Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The last choice was the most difficult. The remaining boys were mediocrities, or at any rate they had so far displayed no qualities that set them apart. For a time Barnes, thinking patriotically of his old university, considered the football captain, a virtuosic halfback who would have been welcome on any Eastern squad; but that would have destroyed the integrity of the idea.

  He finally chose a younger boy, Gordon Vandervere, of a rather higher standing than the others. Vandervere was the handsomest and one of the most popular boys in school. He had been intended for college, but his father, a harassed minister, was glad to see the way made easy.

  Barnes was content with himself; he felt godlike in being able to step in to mold these various destinies. He felt as if they were his own sons, and he telegraphed Schofield in Minneapolis:

  HAVE CHOSEN HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER, AND AM BACKING THEM AGAINST THE WORLD.

  And now, after all this biography, the story begins. . . .

  The continuity of the frieze is broken. Young Charley Schofield had been expelled from Hotchkiss. It was a small but painful tragedy--he and four other boys, nice boys, popular boys, broke the honor system as to smoking. Charley’s father felt the matter deeply, varying between disappointment about Charley and anger at the school. Charley came home to Minneapolis in a desperate humor and went to the country day-school while it was decided what he was to do.

  It was still undecided in midsummer. When school was over, he spent his time playing golf, or dancing at the Minnekada Club--he was a handsome boy of eighteen, older than his age, with charming manners, with no serious vices, but with a tendency to be easily influenced by his admirations. His principal admiration at the time was Gladys Irving, a young married woman scarcely two years older than himself. He rushed her at the club dances, and felt sentimentally about her, though Gladys on her part was in love with her husband and asked from Charley only the confirmation of her own youth and charm that a belle often needs after her first baby.

  Sitting out with her one night on the veranda of the Lafayette Club, Charley felt a necessity to boast to her, to pretend to be more experienced, and so more potentially protective.

  “I’ve seen a lot of life for my age,” he said. “I’ve done things I couldn’t even tell you about.”

  Gladys didn’t answer.

  “In fact last week--” he began, and thought better of it. “In any case I don’t think I’ll go to Yale next year--I’d have to go East right away, and tutor all summer. If I don’t go, there’s a job open in Father’s office; and after Wister goes back to college in the fall, I’ll have the roadster to myself.”

  “I thought you were going to college,” Gladys said coldly.

  “I was. But I’ve thought things over, and now I don’t know. I’ve usually gone with older boys, and I feel older than boys my age. I like older girls, for instance.” When Charley looked at her then suddenly, he seemed unusually attractive to her--it would be very pleasant to have him here, to cut in on her at dances all summer. But Gladys said:

  “You’d be a fool to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “You started something--you ought to go through with it. A few years running around town, and you won’t be good for anything.”

  “You think so,” he said indulgently.

  Gladys didn’t want to hurt him or to drive him away from her; yet she wanted to say something stronger.

  “Do you think I’m thrilled when you tell me you’ve had a lot of dissipated experience? I don’t see how anybody could claim to be your friend and encourage you in that. If I were you, I’d at least pass your examinations for college. Then they can’t say you just lay down after you were expelled from school.”

  “You think so?” Charley said, unruffled, and in his grave, precocious manner, as though he were talking to a child. But she had convinced him, because he was in love with her and the moon was around her. “Oh me, oh my, oh you,” was the last music they had danced to on the Wednesday before, and so it was one of those times.

  Had Gladys let him brag to her, concealing her curiosity under a mask of companionship, if she had accepted his own estimate of himself as a man formed, no urging of his father’s would have mattered. As it was, Charley passed into college that fall, thanks to a girl’s tender reminiscences and her own memories of the sweetness of youth’s success in young fields.

