Josephine was going to meet her friend Lillian Hammel, but their plan did not include attending the movies. In comparison to it, their mothers would have preferred the most objectionable, the most lurid movie. It was no less than to go for a long auto ride with Travis de Coppet and Howard Page, in the course of which they would kiss not once but a lot. The four of them had been planning this since the previous Saturday, when unkind circumstances had combined to prevent its fulfillment.
Travis and Howard were already there--not sitting down, but still in their overcoats, like symbols of action, hurrying the girls breathlessly into the future. Travis wore a fur collar on his overcoat and carried a gold-headed cane; he kissed Josephine’s hand facetiously yet seriously, and she said, “Hello, Travis!” with the warm affection of a politician greeting a prospective vote. But for a minute the two girls exchanged news aside.
“I saw him,” Lillian whispered, “just now.”
“Did you?”
Their eyes blazed and fused together.
“Isn’t he divine?” said Josephine.
They were referring to Mr. Anthony Harker, who was twenty-two, and unconscious of their existence, save that in the Perry house he occasionally recognized Josephine as Constance’s younger sister.
“He has the most beautiful nose,” cried Lillian, suddenly laughing. “It’s--” She drew it on the air with her finger and they both became hilarious. But Josephine’s face composed itself as Travis’ black eyes, conspicuous as if they had been freshly made the previous night, peered in from the hall.
“Well!” he said tensely.
The four young people went out, passed through fifty bitter feet of wind and entered Page’s car. They were all very confident and knew exactly what they wanted. Both girls were expressly disobeying their parents, but they had no more sense of guilt about it than a soldier escaping from an enemy prison camp. In the back seat, Josephine and Travis looked at each other; she waited as he burned darkly.
“Look,” he said to his hand; it was trembling. “Up till five this morning. Girls from the Follies.”
“Oh, Travis!” she cried automatically, but for the first time a communication such as this failed to thrill her. She took his hand, wondering what the matter was inside herself.
It was quite dark, and he bent over her suddenly, but as suddenly she turned her face away. Annoyed, he made cynical nods with his head and lay back in the corner of the car. He became engaged in cherishing his dark secret--the secret that always made her yearn toward him. She could see it come into his eyes and fill them, down to the cheek bones and up to the brows, but she could not concentrate on him. The romantic mystery of the world had moved into another man.
Travis waited ten minutes for her capitulation; then he tried again, and with this second approach she saw him plain for the first time. It was enough. Josephine’s imagination and her desires were easily exploited up to a certain point, but after that her very impulsiveness protected her. Now, suddenly, she found something real against Travis, and her voice was modulated with lowly sorrow.
“I heard what you did last night. I heard very well.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You told Ed Bement you were in for a big time because you were going to take me home in your car.”
“Who told you that?” he demanded, guilty but belittling.
“Ed Bement did, and he told me he almost hit you in the face when you said it. He could hardly keep restraining himself.”
Once more Travis retired to his corner of the seat. He accepted this as the reason for her coolness, as in a measure it was. In view of Doctor Jung’s theory that innumerable male voices argue in the subconscious of a woman, and even speak through her lips, then the absent Ed Bement was probably speaking through Josephine at that moment.
“I’ve decided not to kiss any more boys, because I won’t have anything left to give the man I really love.”
“Bull!” replied Travis.
“It’s true. There’s been too much talk around Chicago about me. A man certainly doesn’t respect a girl he can kiss whenever he wants to, and I want to be respected by the man I’m going to marry some day.”
Ed Bement would have been overwhelmed had he realized the extent of his dominance over her that afternoon.
Walking from the corner, where the youths discreetly left her, to her house, Josephine felt that agreeable lightness which comes with the end of a piece of work. She would be a good girl now forever, see less of boys, as her parents wished, try to be what Miss Benbower’s school denominated An Ideal Benbower Girl. Then next year, at Breerly, she could be an Ideal Breerly Girl. But the first stars were out over Lake Shore Drive, and all about her she could feel Chicago swinging around its circle at a hundred miles an hour, and Josephine knew that she only wanted to want such wants for her soul’s sake. Actually, she had no desire for achievement. Her grandfather had had that, her parents had had the consciousness of it, but Josephine accepted the proud world into which she was born. This was easy in Chicago, which, unlike New York, was a city state, where the old families formed a caste--intellect was represented by the university professors, and there were no ramifications, save that even the Perrys had to be nice to half a dozen families even richer and more important than themselves. Josephine loved to dance, but the field of feminine glory, the ballroom floor, was something you slipped away from with a man.
As Josephine came to the iron gate of her house, she saw her sister shivering on the top steps with a departing young man; then the front door closed and the man came down the walk. She knew who he was.
He was abstracted, but he recognized her for just a moment in passing.
“Oh, hello,” he said.
She turned all the way round so that he could see her face by the street lamp; she lifted her face full out of her fur collar and toward him, and then smiled.
