Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  THE POPULAR GIRL

  Along about half-past ten every Saturday night Yanci Bowman eluded her partner by some graceful subterfuge and from the dancing floor went to point of vantage overlooking the country-club bar. When she saw her father she would either beckon to him, if he chanced to be looking in her direction, or else she would dispatch a waiter to call attention to her impendent presence. If it were no later than half past ten — that is, if he had had no more than an hour of synthetic gin rickeys — he would get up from his chair and suffer himself to be persuaded into the ballroom.

  “Ballroom,” for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase “Let’s go in and dance.” It was referred to as “inside” or “downstairs.” It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America.

  Yanci knew that if she could keep her father there for an hour, talking, watching her dance, or even on rare occasions dancing himself, she could safely release him at the end of that time. In the period that would elapse before midnight ended the dance he could scarcely become sufficiently stimulated to annoy anyone.

  All this entailed considerable exertion on Yanci’s part, and it was less for her father’s sake than for her own that she went through with it. Several rather unpleasant experiences were scattered through this past summer. One night when she had been detained by the impassioned and impossible-to-interrupt speech of a young man from Chicago her father had appeared swaying gently in the ballroom doorway; in his ruddy handsome face two faded blue eyes were squinted half shut as he tried to focus them on the dancers, and he was obviously preparing to offer himself to the first dowager who caught his eye. He was ludicrously injured when Yanci insisted upon an immediate withdrawal.

  After that night Yanci went through her Fabian maneuver to the minute.

  Yanci and her father were the handsomest two people in the Middle Western city where they lived. Tom Bowman’s complexion was hearty from twenty years spent in the service of good whisky and bad golf. He kept an office downtown, where he was thought to transact some vague real-estate business; but in point of fact his chief concern in life was the exhibition of a handsome profile and an easy well-bred manner at the country club, where he had spent the greater part of the ten years that had elapsed since his wife’s death.

  Yanci was twenty, with a vague die-away manner which was partly the setting for her languid disposition and partly the effect of a visit she had paid to some Eastern relatives at an impressionable age. She was intelligent, in a flitting way, a romantic under the moon and unable to decide whether to marry for sentiment or for comfort, the latter of these two abstractions being well enough personified by one of the most ardent among her admirers. Meanwhile she kept house, not without efficiency, for her father, and tried in a placid unruffled tempo to regulate his constant tippling to the sober side of inebriety.

  She admired her father. She admired him for his fine appearance and for his charming manner. He had never quite lost the air of having been a popular Bones man at Yale. This charm of his was a standard by which her susceptible temperament unconsciously judged the men she knew. Nevertheless, father and daughter were far from that sentimental family relationship which is a stock plant in fiction, but in life usually exists in the mind of only the older party to it. Yanci Bowman had decided to leave her home by marriage within the year. She was heartily bored.

  Scott Kimblerly, who saw her for the first time this November evening at the country club, agreed with the lady whose house guest he was that Yanci was an exquisite little beauty. With a sort of conscious sensuality surprising in such a young man — Scott was only twenty-five — he avoided an introduction that he might watch her undisturbed for a fanciful hour, and sip the pleasure or the disillusion of her conversation at the drowsy end of the evening.

  “She never got over the disappointment of not meeting the Prince of Wales when he was in this country,” remarked Mrs. Orrin Rogers, following his gaze. “She said so, anyhow; whether she was serious or not, I don’t know. I hear that she has her walls simply plastered with pictures of him.”

  “Who?” asked Scott suddenly.

  “Why, the Prince of Wales.”

  “Who has plaster pictures of him?”

  “Why, Yanci Bowman, the girl you said you thought was so pretty.”

  “After a certain degree of prettiness, one pretty girl is as pretty as another,” said Scott argumentatively.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Mrs. Rogers’ voice drifted off on an indefinite note. She had never in her life compassed a generality until it had fallen familiarly on her ear from constant repetition.

  “Let’s talk her over,” Scott suggested.

  With a mock reproachful smile Mrs. Rogers lent herself agreeably to slander. An encore was just beginning. The orchestra trickled a light overflow of music into the pleasant green-latticed room and the two score couples who for the evening comprised the local younger set moved placidly into time with its beat. Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood; and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom.

  Their trappings lacked the sparkle of the seventeen-year-old affairs that took place through the short and radiant holidays. On such occasions as this, thought Scott as his eyes still sought casually for Yanci, occurred the matings of the left-overs, the plainer, the duller, the poorer of the social world; matings actuated by the same urge toward perhaps a more glamorous destiny, yet, for all that, less beautiful and less young. Scott himself was feeling very old.

  But there was one face in the crowd to which his generalization did not apply. When his eyes found Yanci Bowman among the dancers he felt much younger. She was the incarnation of all in which the dance failed — graceful youth, arrogant, languid freshness and beauty that was sad and perishable as a memory in a dream. Her partner, a young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day, did not appear to be holding her interest, and her glance fell here and there upon a group, a face, a garment, with a far-away and oblivious melancholy.