  And it was well for his father that he did. If he had not, the catastrophe of his older brother Wister that autumn would have broken Schofield’s heart. The morning after the Harvard game the New York papers carried a headline:

  YALE BOYS AND FOLLIES GIRLS IN

  MOTOR CRASH NEAR RYE

  IRENE DALEY IN GREENWICH HOSPITAL THREATENS BEAUTY SUIT

  MILLIONAIRE’S SON INVOLVED

  The four boys came up before the dean a fortnight later. Wister Schofield, who had driven the car, was called first.

  “It was not your car, Mr. Schofield,” the dean said. “It was Mr. Kavenaugh’s car, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How did you happen to be driving?”

  “The girls wanted me to. They didn’t feel safe.”

  “But you’d been drinking too, hadn’t you?”

  “Yes, but not so much.”

  “Tell me this,” asked the dean: “Haven’t you ever driven a car when you’d been drinking--perhaps drinking even more than you were that night?”

  “Why--perhaps once or twice, but I never had any accidents. And this was so clearly unavoidable--”

  “Possibly,” the dean agreed; “but we’ll have to look at it this way: Up to this time you had no accidents even when you deserved to have them. Now you’ve had one when you didn’t deserve it. I don’t want you to go out of here feeling that life or the University or I myself haven’t given you a square deal, Mr. Schofield. But the newspapers have given this a great deal of prominence, and I’m afraid that the University will have to dispense with your presence.”

  Moving along the frieze to Howard Kavenaugh, the dean’s remarks to him were substantially the same.

  “I am particularly sorry in your case, Mr. Kavenaugh. Your father has made substantial gifts to the University, and I took pleasure in watching you play hockey with your usual brilliance last winter.”

  Howard Kavenaugh left the office with uncontrollable tears running down his cheeks.

  Since Irene Daley’s suit for her ruined livelihood, her ruined beauty, was directed against the owner and the driver of the automobile, there were lighter sentences for the other two occupants of the car. Beau Lebaume came into the dean’s office with his arm in a sling and his handsome head swathed in bandages and was suspended for the remainder of the current year. He took it jauntily and said good-by to the dean with as cheerful a smile as could show through the bandages. The last case, however, was the most difficult. George Winfield, who had entered high-school late because work in the world had taught him the value of an education, came in looking at the floor.

  “I can’t understand your participation in this affair,” said the dean. “I know your benefactor, Mr. Barnes, personally. He told me how you left school to go to work, and how you came back to it four years later to continue your education, and he felt that your attitude toward life was essentially serious. Up to this point you have a good record here at New Haven, but it struck me several months ago that you were running with a rather gay crowd, boys with a great deal of money to spend. You are old enough to realize that they couldn’t possibly give you as much in material ways as they took away from you in others. I’ve got to give you a year’s suspension. If you come back, I have every hope you’ll justify the confidence that Mr. Barnes reposed in you.”

  “I won’t come back,” said Winfield. “I couldn’t face Mr. Barnes after this. I’m not going home.”

  At the suit brought by Irene Daley, all four of them lied loyally for Wister Schofield. They said that before they hit the gasoline pump they had seen Miss Daley grab the wheel. But Miss Dal
ey was in court, with her face, familiar to the tabloids, permanently scarred; and her counsel exhibited a letter canceling her recent moving-picture contract. The students’ case looked bad; so in the intermission, on their lawyer’s advice, they settled for forty thousand dollars. Wister Schofield and Howard Kavenaugh were snapped by a dozen photographers leaving the courtroom, and served up in flaming notoriety next day.

  That night, Wister, the three Minneapolis boys, Howard and Beau Lebaume started for home. George Winfield said good-by to them in the Pennsylvania station; and having no home to go to, walked out into New York to start life over.

  Of all Barnes’ protégés, Jack Stubbs with his one arm was the favorite. He was the first to achieve fame--when he played on the tennis team at Princeton, the rotogravure section carried pictures showing how he threw the ball from his racket in serving. When he was graduated, Barnes took him into his own office--he was often spoken of as an adopted son. Stubbs, together with Schlach, now a prominent consulting engineer, were the most satisfactory of his experiments, although James Matsko at twenty-seven had just been made a partner in a Wall Street brokerage house. Financially he was the most successful of the six, yet Barnes found himself somewhat repelled by his hard egoism. He wondered, too, if he, Barnes, had really played any part in Matsko’s career--did it after all matter whether Matsko was a figure in metropolitan finance or a big merchant in the Middle West, as he would have undoubtedly become without any assistance at all.

