The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Some party, boys!”

  At Forty-ninth Street Peter turned to Dean. “Beautiful morning,” he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

  “Probably is.”

  “Go get some breakfast, hey?”

  Dean agreed—with additions.

  “Breakfast and liquor.”

  “Breakfast and liquor,” repeated Peter, and they looked at each other, nodding. “That’s logical.”

  Then they both burst into loud laughter.

  “Breakfast and liquor! Oh, gosh!”

  “No such thing,” announced Peter.

  “Don’t serve it? Ne’mind. We force ’em serve it. Bring pressure bear.”

  “Bring logic bear.”

  The taxi cut suddenly off Broadway, sailed along a cross street, and stopped in front of a heavy tomb-like building in Fifth Avenue.

  “What’s idea?”

  The taxi-driver informed them that this was Delmonico’s.

  This was somewhat puzzling. They were forced to devote several minutes to intense concentration, for if such an order had been given there must have been a reason for it.

  “Somep’m ’bouta coat,” suggested the taxi-man.

  That was it. Peter’s overcoat and hat. He had left them at Delmonico’s. Having decided this, they disembarked from the taxi and strolled toward the entrance arm in arm.

  “Hey!” said the taxi-driver.

  “Huh?”

  “You better pay me.”

  They shook their heads in shocked negation.

  “Later, not now—we give orders, you wait.”

  The taxi-driver objected; he wanted his money now. With the scornful condescension of men exercising tremendous self-control they paid him.

  Inside Peter groped in vain through a dim, deserted check-room in search of his coat and derby.

  “Gone, I guess. Somebody stole it.”

  “Some Sheff student.”

  “All probability.”

  “Never mind,” said Dean, nobly. “I’ll leave mine here too—then we’ll both be dressed the same.”

  He removed his overcoat and hat and was hanging them up when his roving glance was caught and held magnetically by two large squares of cardboard tacked to the two coat-room doors. The one on the left-hand door bore the word “In” in big black letters, and the one on the right-hand door flaunted the equally emphatic word “Out.”

  “Look!” he exclaimed happily——

  Peter’s eyes followed his pointing finger.

  “What?”

  “Look at the signs. Let’s take ’em.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Probably pair very rare an’ valuable signs. Probably come in handy.”

  Peter removed the left-hand sign from the door and endeavored to conceal it about his person. The sign being of considerable proportions, this was a matter of some difficulty. An idea flung itself at him, and with an air of dignified mystery he turned his back. After an instant he wheeled dramatically around, and stretching out his arms displayed himself to the admiring Dean. He had inserted the sign in his vest, completely covering his shirt front. In effect, the word “In” had been painted upon his shirt in large black letters.

  “Yoho!” cheered Dean. “Mister In.”

  He inserted his own sign in like manner.

  “Mister Out!” he announced triumphantly. “Mr. In meet Mr. Out.”

  They advanced and shook hands. Again laughter overcame them and they rocked in a shaken spasm of mirth.

  “Yoho!”

  “We probably get a flock of breakfast.”

  “We’ll go—go to the Commodore.”14

  Arm in arm they sallied out the door, and turning east in Forty-fourth Street set out for the Commodore.

  As they came out a short dark soldier, very pale and tired, who had been wandering listlessly along the sidewalk, turned to look at them.

  He started over as though to address them, but as they immediately bent on him glances of withering unrecognition, he waited until they had started unsteadily down the street, and then followed at about forty paces, chuckling to himself and saying “Oh, boy!” over and over under his breath, in delighted, anticipatory tones.

  Mr. In and Mr. Out were meanwhile exchanging pleasantries concerning their future plans.

  “We want liquor; we want breakfast. Neither without the other. One and indivisible.”

  “We want both ’em!”

  “Both ’em!”

  It was quite light now, and passers-by began to bend curious eyes on the pair. Obviously they were engaged in a discussion, which afforded each of them intense amusement, for occasionally a fit of laughter would seize upon them so violently that, still with their arms interlocked, they would bend nearly double.

  Reaching the Commodore, they exchanged a few spicy epigrams with the sleepy-eyed doorman, navigated the revolving door with some difficulty, and then made their way through a thinly populated but startled lobby to the dining-room, where a puzzled waiter showed them an obscure table in a corner. They studied the bill of fare helplessly, telling over the items to each other in puzzled mumbles.

  “Don’t see any liquor here,” said Peter reproachfully.

  The waiter became audible but unintelligible.

  “Repeat,” continued Peter, with patient tolerance, “that there seems to be unexplained and quite distasteful lack of liquor upon bill of fare.”

  “Here!” said Dean confidently, “let me handle him.” He turned to the waiter—“Bring us—bring us—” he scanned the bill of fare anxiously. “Bring us a quart of champagne and a—a—probably ham sandwich.”

  The waiter looked doubtful.

  “Bring it!” roared Mr. In and Mr. Out in chorus.

  The waiter coughed and disappeared. There was a short wait during which they were subjected without their knowledge to a careful scrutiny by the headwaiter. Then the champagne arrived, and at the sight of it Mr. In and Mr. Out became jubilant.

  “Imagine their objecting to us having champagne for breakfast— jus’ imagine.”

  They both concentrated upon the vision of such an awesome possibility, but the feat was too much for them. It was impossible for their joint imaginations to conjure up a world where any one might object to any one else having champagne for breakfast. The waiter drew the cork with an enormous pop—and their glasses immediately foamed with pale yellow froth.

  “Here’s health, Mr. In.”

  “Here’s same to you, Mr. Out.”

  The waiter withdrew; the minutes passed; the champagne became low in the bottle.

