woman seemed to be not entirely of America, to possess resources which the American woman lacked or handled ineptly.

She received him with a graciousness which, though it was largely external, seemed to conceal no perturbation underneath. Indeed, her attitude appeared to be perfectly passive, just short of encouraging. It was with an effort that he resisted the inclination to lay his cards on the table. “Good evening.” She sat down on a stiff chair in the centre of the room and asked him to take an easy-chair near by. She sat looking at him silently until he spoke.

“Mrs Poindexter, I am very anxious to see Miss Garneau. I telephoned your house this morning and was told that she was not here.” Mrs Poindexter nodded. “However, I know she is here,” he continued evenly. “And I’m determined to see her. The idea that her father and mother can prevent me from seeing her, as though I had disgraced myself in some way — or that you, Mrs Poindexter, can prevent me from seeing her” — his voice rose a little —  — “is preposterous. This is not the year 1500 — nor even the year 1910.”

He paused. Mrs Poindexter waited for a moment to see if he had finished. Then she said, quietly and unequivocally, “I quite agree with you.”

Save for Noel, Juan thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful before.

“Mrs Poindexter,” he began again, in a more friendly tone, “I’m sorry to seem rude. I’ve been called presumptuous in this matter, and perhaps to some extent I am. Perhaps all poor boys who are in love with wealthy girls are presumptuous. But it happens that I am no longer a poor boy, and I have good reason to believe that Noel cares for me.”

“I see,” said Mrs Poindexter attentively. “But of course I knew nothing about all that.”

Juan hesitated, again disarmed by her complaisance. Then a surge of determination went over him.

“Will you let me see her?” he demanded. “Or will you insist on keeping up this farce a little longer?”

Mrs Poindexter looked at him as though considering.

“Why should I let you see her?”

“Simply because I ask you. Just as, when someone says ‘Excuse me’ you step aside for him in a doorway.”

Mrs Poindexter frowned.

“But Noel is concerned in this matter as much as you. And I’m not like person in a crowd. I’m more like a bodyguard, with instructions to let no one pass, even if they say ‘Excuse me’ in a most appealing voice.”

“You have instructions only from her father and mother,” said Juan, with rising impatience. “She’s the person concerned.”

“I’m glad you begin to admit that.”

“Of course I admit it,” he broke out. “I want you to admit it.”

“I do.”

“Then what’s the point of all this absurd discussion?” he demanded heatedly.

She stood up suddenly. “I bid you good evening, sir.”

Taken aback, Juan stood up too. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“I will not be spoken to like that,” said Mrs Poindexter, still in a low cool voice. “Either you can conduct yourself quietly or you can leave this house at once.”

Juan realized that he had taken the wrong tone. The words stung at him and for a moment he had nothing to say — as though he were a scolded boy at school. “This is beside the question,” he stammered finally. “I want to talk to Noel.”

“Noel doesn’t want to talk to you.” Suddenly Mrs Poindexter held out a sheet of note paper to him. He opened it. It said:

Aunt Jo: As to what we talked about this afternoon: If that intolerable bore calls, as he will probably do, and begins his presumptuous whining, please speak to him frankly. Tell him I never loved him, that I never at any time claimed to love him and that his persistence is revolting to me. Say that I am old enough to know my own mind and that my greatest wish is never to see him again in this world.

Juan stood there aghast. His universe was suddenly about him. Noel did not care, she had never cared. It was all a preposterous joke on him, played by those to whom the business of life had been such jokes from the beginning. He realized now that fundamentally they were all akin — Cousin Cora, Noel, her father, this cold, lovely woman here — affirming the prerogative of the rich to marry always within their caste, to erect artificial barriers and standards against those who could presume upon a summer’s philandering. The scales fell from his eyes and he saw his year and a half of struggle and effort not as progress towards a goal but only as a little race he had run by himself, outside, with no one to beat except himself — no one who cared.