  One morning in 1930 he handed Jack Stubbs a letter that led to a balancing up of the book of boys.

  “What do you think of this?”

  The letter was from Louis Ireland in Paris. About Louis they did not agree, and as Jack read, he prepared once more to intercede in his behalf.

  MY DEAR SIR:

  After your last communication, made through your bank here and enclosing a check which I hereby acknowledge, I do not feel that I am under any obligation to write you at all. But because the concrete fact of an object’s commercial worth may be able to move you, while you remain utterly insensitive to the value of an abstract idea--because of this I write to tell you that my exhibition was an unqualified success. To bring the matter even nearer to your intellectual level, I may tell you that I sold two pieces--a head of Lallette, the actress, and a bronze animal group--for a total of seven thousand francs ($280.00). Moreover I have commissions which will take me all summer--I enclose a piece about me cut from CAHIERS D’ART, which will show you that whatever your estimate of my abilities and my career, it is by no means unanimous.

  This is not to say that I am ungrateful for your well-intentioned attempt to “educate” me. I suppose that Harvard was no worse than any other polite finishing school--the years that I wasted there gave me a sharp and well-documented attitude on American life and institutions. But your suggestions that I come to America and make standardized nymphs for profiteers’ fountains was a little too much--

  Stubbs looked up with a smile.

  “Well,” Barnes said, “what do you think? Is he crazy--or now that he has sold some statues, does it prove that I’m crazy?”

  “Neither one,” laughed Stubbs. “What you objected to in Louis wasn’t his talent. But you never got over that year he tried to enter a monastery and then got arrested in the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, and then ran away with the professor’s wife.”

  “He was just forming himself,” said Barnes dryly, “just trying his little wings. God knows what he’s been up to abroad.”

  “Well, perhaps he’s formed now,” Stubbs said lightly. He had always liked Louis Ireland--privately he resolved to write and see if he needed money.

  “Anyhow, he’s graduated from me,” announced Barnes. “I can’t do any more to help him or hurt him. Suppose we call him a success, though that’s pretty doubtful--let’s see how we stand. I’m going to see Schofield out in Minneapolis next week, and I’d like to balance accounts. To my mind, the successes are you, Otto Schlach, James Matsko,--whatever you and I may think of him as a man,--and let’s assume that Louis Ireland is going to be a great sculptor. That’s four. Winfield’s disappeared. I’ve never had a line from him.”

  “Perhaps he’s doing well somewhere.”

  “If he were doing well, I think he’d let me know. We’ll have to count him as a failure so far as my experiment goes. Then there’s Gordon Vandervere.”

  Both were silent for a moment.

  “I can’t make it out about Gordon,” Barnes said. “He’s such a nice fellow, but since he left college, he doesn’t seem to come through. He was younger than the rest of you, and he had the advantage of two years at Andover before he went to college, and at Princeton he knocked them cold, as you say. But he seems to have worn his wings out--for four years now he’s done nothing at all; he can’t hold a job; he can’t get his mind on his work, and he doesn’t seem to care. I’m about through with Gordon.”

  At this moment Gordon was announced over the phone.

  “He asked for an appointment,” explained Barnes. “I suppose he wants to try something new.”

  A personable young man with an easy and attractive manner strolled in to the office.

  “Good afternoon, Uncle Ed. Hi there, Jack!” Gordon sat down. “I’m full of news.”

  “About what?” asked Barnes.

  “About myself.”

  “I know. You’ve just been appointed to arrange a merger between J. P. Morgan and the Queensborough Bridge.”