  “It’s—it’s mortifying,” said Dean suddenly.

  “Wha’s mortifying?”

  “The idea their objecting us having champagne breakfast.”

  “Mortifying?” Peter considered. “Yes, tha’s word—mortifying.”

  Again they collapsed into laughter, howled, swayed, rocked back and forth in their chairs, repeating the word “mortifying” over and over to each other—each repetition seeming to make it only more brilliantly absurd.

  After a few more gorgeous minutes they decided on another quart. Their anxious waiter consulted his immediate superior, and this discreet person gave implicit instructions that no more champagne should be served. Their check was brought.

  Five minutes later, arm in arm, they left the Commodore and made their way through a curious, staring crowd along Forty-second Street, and up Vanderbilt Avenue to the Biltmore. There, with sudden cunning, they rose to the occasion and traversed the lobby, walking fast and standing unnaturally erect.

  Once in the dining-room they repeated their performance. They were torn between intermittent convulsive laughter and sudden spasmodic discussions of politics, college, and the sunny state of their dispositions. Their watches told them that it was now nine o’clock, and a dim idea was born in them that they were on a memorable party, something that they would remember always. They lingered over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word “mortify
ing” to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room was whirring and shifting now; a curious lightness permeated and rarefied the heavy air.

  They paid their check and walked out into the lobby.

  It was at this moment that the exterior doors revolved for the thousandth time that morning, and admitted into the lobby a very pale young beauty with dark circles under her eyes, attired in a much-rumpled evening dress. She was accompanied by a plain stout man, obviously not an appropriate escort.

  At the top of the stairs this couple encountered Mr. In and Mr. Out.

  “Edith,” began Mr. In, stepping toward her hilariously and making a sweeping bow, “darling, good morning.”

  The stout man glanced questioningly at Edith, as if merely asking her permission to throw this man summarily out of the way.

  “ ’Scuse familiarity,” added Peter, as an afterthought. “Edith, good morning.”

  He seized Dean’s elbow and impelled him into the foreground.

  “Meet Mr. In, Edith, my bes’ frien’. Inseparable. Mr. In and Mr. Out.”

  Mr. Out advanced and bowed; in fact, he advanced so far and bowed so low that he tipped slightly forward and only kept his balance by placing a hand lightly on Edith’s shoulder.

  “I’m Mr. Out, Edith,” he mumbled pleasantly, “S’misterin Mister-out.”

  “ ’Smisterinanout,” said Peter proudly.

  But Edith stared straight by them, her eyes fixed on some infinite speck in the gallery above her. She nodded slightly to the stout man, who advanced bull-like and with a sturdy brisk gesture pushed Mr. In and Mr. Out to either side. Through this alley he and Edith walked.

  But ten paces farther on Edith stopped again—stopped and pointed to a short, dark soldier who was eying the crowd in general, and the tableau of Mr. In and Mr. Out in particular, with a sort of puzzled, spellbound awe.

  “There,” cried Edith. “See there!”

  Her voice rose, became somewhat shrill. Her pointing finger shook slightly.

  “There’s the soldier who broke my brother’s leg.”

  There were a dozen exclamations; a man in a cutaway coat left his place near the desk and advanced alertly; the stout person made a sort of lightning-like spring toward the short, dark soldier, and then the lobby closed around the little group and blotted them from the sight of Mr. In and Mr. Out.

  But to Mr. In and Mr. Out this event was merely a particolored iridescent segment of a whirring, spinning world.

  They heard loud voices; they saw the stout man spring; the picture suddenly blurred.

  Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.

  “What floor, please?” said the elevator man.

  “Any floor,” said Mr. In.

  “Top floor,” said Mr. Out.

  “This is the top floor,” said the elevator man.

  “Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out.

  “Higher,” said Mr. In.

  “Heaven,” said Mr. Out.

  XI

  In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon Sterrett awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill—a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet—comatose, drugged, his eyes wide, his mind clicking wildly like an unoiled machine.

  It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson. 15

  He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sporting goods store. Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the temple.

  THE JELLY-BEAN

  Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jellybean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.

  Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two—a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia, occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.

  Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound—rather like the beginning of a fairy story—as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sorts of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. “Jelly-bean” is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular—I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.

  Jim was born in a white house on a green corner. It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim’s father scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boardinghouse run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul.

  He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sort of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim’s mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly’s Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw any number he desired on the dice and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the past fifty years.

  He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob 1 and polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard for a year.

  When the war was over he came home. He was twenty-one, his trousers were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very good old cloth long exposed to the sun.

  In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted
down along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon’s rim above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an hour. The Jellybean had been invited to a party.

  Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in school. But, while Jim’s social aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had alternately fallen in and out of love, gone to college, taken to drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that, though casual, was perfectly definite. That afternoon Clark’s ancient Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a clear sky, Clark had invited him to a party at the country club. The impulse that made him do this was no stranger than the impulse which made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a half-frightened sense of adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking it over.

  He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in time to the low throaty tune:

  “One mile from Home in Jelly-bean town,

  Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.

  She loves her dice and treats ’em nice;

  No dice would treat her mean.”

  He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.

  “Daggone!” he muttered, half aloud.

  They would all be there—the old crowd, the crowd to which, by right of the white house, sold long since, and the portrait of the officer in gray over the mantel, Jim should have belonged. But that crowd had grown up together into a tight little set as gradually as the girls’ dresses had lengthened inch by inch, as definitely as the boys’ trousers had dropped suddenly to their ankles. And to that society of first names and dead puppy-loves Jim was an outsider—a running mate of poor whites. Most of the men knew him, condescendingly; he tipped his hat to three or four girls. That was all.