“Hello,” she said modestly.
They passed. She drew in her head like a turtle.
“Well, now he knows what I look like, anyhow,” she told herself excitedly as she went on into the house.
II
Several days later Constance Perry spoke to her mother in a serious tone:
“Josephine is so conceited that I really think she’s a little crazy.”
“She’s very conceited,” admitted Mrs. Perry. “Father and I were talking and we decided that after the first of the year she should go East to school. But you don’t say a word about it until we know more definitely.”
“Heavens, mother, it’s none too soon! She and that terrible Travis de Coppet running around with his cloak, as if they were about a thousand years old. They came into the Blackstone last week and my spine crawled. They looked just like two maniacs--Travis slinking along, and Josephine twisting her mouth around as if she had St. Vitus dance. Honestly--”
“What did you begin to say about Anthony Harker?” interrupted Mrs. Perry.
“That she’s got a crush on him, and he’s about old enough to be her grandfather.”
“Not quite.”
“Mother, he’s twenty-two and she’s sixteen. Every time Jo and Lillian go by him, they giggle and stare--”
“Come here, Josephine,” said Mrs. Perry.
Josephine came into the room slowly and leaned her backbone against the edge of the opened door, teetering upon it calmly.
“What, mother?”
“Dear, you don’t want to be laughed at, do you?”
Josephine turned sulkily to her sister. “Who laughs at me? You do, I guess. You’re the only one that does.”
“You’re so conceited that you don’t see it. When you and Travis de Coppet came into the Blackstone that afternoon, my spine crawled. Everybody at our table and most of the other tables laughed--the ones that weren’t shocked.”
“I guess they were more shocked,” guessed Josephine complacently.
“You’ll have a fine reputation by the time you come out.”
“Oh, shut your mouth!” said Jos
ephine.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Mrs. Perry whispered solemnly, “I’ll have to tell your father about this as soon as he comes home.”
“Go on, tell him.” Suddenly Josephine began to cry. “Oh, why can’t anybody ever leave me alone? I wish I was dead.”
Her mother stood with her arm around her, saying, “Josephine--now, Josephine”; but Josephine went on with deep, broken sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of her heart.
“Just a lot--of--of ugly and jealous girls who get mad when anybody looks at m-me, and make up all sorts of stories that are absolutely untrue, just because I can get anybody I want. I suppose that Constance is mad about it because I went in and sat for five minutes with Anthony Harker while he was waiting last night.”
“Yes, I was terribly jealous! I sat up and cried all night about it. Especially because he comes to talk to me about Marice Whaley. Why!--you got him so crazy about you in that five minutes that he couldn’t stop laughing all the way to the Warrens.”
Josephine drew in her breath in one last gasp, and stopped crying. “If you want to know, I’ve decided to give him up.”
“Ha-ha!” Constance exploded. “Listen to that, mother! She’s going to give him up--as if he ever looked at her or knew she was alive! Of all the conceited--”
But Mrs. Perry could stand no more. She put her arm around Josephine and hurried her to her room down the hall.
“All your sister meant was that she didn’t like to see you laughed at,” she explained.
“Well, I’ve given him up,” said Josephine gloomily.
She had given him up, renouncing a thousand kisses she had never had, a hundred long, thrilling dances in his arms, a hundred evenings not to be recaptured. She did not mention the letter she had written him last night--and had not sent, and now would never send.
“You musn’t think about such things at your age,” said Mrs. Perry. “You’re just a child.”
Josephine got up and went to the mirror.
“I promised Lillian to come over to her house. I’m late now.”
Back in her room, Mrs. Perry thought: “Two months to February.” She was a pretty woman who wanted to be loved by everyone around her; there was no power of governing in her. She tied up her mind like a neat package and put it in the post office, with Josephine inside it safely addressed to the Breerly School.
An hour later, in the tea room at the Blackstone Hotel, Anthony Harker and another young man lingered at table. Anthony was a happy fellow, lazy, rich enough, pleased with his current popularity. After a brief career in an Eastern university, he had gone to a famous college in Virginia and in its less exigent shadow completed his education; at least, he had absorbed certain courtesies and mannerisms that Chicago girls found charming.
“There’s that guy Travis de Coppet,” his companion had just remarked. “What’s he think he is, anyhow?”
Anthony looked remotely at the young people across the room, recognizing the little Perry girl and other young females whom he seemed to have encountered frequently in the street of late. Although obviously much at home, they seemed silly and loud; presently his eyes left them and searched the room for the party he was due to join for dancing, but he was still sitting there when the room--it had a twilight quality, in spite of the lights within and the full dark outside--woke up to confident and exciting music. A thickening parade drifted past him. The men in sack suits, as though they had just come from portentous affairs, and the women in hats that seemed about to take flight, gave a special impermanence to the scene. This implication that this gathering, a little more than uncalculated, a little less than clandestine, would shortly be broken into formal series, made him anxious to seize its last minutes, and he looked more and more intently into the crowd for the face of anyone he knew.