  “Dark-blue eyes,” said Scott to Mrs. Rogers. “I don’t know that they mean anything except that they’re beautiful, but that nose and upper lip and chin are certainly aristocratic — if there is any such thing,” he added apologetically.

  “Oh, she’s very aristocratic,” agreed Mrs. Rogers. “Her grandfather was a senator or governor or something in one of the Southern states. Her father’s very aristocratic looking too. Oh, yes, they’re very aristocratic; they’re aristocratic people.”

  “She looks lazy.”

  Scott was watching the yellow gown drift and submerge among the dancers.

  “She doesn’t like to move. It’s a wonder she dances so well. Is she engaged? Who is the man who keeps cutting in on her, the one who tucks his tie under his collar so rakishly and affects the remarkable slanting pockets?”

  He was annoyed at the young man’s persistence, and his sarcasm lacked the ring of detachment.

  “Oh, that’s” — Mrs. Rogers bent forward, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips — “that’s the O’Rourke boy. He’s quite devoted, I believe.”

  “I believe,” Scott said suddenly, “that I’ll get you to introduce me if she’s near when the music stops.”

  They arose and stood looking for Yanci — Mrs. Rogers, small, stoutening, nervous, and Scott Kimberly, her husband’s cousin, dark and just below medium height. Scott was an orphan with half a million of his own, and he was in this city for no more reason than that he had missed a train. They looked for several minutes, and in vain. Yanci, in her yellow dress, no longer moved with slow loveliness among the dancer
s.

  The clock stood at half past ten.

  II

  “Good evening,” her father was saying to her at that moment in syllables faintly slurred. “This seems to be getting to be a habit.”

  They were standing near a side stairs, and over his shoulder through a glass door Yanci could see a party of half a dozen men sitting in familiar joviality about a round table.

  “Don’t you want to come out and watch for a while?” she suggested, smiling and affecting a casualness she did not feel.

  “Not tonight, thanks.”

  Her father’s dignity was a bit too emphasized to be convincing.

  “Just come out and take a look,” she urged him. “Everybody’s here, and I want to ask you what you think of somebody.”

  This was not so good, but it was the best that occurred to her.

  “I doubt very strongly if I’d find anything to interest me out there,” said Tom Bowman emphatically. “I observe that f’some insane reason I’m always taken out and aged on the wood for half an hour as though I was irresponsible.”

  “I only ask you to stay a little while.”

  “Very considerate, I’m sure. But tonight I happ’n to be interested in a discussion that’s taking place in here.”

  “Come on, father.”

  Yanci put her arm through his ingratiatingly; but he released it by the simple expedient of raising his own arm and letting hers drop.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I’ll tell you,” she suggested, concealing her annoyance at this unusually protracted argument, “you come in and look, just once, and then if it bores you you can go right back.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, thanks.”

  Then without another word he turned suddenly and reentered the bar. Yanci went back to the ballroom. She glanced easily at the stag line as she passed, and making a quick selection murmured to a man near her, “Dance with me, will you, Carty? I’ve lost my partner.”

  “Glad to,” answered Carty truthfully.

  “Awfully sweet of you.”

  “Sweet of me? Of you, you mean.”

  She looked up at him absently. She was furiously annoyed at her father. Next morning at breakfast she would radiate a consuming chill, but for tonight she could only wait, hoping that if the worst happened he would at least remain in the bar until the dance was over.

  Mrs. Rogers, who lived next door to the Bowmans, appeared suddenly at her elbow with a strange young man.

  “Yanci,” Mrs. Rogers was saying with a social smile, “I want to introduce Mr. Kimberly. Mr. Kimberly’s spending the weekend with us, and I particularly wanted him to meet you.”

  “How perfectly slick!” drawled Yanci with lazy formality.

  Mr. Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace lamps, the rhythm of the music playing some paraphrase of a paraphrase, the faces of many girls, pretty, undistinguished or absurd, assumed a certain solidity as though they had grouped themselves in a retinue for Yanci’s languid eyes and dancing feet.

  “I’ve been watching you,” said Scott simply. “You look rather bored this evening.”

  “Do I?” Her dark-blue eyes exposed a borderland of fragile iris as they opened in a delicate burlesque of interest. “How perfectly kill-ing!” she added.

  Scott laughed. She had used the exaggerated phrase without smiling, indeed without any attempt to give it verisimilitude. He had heard the adjectives of the year — “hectic,” “marvelous,” and “slick” — delivered casually, but never before without the faintest meaning. In this lackadaisical young beauty it was inexpressibly charming.

  The dance ended. Yanci and Scott strolled toward a lounge set against the wall, but before they could take possession there was a shriek of laughter and a brawny damsel dragging an embarrassed boy in her wake skidded by them and plumped down upon it.

  “How rude!” observed Yanci.

  “I suppose it’s her privilege.”