Blindly he looked about for his hat, scarcely realizing it was in the hall. Blindly he stepped back when Mrs Poindexter’s hand moved towards him half a foot through the mist and Mrs Poindexter’s voice said softly, “I’m sorry.” Then he was in the hall, the note still clutched in the hand that struggled through the sleeve of his overcoat, the words which he felt he must somehow say choking through his lips.

“I didn’t understand. I regret very much that I’ve bothered you. It wasn’t dear to me how matters stood — between Noel and me —  — “

His hand was on the door knob.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Mrs Poindexter. “I didn’t realize from what Noel said that what I had to do would be so hard — Mr Templeton.”

“Chandler,” he corrected her dully. “My name’s Chandler.”

She stood dead still; suddenly her face went white.

“What?”

“My name — it’s Chandler.”

Like a flash she threw herself against the half-open door and it bumped shut. Then in a flash she was at the foot of the staircase.

“Noel!” she cried in a high, clear call. “Noel! Noel! Come down, Noel!” Her lovely voice floated up like a bell through the long high central hall. “Noel! Come down! It’s Mr Chandler! It’s Chandler!”

YOUR WAY AND MINE

One spring afternoon in the first year of the present century a young man was experimenting with a new typewriter in a brokerage office on lower Broadway. At his elbow lay an eight-line letter and he was endeavoring to make a copy on the machine but each attempt was marred by a monstrous capital rising unexpectedly in the middle of a word or by the disconcerting intrusion of some symbol such as $ or % into an alphabet whose membership was set at twenty-six many years ago. Whenever he detected a mistake he made a new beginning with a fresh sheet but after the fifteenth try he was aware of a ferocious instinct to cast the machine from the window.

The young man’s short blunt fingers were too big for the keys. He was big all over; indeed his bulky body seemed to be in the very process of growth for it had ripped his coat at the back seam, while his trousers clung to thigh and calf like skin tights. His hair was yellow and tousled — you could see the paths of his broad fingers in it — and his eyes were of a hard brilliant blue but the lids drooping a little over them reinforced an impression of lethargy that the clumsy body conveyed. His age was twenty-one.

“What do you think the eraser’s for, McComas?”

The young man looked around.

“What’s that?” he demanded brusquely.

“The eraser,” repeated the short alert human fox who had come in the outer door and paused behind him. “That there’s a good copy except for one word. Use your head or you’ll be sitting there until tomorrow.”

The human fox moved on into his private office. The young man sat for a moment, motionless, sluggish. Suddenly he grunted, picked up the eraser referred to and flung it savagely out of the window.

Twenty minutes later he opened the door of his employer’s office. In his hand was the letter, immaculately typed, and the addressed envelope.

“Here it is, sir,” he said, frowning a little from his late concentration.

The human fox took it, glanced at it and then looked at McComas with a peculiar smile.

“You didn’t use the eraser?”

“No, I didn’t, Mr. Woodley.”

“You’re one of those thorough young men, aren’t you?” said the fox sarcastically.

“What?”

“I said ‘thorough’ but since you weren’t listening I’ll change it to ‘pig-headed.’ Whose time did you waste just to avoid a little erasure that the best typists aren’t too proud to make? Did you waste your time or mine?”

“I wanted to make one good copy,” answered McComas steadily.

“You see, I never worked a typewriter before.”

“Answer my question,” snapped Mr. Woodley. “When you sat there making two dozen copies of that letter were you wasting your time or mine?”

“It was mostly my lunch time,” McComas replied, his big face flushing to an angry pink. “I’ve got to do things my own way or not at all.”

For answer Mr. Woodley picked up the letter and envelope, folded them, tore them once and again and dropped the pieces into the wastepaper basket with a toothy little smile.

“That’s my way,” he announced. “What do you think of that?”

Young McComas had taken a step forward as if to snatch the fragments from the fox’s hand.

“By golly,” he cried. “By golly. Why, for two cents I’d spank you!”