One face emerged suddenly around a man’s upper arm not five feet away, and for a moment Anthony was the object of the saddest and most tragic regard that had ever been directed upon him. It was a smile and not a smile--two big gray eyes with bright triangles of color underneath, and a mouth twisted into a universal sympathy that seemed to include both him and herself--yet withal, the expression not of a victim, but rather of the very demon of tender melancholy--and for the first time Anthony really saw Josephine.
His immediate instinct was to see with whom she was dancing. It was a young man he knew, and with this assurance he was on his feet giving a quick tug to his coat, and then out upon the floor.
“May I cut in, please?”
Josephine came close to him as they started, looked up into his eyes for an instant, and then down and away. She said nothing. Realizing that she could not possibly be more than sixteen, Anthony hoped that the party he was to join would not arrive in the middle of the dance.
When that was over, she raised eyes to him again; a sense of having been mistaken, of her being older than he had thought, possessed him. Just before he left her at her table, he was moved to say:
“Couldn’t I have another later?”
“Oh, sure.”
She united her eyes with his, every glint a spike--perhaps from the railroads on which their family fortunes were founded, and upon which they depended. Anthony was disconcerted as he went back to his table.
One hour later, they left the Blackstone together in her car.
This had simply happened--Josephine’s statement, at the end of their second dance, that she must leave, then her request, and his own extreme self-consciousness as he walked beside her across the empty floor. It was a favor to her sister to take her home--but he had that unmistakable feeling of expectation.
Nevertheless, once outside and shocked into reconsideration by the bitter cold, he tried again to allocate his responsibilities in the matter. This was hard going with Josephine’s insistent dark and ivory youth pressed up against him. As they got in the car he tried to dominate the situation with a masculine stare, but her eyes, shining as if with fever, melted down his bogus austerity in a whittled second.
Idly he patted her hand--then suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly. . . .
“So that’s that,” she whispered after a moment. Startled, he wondered if he had forgotten something--something he had said to her before.
“What a cruel remark,” he said, “just when I was getting interested.”
“I only meant that any minute with you may be the last one,” she said miserably. “The family are going to send me away to school--they think I haven’t found that out yet.”
“Too bad.”
“--and today they got together--and tried to tell me that you didn’t know I was alive!”
After a long pause, Anthony contributed feebly. “I hope you didn’t let them convince you.”
She laughed shortly. “I just laughed and came down here.”
Her hand burrowed its way into his; when he pressed it, her eyes, bright now, not dark, rose until they were as high as his, and came toward him. A minute later he thought to himself: “This is a rotten trick I’m doing.”
He was sure he was doing it.
“You’re so sweet,” she said.
“You’re a dear child.”
“I hate jealousy worse than anything in the world,” Josephine broke forth, “and I have to suffer from it. And my own sister worse than all the rest.”
“Oh, no,” he protested.
“I couldn’t help it if I fell in love with you. I tried to help it. I used to go out of the house when I knew you were coming.”
The force of her lies came from her sincerity and from her simple and superb confidence that whomsoever she loved must love her in return. Josephine was never either ashamed or plaintive. She was in the world of being alone with a male, a world through which she had moved surely since she was eight years old. She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how sim
ple such things are.
“But you couldn’t be in love with me,” Anthony wanted to say, and couldn’t. He fought with a desire to kiss her again, even tenderly, and began to tell her that she was being unwise, but before he got really started at this handsome project, she was in his arms again, and whispering something that he had to accept, since it was wrapped up in a kiss. Then he was alone, driving away from her door.
What had he agreed to? All they had said rang and beat in his ear like an unexpected temperature--tomorrow at four o’clock on that corner.
“Good God!” he thought uneasily. “All that stuff about giving me up. She’s a crazy kid, she’ll get into trouble if somebody looking for trouble comes along. Big chance of my meeting her tomorrow!”
But neither at dinner nor the dance that he went to that night could Anthony get the episode out of his mind; he kept looking around the ballroom regretfully, as if he missed someone who should be there.
III
Two weeks later, waiting for Marice Whaley in a meager, indefinable down-stairs “sitting room,” Anthony reached in his pocket for some half-forgotten mail. Three letters he replaced; the other--after a moment of listening--he opened quickly and read with his back to the door. It was the third of a series--for one had followed each of his meetings with Josephine--and it was exactly like the others--the letter of a child. Whatever maturity of emotion could accumulate in her expression, when once she set pen to paper was snowed under by ineptitude. There was much about “your feeling for me” and “my feeling for you,” and sentences began, “Yes, I know I am sentimental,” or more gawkily, “I have always been sort of pash, and I can’t help that,” and inevitably much quoting of lines from current popular songs, as if they expressed the writer’s state of mind more fully than verbal struggles of her own.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 212