  “It’s a merger,” agreed Vandervere, “but those are not the parties to it. I’m engaged to be married.”

  Barnes glowered.

  “Her name,” continued Vandervere, “is Esther Crosby.”

  “Let me congratulate you,” said Barnes ironically. “A relation of H. B. Crosby, I presume.”

  “Exactly,” said Vandervere unruffled. “In fact, his only daughter.”

  For a moment there was silence in the office. Then Barnes exploded.

  “You’re going to marry H. B. Crosby’s daughter? Does he know that last month you retired by request from one of his banks?”

  “I’m afraid he knows everything about me. He’s been looking me over for four years. You see, Uncle Ed,” he continued cheerfully, “Esther and I got engaged during my last year at Princeton--my roommate brought her down to a house-party, but she switched over to me. Well, quite naturally Mr. Crosby wouldn’t hear of it until I’d proved myself.”

  “Proved yourself!” repeated Barnes. “Do you consider that you’ve proved yourself?”

  “Well--yes.”

  “How?”

  “By waiting four years. You see, either Esther or I might have married anybody else in that time, but we didn’t. Instead we sort of wore him away. That’s really why I haven’t been able to get down to anything. Mr. Crosby is a strong personality, and it took a lot of time and energy wearing him away. Sometimes Esther and I didn’t see each other for months, so she couldn’t eat; so then thinking of that I couldn’t eat, so then I couldn’t work--”

  “And you mean he’s really given his consent?”

  “He gave it last night.”

  “Is he going to let you loaf?”

  “No. Esther and I are going into the diplomatic service. She feels that the family has passed through the banking phase.” He winked at Stubbs. “I’ll look up Louis Ireland when I get to Paris, and send Uncle Ed a report.”

  Suddenly Barnes roared with laughter.

  “Well, it’s all in the lottery-box,” he said. “When I picked out you six, I was a long way from guessing--” He turned to Stubbs and demanded: “Shall we put him under failure or under success?”

  “A howling success,” said Stubbs. “Top of the list.”

  A fortnight later Barnes was with his old friend Schofield in Minneapolis. He thought of the house with the six boys as he had last seen it--now it seemed to bear scars of them, like the traces that pictures leave on a wall that they have long protected from the mark of time. Since he did not know what had
become of Schofield’s sons, he refrained from referring to their conversation of ten years before until he knew whether it was dangerous ground. He was glad of his reticence later in the evening when Schofield spoke of his elder son, Wister.

  “Wister never seems to have found himself--and he was such a high-spirited kid! He was the leader of every group he went into; he could always make things go. When he was young, our houses in town and at the lake were always packed with young people. But after he left Yale, he lost interest in things--got sort of scornful about everything. I thought for a while that it was because he drank too much, but he married a nice girl and she took that in hand. Still, he hasn’t any ambition--he talked about country life, so I bought him a silver-fox farm, but that didn’t go; and I sent him to Florida during the boom, but that wasn’t any better. Now he has an interest in a dude-ranch in Montana; but since the depression--”

  Barnes saw his opportunity and asked:

  “What became of those friends of your sons’ that I met one day?”

  “Let’s see--I wonder who you mean. There was Kavenaugh--you know, the flour people--he was here a lot. Let’s see--he eloped with an Eastern girl, and for a few years he and his wife were the leaders of the gay crowd here--they did a lot of drinking and not much else. It seems to me I heard the other day that Howard’s getting a divorce. Then there was the younger brother--he never could get into college. Finally he married a manicurist, and they live here rather quietly. We don’t hear much about them.”

  They had had a glamour about them, Barnes remembered; they had been so sure of themselves, individually, as a group; so high-spirited, a frieze of Greek youths, graceful of body, ready for life.

  “Then Larry Patt, you might have met him here. A great golfer. He couldn’t stay in college--there didn’t seem to be enough fresh air there for Larry.” And he added defensively: “But he capitalized what he could do--he opened a sporting-goods store and made a good thing of it, I understand. He has a string of three or four.”