With an angry snarl Mr. Woodley sprang to his feet, fumbled in his pocket and threw a handful of change upon his desk.

Ten minutes later the outside man coming in to report perceived that neither young McComas nor his hat were in their usual places. But in the private office he found Mr. Woodley, his face crimson and foam bubbling between his teeth, shouting frantically into the telephone. The outside man noticed to his surprise that Mr. Woodley was in daring dishabille and that there were six suspender buttons scattered upon the office floor.

In 1902 Henry McComas weighed 196 pounds. In 1905 when he journeyed back to his home town, Elmira, to marry the love of his boyhood he tipped accurate beams at 210. His weight remained constant for two years but after the panic of 1907 it bounded to 220, about which comfortable figure it was apparently to hover for the rest of his life.

He looked mature beyond his years — under certain illuminations his yellow hair became a dignified white — and his bulk added to the impression of authority that he gave. During his first five years off the farm there was never a time when he wasn’t scheming to get into business for himself.

For a temperament like Henry McComas’, which insisted on running at a pace of its own, independence was an utter necessity. He must make his own rules, willy-nilly, even though he join the ranks of those many abject failures who have also tried. Just one week after he had achieved his emancipation from other people’s hierarchies he was moved to expound his point to Theodore Drinkwater, his partner — this because Drinkwater had wondered aloud if he intended never to come downtown before eleven.

“I doubt it,” said McComas.

“What’s the idea?” demanded Drinkwater indignantly. “What do you think the effect’s going to be on our office force?”

“Does Miss Johnston show any sign of being demoralized?”

“I mean after we get more people. It isn’t as if you were an old man, Mac, with your work behind you. You’re only twenty-eight, not a day older than I. What’ll you do at forty?”

“I’ll be downtown at eleven o’clock,” said McComas, “every working day of my life.”

Later in the week one of their first clients invited them to lunch at a celebrated business club; the club’s least member was a rajah of the swelling, expanding empire.

“Look around, Ted,” whispered McComas as they left the dining-room. “There’s a man looks like a prize-fighter, and there’s one who looks like a ham actor. That’s a plumber there behind you; there’s a coal heaver and a couple of cowboys — do you see? There’s a chronic invalid and a confidence man, a pawn-broker — that one on the right. By golly, where are all the big business men we came to see?”

The route back to their office took them by a small restaurant where the clerks of the district flocked to lunch.

“Take a look at them, Ted, and you’ll find the men who know the rules — and think and act and look like just what they are.”

“I suppose if they put on pink mustaches and came to work at five in the afternoon they’d get to be great men,” scoffed Drinkwater.

“Posing is exactly what I don’t mean. Just accept yourself. We’re brought up on fairy stories about the new leaf, but who goes on believing them except those who have to believe and have to hope or else go crazy. I think America will be a happier country when the individual begins to look his personal limitations in the face. Anything that’s in your character at twenty-one is usually there to stay.”

In any case what was in Henry McComas’ was there to stay. Henry McComas wouldn’t dine with a client in a bad restaurant for a proposition of three figures, wouldn’t hurry his luncheon for a proposition of four, wouldn’t go without it for a proposition of five. And in spite of these peculiarities the exporting firm in which he owned forty-nine per cent of the stock began to pepper South America with locomotives, dynamos, barb wire, hydraulic engines, cranes, mining machinery, and other appurtenances of civilization. In 1913 when Henry McComas was thirty-four he owned a house on Ninety-second Street and calculated that his income for the next year would come to thirty thousand dollars. And because of a sudden and unexpected demand from Europe which was not for pink lemonade, it came to twice that. The buying agent for the British Government arrived, followed by the buying agents for the French, Belgian, Russian and Serbian Governments, and a share of the commodities required were assembled under the stewardship of Drinkwater and McComas. There was a chance that they would be rich men. Then suddenly this eventually began to turn on the woman Henry McComas had married.