Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “That isn’t her young admirer,” retorted Yanci crisply. There was no drawl in her voice now. “She’s as old as you are. That’s her niece — I mean her nephew.”

  “Excuse me!”

  “I think you owe me an apology.” She found suddenly that she bore him no resentment. She was rather sorry for him, and it occurred to her that in asking him to take Mrs. Rogers home she had somehow imposed on his liberty. Nevertheless, discipline was necessary — there would be other Saturday nights. “Don’t you?” she concluded.

  “I apologize, Yanci.”

  “Very well, I accept your apology,” she answered stiffly.

  “What’s more, I’ll make it up to you.”

  Her blue eyes contracted. She hoped — she hardly dared to hope that he might take her to New York.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “November, isn’t it? What date?”

  “The twenty-third.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He knocked the tips of his fingers together tentatively. “I’ll give you a present. I’ve been meaning to let you have a trip all fall, but business has been bad.” She almost smiled — as though business was of any consequence in his life. “But then you need a trip. I’ll make you a present of it.”

  He rose again, and crossing over to his desk sat down.

  “I’ve got a little money in a New York bank that’s been lying there quite a while,” he said as he fumbled in a drawer for a check book. “I’ve been intending to close out the account. Let — me — see. There’s just — — “ His pen scratched. “Where the devil’s the blotter? Uh!”

  He came back to the fire and a pink oblong paper fluttered into her lap.

  “Why, Father!”

  It was a check for three hundred dollars.

  “But can you afford this?” she demanded.

  “It’s all right,” he reassured her, nodding. “That can be a Christmas present, too, and you’ll probably need a dress or a hat or something before you go.”

  “Why,” she began uncertainly, “I hardly know whether I ought to take this much or not! I’ve got two hundred of my own downtown, you know. Are you sure — — “

  “Oh, yes!” He waved his hand with magnificent carelessness. “You need a holiday. You’ve been talking about New York, and I want you to go down there. Tell some of your friends at Yale and the other colleges and they’ll ask you to the prom or something. That’ll be nice. You’ll have a good time.”

  He sat down abruptly in his chair and gave vent to a long sigh. Yanci folded up the check and tucked it into the low bosom of her dress.

  “Well,” she drawled softly with a return to her usual manner, “you’re a perfect lamb to be so sweet about it, but I don’t want to be horribly extravagant.”

  Her father did not answer. He gave another little sigh and relaxed sleepily into his chair.

  “Of course I do want to go,” went on Yanci.

  Still her father was silent. She wondered if he were asleep.

  “Are you asleep?” she demanded, cheerfully now. She bent toward him; then she stood up and looked at him.

  “Father,” she said uncertainly.

  Her father remained motionless; the ruddy color had melted suddenly out of his face.

  “Father!”

  It occurred to her — and at the thought she grew cold, and a brassiere of iron clutched at her breast — that she was alone in the room. After a frantic instant she said to herself that her father was dead.

  V

  Yanci judged herself with inevitable gentleness — judged herself very much as a mother might judge a wild, spoiled child. She was not hard-minded, nor did she live by any ordered and considered philosophy of her own. To such a catastrophe as the death of her father her immediate reaction was a hysterical self-pity. The first three days were something of a nightmare; but sentimental civilization, being as infallible as Nature in healing the wounds of its more fortunate children, had inspired a certain Mrs. Oral, whom Yanci had always loathed, with a passionate interest in all such crises. To all intents and purposes Mrs. Oral buried Tom Bowman. The morning after his death Yanci had wired her maternal aunt in Chicago, but as yet that undemonstrative and well-to-do lady had sent no answer.

  All day long, for four days, Yanci sat in her room upstairs, hearing steps come and go on the porch, and it merely increased her nervousness that the doorbell had been disconnected. This by order of Mrs. Oral! Doorbells were always disconnected! After the burial of the dead the strain relaxed. Yanci, dressed in her new black, regarded herself in the pier glass, and then wept because she seemed to herself very sad and beautiful. She went downstairs and tried to read a moving-picture magazine, hoping that she would not be alone in the house when the winter dark came down just after four.

  This afternoon Mrs. Oral had said carpe diem to the maid, and Yanci was just starting for the kitchen to see whether she had yet gone when the reconnected bell rang suddenly through the house. Yanci started. She waited a minute, then went to the door. It was Scott Kimberly.

