Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (425 page)

“We can eat later,” a man’s voice said.

“I don’t care about it at all, when I’m with you.”

The three young girls caught their breath in a gasp, clutched at one another’s arms. The voices came from a car not five feet from where they stood; it was turned away from the gymnasium, so that under cover of the music, their approach had gone unobserved.

“What’s one supper,” the girl continued, “when I think of all the suppers we’ll have together all through life?”

“Beginning next June, darling.”

“Beginning next June, darling, darling, darling.”

And once again a clutching went on among the listeners. For the girl’s voice was that of Marion Lamb, the debutante who had been on the train.

At this point, because it was a rather cool night and her evening cloak was thin, Dizzy sneezed — sneezed loudly and sneezed again.

III

“But how do we know you kids won’t tell?” the man was demanding: He turned to Marion: “Can’t you explain to them how important it is not to tell? Explain that it’ll absolutely wreck your debut at home.”

“But I don’t care, Harry. I’d be proud —  — “

“I care. It simply can’t get around now.”

“We won’t tell,” the young girls chorused ardently. And Gwen added: “We think it’s cute.”

“Do you realize you’re the only ones that know?” he asked sternly. “The only ones! And if it slipped out, I’d know who told, and —  — “

There were such sinister threats in his voice that instinctively the trio recoiled a step.

“That isn’t the way to talk to them,” said Marion. “I went to school with these girls and I know they won’t tell. Anyhow, they know it’s not serious — that I get engaged every few weeks or so.”

“Marion,” cried the young man, “I can’t stand hearing you talk like that!”

“Oh, Harry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!” she gasped, equally upset. “You know there’s never been anyone but you.”

He groaned.

“Well, how are we going to silence this gallery?” Distraught, he fumbled in his pocket for money.

“No, Harry. They’ll keep quiet.” But looking at those six eyes, she felt a vast misgiving. “Listen, what would you three like more than anything in the world?”

They laughed and looked at one another.

“To go to the prom, I guess,” said Gwen frankly. “But of course, we wouldn’t be allowed to. Our parents wouldn’t let us, even if we were invited — I mean —  — “

“I’ve got the idea,” said Harry. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I know a side entrance that leads up to the indoor track. How would you like to sit up there in the dark and look on awhile without anybody seeing you?”

“Whew!” said Dizzy.

“If I take you up there, will you give me your sacred words of honor that you’ll never breathe a word of what you heard tonight?”

“Will we!” they exclaimed together.

IV

Leaving them on the running track, the focusing eye must move down momentarily to the thick of the dance below. Or rather to its outskirts, where a person had just appeared who has hitherto played a small and sorry part in this history, and there he stood uncertainly, his view obscured by a throbbing Harvard-Princeton stag line. If, half an hour before, anyone had told Shorty Ray that eleven o’clock would find him in his present situation, he would not even have said, “Huh!” Some boys of inconsiderable height are compensated by an almost passionate temerity. Not Shorty; since adolescence, he never had been able to face girls with a minimum of dignity. The dance at home was part of a campaign to break him of his shyness, and it had seemed a stroke of luck to him that if his grandmother’s health were going to fail anyhow, it should have chosen this particular day.

As if in retribution for this irreverence, a telegram from Albany addressed to his sister had come to the house at the very moment when he had started to turn out his lights.

An older man would have torn open the telegram and read it, but anything sealed was sacred to him, and such telegrams spelled emergencies. There was nothing for it save to get it to Esther in the gymnasium as quickly as possible.

One thing he knew — he would not go upon the dance floor in search of her. After he had argued his way past the doorkeeper, he was simply standing there feeling helpless, when Dizzy spied him from above.

“There’s Tommy!” she exclaimed.

“Where?”

“The short boy by the door. Well, that’s pathetic, if you ask me! He wouldn’t even come out and look at us, and then he goes to the prom.”

“He doesn’t seem to be having much of a time,” said Clara.

“Let’s go down and cheer him up,” Gwen suggested.