  “A girl with ankles like that has no privileges.”

  They seated themselves uncomfortably on two stiff chairs.

  “Where do you come from?” she asked of Scott with polite uninterest.

  “New York.”

  This having transpired, Yanci deigned to fix her eyes on him for the best part of ten seconds.

  “Who was the gentleman with the invisible tie,” Scott asked rudely, in order to make her look at him, “who was giving you such a rush? I found it impossible to keep my eyes off him. Is his personality as diverting as his haberdashery?”

  “I don’t know,” she drawled; “I’ve only been engaged to him for a week.”

  “My Lord!” exclaimed Scott, perspiring suddenly under his eyes.

  “I beg your pardon. I didn’t — — “

  “I was only joking,” she interrupted with a sighing laugh. “I thought I’d see what you’d say to that.”

  Then they both laughed, and Yanci continued, “I’m not engaged to anyone. I’m too horribly unpopular.” Still the same key, her languorous voice humorously contradicting the content of her remark. “No one’ll ever marry me.”

  “How pathetic!”

  “Really,” she murmured; “because I have to have compliments all the time, in order to live, and no one thinks I’m attractive any more, so no one ever gives them to me.”

  Seldom had Scott been so amused.

  “Why, you beautiful child,” he cried, “I’ll bet you never hear anything else from morning till night!”

  “Oh yes I do,” she responded, obviously pleased. “I never get compliments unless I fish for them.”

  “Everything’s the same,” she was thinking as she gazed around her in a peculiar mood of pessimism. Same boys sober and same boys tight; same old women sitting by the walls and one or two girls sitting with them who were dancing this time last year.

  Yanci had reached the stage where these country-club dances seemed little more than a display of sheer idiocy. From being an enchanted carnival where jeweled and immaculate maidens rouged to the pinkest propriety displayed themselves to strange and fascinating men, the picture had faded to a medium-sized hall where was an almost indecent display of unclothed motives and obvious failures. So much for several years! And the dance had changed scarcely by a ruffle in the fashions or a new flip in a figure of speech.

  Yanci was ready to be married.

  Meanwhile the dozen remarks rushing to Scott Kimberly’s lips were interrupted by the apologetic appearance of Mrs. Rogers.

  “Yanci,” the older woman was saying, “the chauffeur’s just telephoned to say that the car’s broken down. I wonder if you and your father have room for us going home. If it’s the slightest inconvenience don’t hesitate to tell — — “

  “I know he’ll be terribly glad to. He’s got loads of room, because I came out with someone else.”

  She was wondering if her father would be presentable at twelve.

  He could always drive at any rate — and, besides, people who asked for a lift could take what they got.

  “That’ll be lovely. Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Rogers.

  Then, as she had just passed the kittenish late thirties when women still think they are persona grata with the young and entered upon the early forties when their children convey to them tactfully that they no longer are, Mrs. Rogers obliterated herself from the scene. At that moment the music started and the unfortunate young man with white streaks in his red complexion appeared in front of Yanci.

  Just before the end of the end of the next dance Scott Kimberly cut in on her again.

  “I’ve come back,” he began, “to tell you how beautiful you are.”

  “I’m not, really,” she answered. “And, besides, y
ou tell everyone that.”

  The music gathered gusto for its finale, and they sat down upon the comfortable lounge.

  “I’ve told no one that for three years,” said Scott.

  There was no reason why he should have made it three years, yet somehow it sounded convincing to both of them. Her curiosity was stirred. She began finding out about him. She put him to a lazy questionnaire which began with his relationship to the Rogerses and ended, he knew not by what steps, with a detailed description of his apartment in New York.

  “I want to live in New York,” she told him; “on Park Avenue, in one of those beautiful white buildings that have twelve big rooms in each apartment and cost a fortune to rent.”

  “That’s what I’d want, too, if I were married. Park Avenue — it’s one of the most beautiful streets in the world, I think, perhaps chiefly because it hasn’t any leprous park trying to give it an artificial suburbanity.”

  “Whatever that is,” agreed Yanci. “Anyway, Father and I go to New York about three times a year. We always go to the Ritz.”

  This was not precisely true. Once a year she generally pried her father from his placid and not unbeneficent existence that she might spend a week lolling by the Fifth Avenue shop windows, lunching or having tea with some former school friend from Farmover, and occasionally going to dinner and the theater with boys who came up from Yale or Princeton for the occasion. These had been pleasant adventures — not one but was filled to the brim with colorful hours — dancing at Montmartre, dining at the Ritz, with some movie star or supereminent society woman at the next table, or else dreaming of what she might buy at Hempel’s or Waxe’s or Thrumble’s if her father’s income had but one additional naught on the happy side of the decimal. She adored New York with a great impersonal affection — adored it as only a Middle Western or Southern girl can. In its gaudy bazaars she felt her soul transported with turbulent delight, for to her eyes it held nothing ugly, nothing sordid, nothing plain.