  “I was just going to inquire for you,” he said.

  “Oh! I’m much better, thank you,” she responded with the quiet dignity that seemed suited to her role.

  They stood there in the hall awkwardly, each reconstructing the half-facetious, half-sentimental occasion on which they had last met. It seemed such an irreverent prelude to such a somber disaster. There was no common ground for them now, no gap that could be bridged by a slight reference to their mutual past, and there was no foundation on which he could adequately pretend to share her sorrow.

  “Won’t you come in?” she said, biting her lip nervously. He followed her to the sitting room and sat beside her on the lounge. In another minute, simply because he was there and alive and friendly, she was crying on his shoulder.

  “There, there!” he said, putting his arm behind her and patting her shoulder idiotically. “There, there, there!”

  He was wise enough to attribute no ulterior significance to her action. She was overstrained with grief and loneliness and sentiment; almost any shoulder would have done as well. For all the biological thrill to either of them he might have been a hundred years old. In a minute she sat up.

  “I beg your pardon,” she murmured brokenly. “But it’s — it’s so dismal in this house today.”

  “I know just how you feel, Yanci.”

  “Did I — did I — get — tears on your coat?”

  In tribute to the tenseness of the incident they both laughed hysterically, and with the laughter she momentarily recovered her propriety.

  “I don’t know why I should have chosen you to collapse on,” she wailed. “I really don’t just go ‘round doing it in-indiscriminately on anyone who comes in.”

  “I consider it — a compliment,” he responded soberly, “and I can understand the state you’re in.” Then, after a pause, “Have you any plans?”

  She shook her head.

  “Va-vague ones,” she muttered between little gasps. “I tho-ought I’d go down and stay with my aunt in Chicago a while.”

  “I should think that’d be the best — much the best thing.” Then, because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “Yes, very much the best thing.”

  “What are you doing — here in town?” she inquired, taking in her breath in minute gasps and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Oh, I’m here with — with the Rogerses. I’ve been here.”

  “Hunting?”

  “No, I’ve just been here.”

  He did not tell her that he had stayed over on her account. She might think it fresh.

  “I see,” she said. She didn’t see.

  “I want to know if there’s any possible thing I can do for you, Yanci. Perhaps go downtown for you, or do some errands — anything. Maybe you’d like to bundle up and get a bit of air. I could take you out to drive in your car some night, and no one would see you.”

  He clipped his last word short as the inadvertency of t
his suggestion dawned on him. They stared at each other with horror in their eyes.

  “Oh, no, thank you!” she cried. “I really don’t want to drive.”

  To his relief the outer door opened and an elderly lady came in. It was Mrs. Oral. Scott rose immediately and moved backward toward the door.

  “If you’re sure there isn’t anything I can do — — “

  Yanci introduced him to Mrs. Oral; then leaving the elder woman by the fire walked with him to the door. An idea had suddenly occurred to her.

  “Wait a minute.”

  She ran up the front stairs and returned immediately with a slip of pink paper in her hand.

  “Here’s something I wish you’d do,” she said. “Take this to the First National Bank and have it cashed for me. You can leave the money here for me any time.”

  Scott took out his wallet and opened it.

  “Suppose I cash it for you now,” he suggested.

  “Oh, there’s no hurry.”

  “But I may as well.” He drew out three new one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to her.

  “That’s awfully sweet of you,” said Yanci.

  “Not at all. May I come in and see you next time I come West?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Then I will. I’m going East tonight.”

  The door shut him out into the snowy dusk and Yanci returned to Mrs. Oral. Mrs. Oral had come to discuss plans.

  “And now, my dear, just what do you plan to do? We ought to have some plan to go by, and I thought I’d find out if you had any definite plan in your mind.”

  Yanci tried to think. She seemed to herself to be horribly alone in the world.

  “I haven’t heard from my aunt. I wired her again this morning. She may be in Florida.”

  “In that case you’d go there?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Would you close this house?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Mrs. Oral glanced around with placid practicality. It occurred to her that if Yanci gave the house up she might like it for herself.

  “And now,” she continued, “do you know where you stand financially?”