“Not me,” said Dizzy. “For one thing, I wouldn’t want the Rays to know we were here.”

“I forgot about that.”

“Anyhow, he’s gone now.”

He was gone, but not, as they supposed, into the delirious carnival. Irresolute, he had finally conceived the idea of mounting to the running track and trying to locate Esther among the dancers. Even as Dizzy spoke, he was there at her elbow, to their mutual surprise.

“I thought you were in bed!” he exclaimed, as he recognized his cousin.

“I thought you were studying.”

“I
was
studying when a telegram came, and now I’ve got to find Esther.”

He was introduced with great formality; Gwen and Clara immediately adopting the convention that they had not known of his existence in the same town.

“Esther was in one of the boxes a while ago,” said Gwen. “No. 18.”

Grasping at this, Tommy turned to Dizzy.

“Then I wonder if you’d mind going over and giving her this telegram?”

“I would so mind,” said Dizzy. “Why don’t you give it to her yourself? We’re not supposed to be here.”

“Neither am I; they let me in. But I can’t just walk across there all by myself, and you can,” he said earnestly.

Gwen had been looking at him in a curiously intent way for some moments. He was not at all the person she had pictured — in fact, she decided that he was one of the handsomest boys she had ever seen in her life.

“I’ll take it to her,” she said suddenly.

“Will you?” For the first time he seemed to see Gwen — a girl who looked like the pictures in the magazines, and yet was smaller than himself. He thrust the telegram at her. “Thanks! Gosh, I certainly am —  — “

“I’m not going downstairs alone,” she interrupted. “You’ve got to take me part way.”

As they descended, he looked at her again out of the corner of his eye; at the big arch he paused.

“Now you take it the rest of the way,” he said.

“The best way would be to do it together.”

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t say that. I’m not going to walk across the floor.”

“I didn’t mean walk. If we walked, everybody’d kind of look at us, but if we danced across to the box, nobody would notice it.”

“You said you’d take it!” he said indignantly.

“I will, but you’ve got to take me.” And she added innocently, “That makes it easy for us both.”

“I won’t do it,” he declared.

“Then you can take it yourself.”

“I never —  — “

Suddenly, before he realized it, she was in the circle of his arm, his hand was on what was apparently a forgotten seam in her dress just between shoulder blades, and they were moving across the floor.

Through the line of stags and out into the kaleidoscope. Gwen was at home; all hesitancy at the daring of her idea vanishing like the tension of a football player after the kick-off. By some inexorable right, this was her world. This was, perhaps, not the time set for entering it, but, maybe because her generation had ceased to move in the old Euclidian world, her age ceased to matter after a moment. She felt as old as any girl on the floor.

And now, miracle of miracles, the lights dimmed, and at the signal, the divine spark passed from one orchestra to another, and Gwen was dancing onward in a breathless trance to the melody of “Cheek to Cheek.”

*****

In the Laurel Club box, the ladies were growing weary. Chaperonage, they decided, was too lightly undertaken, too poorly compensated for. They were tired of the parade of animation, of lovely, confident faces, and one of them said as much to the middle-aged man who sat at her side. He, too, wore the look of speculating upon the texture of cool pillowcases and the beatitude of absolute quiet.

“I had to come,” she said, “but I still don’t understand why you came.”

“Perhaps because I saw in the morning paper that you’d be here, after all these years.”

“This is no place to say that to a woman of my age; the competition makes me feel very old. Look at that odd-looking couple — like a pair of midgets. I haven’t seen them before.”

He looked, but they seemed like just the sort of eccentrics to wander into any doze, so, after vaguely replying, “Aren’t they cute?” he glazed his eyes for a while, until she commented: “There they are again. Such little people. That girl — why, she can’t be more than fourteen, and she’s like a blase, world-weary woman of twenty. Can you imagine what her parents could have been thinking of, to let her come here tonight?”

He looked again; then, after a long pause, he said, rather wearily:

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“You think it’s all right then?” she demanded. “Why, it seems to me —  — “

“No, Helen, I just meant I can imagine what they would be thinking if they knew about it. Because the girl seems to be my daughter.”

V

It was not in Bryan’s nature to rush out and snatch Gwen from the floor. Should she pass near him again, he intended to bow to her very formally indeed and let the next step be hers. He was not angry with her — he supposed her hostess was behind the matter — but he was angry at a system which permitted a baby disguised as a young woman, a marriageable young woman, to dance at a semipublic ball.

At his undergraduate club the next day, he wended his way from group to group, stopping to chat momentarily here and there, but with his eye always out for Gwen, who was to meet him there. When the crowd was drifting out and down to the stadium, he called the Rays’ house, and found her still there.

“You better meet me at the game,” he said, glad he had given her the ticket. “I want to go down now and see the teams practice.”

“Daddy, I hate to say it but I’ve lost it.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “I searched and searched, and then I remembered I stuck it in the mirror at home with some invitations, to see how it would look, and forgot to —  — “

The connection was broken, and a male voice demanded if there were rooms at the club tonight and if the steward had delivered a brown lunch basket to Thomas Pickering, ‘96. For ten minutes more he jangled the receiver; he wanted to tell her to buy a bad seat in the end stand and work her way around to him, but the phone service in Princeton shared the hysteria of the crowd.

People began going by the booth, looking at their watches and hurrying to get to the kick-off; in another five minutes there was no one going by the booth, and there was sweat upon Bryan’s brow. He had played freshman football in college; it meant to him what war or chess might have meant to his grandfather. Resentment possessed him suddenly.

“After all, she had her fun last night, and now I have a right to mine. Let her miss it. She doesn’t care, really.”

But on the way to the stadium he was torn between the human roar that went up at momentary intervals behind that massive wall and the picture of Gwen making a last desperate search for that precious counter that gleamed uselessly in a mirror at home.

He hardened himself.

“It’s that disorderliness. This will be a better lesson than any lecture.”

Nevertheless, at the very gate Bryan paused once more; he and Gwen were very close, and he could still go after her, but a huge swelling cry from the arena decided him; he went in with the last dribble of the crowd.

It was as he reached his seat that he saw that there was a hand signaling him, heard a voice hailing him.

“Oh, daddy, here we are! We thought maybe you’d —  — “

“Sit down,” he whispered, breathlessly slipping into his place. “People want to see. Did you find your ticket?”

“No, daddy. I had a terrible time — but this is Tommy Ray, daddy. He hasn’t got a seat here; he was just keeping your seat till you came. He can sit anywhere because he —  — “

“Be quiet, Baby! You can tell me later. What’s happened on the field? What’s on that Scoreboard?”

“What Scoreboard?”

From the aisle steps whither he had moved, Tommy supplied the information that it was nothing to nothing; Bryan bent his whole attention upon the game.

At the quarter, he relaxed and demanded:

“How did you manage to get in?”

“Well, you see, Tommy Ray” — she lowered her voice — “this boy beside me — he’s one of the ticket takers. And I knew he’d be somewhere, because he told me last night that was why he had to go home —  — “

She stopped herself.

“I understand,” Bryan said dryly. “I wondered what you found to talk about in that remarkable dancing position.”

“You were there?” she cried in dismay. “You —  — “

“Listen to that Harvard band,” he interrupted, “jazzing old marching songs — seems sort of irreverent. Of course, you’d probably like them to play ‘Cheek by Jowl.’“

“Daddy!”

But for a moment her eyes were far off on the gray horizon, listening, not to the band, but to that sweeter and somehow older tune.

“What did you think?” she asked, after a moment. “I mean when you saw me there?”

“What did I think? I thought you were just too cute for words.”

“You didn’t! I don’t care how you punish me, but please don’t ever say that horrible word again!”

STRANGE SANCTUARY

The little girl with dark blue eyes and last summer’s golden tan rang the doorbell of the Appletons’ house a second time, then turned to the Negress behind her.

“I know there’s somebody in, Hazeldawn, because I can hear them. Just leave the suitcase and you can go back to Mrs. Martin’s.”