  “All right, I guess,” answered Yanci indifferently; and then with a rush of sentiment, “There was enough for t-two; there ought to be enough for o-one.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Mrs. Oral. “I mean, do you know the details?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I thought you didn’t know the details. And I thought you ought to know all the details — have a detailed account of what and where your money is. So I called up Mr. Haedge, who knew your father very well personally, to come up this afternoon and glance through his papers. He was going to stop in your father’s bank, too, by the way, and get all the details there. I don’t believe your father left any will.”

  Details! Details! Details!

  “Thank you,” said Yanci. “That’ll be — nice.”

  Mrs. Oral gave three or four vigorous nods that were like heavy periods. Then she got up.

  “And now if Hilma’s gone out I’ll make you some tea. Would you like some tea?”

  “Sort of.”

  “All right, I’ll make you some ni-nice tea.”

  Tea! Tea! Tea!

  Mr. Haedge, who came from one of the best Swedish families in town, arrived to see Yanci at five o’clock. He greeted her funereally; said that he had been several times to inquire for her; had organized the pallbearers and would now find out how she stood in no time. Did she have any idea whether or not there was a will? No? Well, there probably wasn’t one.

  There was one. He found it almost at once in Mr. Bowman’s desk — but he worked there until eleven o’clock that night before he found much else. Next morning he arrived at eight, went down to the bank at ten, then to a certain brokerage firm, and came back to Yanci’s house at noon. He had known Tom Bowman for some years, but he was utterly astounded when he discovered the condition in which that handsome gallant had left his affairs.

  He consulted Mrs. Oral, and that afternoon he informed a frightened Yanci in measured language that she was practically penniless. In the midst of the conversation a telegram from Chicago told her that her aunt had sailed the week previous for a trip through the Orient and was not expected back until late spring.

  The beautiful Yanci, so profuse, so debonair, so careless with her gorgeous adjectives, had no adjectives for this calamity. She crept upstairs like a hurt child and sat before a mirror, brushing her luxurious hair to comfort herself. One hundred and fifty strokes she gave it, as it said in the treatment, and then a hundred and fifty more — she was too distraught to stop the nervous motion. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing.

  The maid found her next morning, asleep, sprawled across the toilet things on the dresser in a room that was heavy and sweet with the scent of spilled perfume.

  VI

  To be precise, as Mr. Haedge was to a depressing degree, Tom Bowman left a bank balance that was more than ample — that is to say, more than ample to supply the post-mortem requirements of his own person. There was also twenty years’ worth of furniture, a temperamental roadster with asthmatic cylinders and two one-thousand-dollar bonds of a chain of jewelry stores which yielded 7.5 per cent interest. Unfortunately these were not known in the bond market.

  When the car and the furniture had been sold and the stucco bungalow sublet, Yanci contemplated her resources with dismay. She had a bank balance of almost a thousand dollars. If she invested this she would increase her total income to about fifteen dollars a month. This, as Mrs. Oral cheerfully observed, would pay for the boarding-house room she had taken for Yanci as long as Yanci lived. Yanci was so encouraged by this news that she burst into tears.

  So she acted as any beautiful girl would have acted in this emergency. With rare decision she told Mr. Haedge that she would leave her thousand dollars in a checking account, and then she walked out of his office and across the street to a beauty parlor to have her hair waved. This raised her morale astonishingly.

  Indeed, she moved that very day out of the boarding house and into a small room at the best hotel in town. If she must sink into poverty, she would at least do so in the grand manner.

  Sewed into the lining of her best mourning hat were the three new one-hundred-dollar bills, her father’s last present. What she expected of them, why she kept them in such a way, she did not know, unless perhaps because they had come to her under cheerful auspices and might through some gayety inherent in their crisp and virgin paper buy happier things than solitary meals and narrow hotel beds. They were hope and youth and luck and beauty; they began, somehow, to stand for all the things she had lost in that November night when Tom Bowman, having led her recklessly into space, had plunged off himself, leaving her to find the way back alone.

  Yanci remained at the Hiawatha Hotel for three months, and she found that after the first visits of condolence her friends had happier things to do with their time than to spend it in her company. Jerry O’Rourke came to see her one day with a wild Celtic look in his eyes, and demanded that she marry him immediately. When she asked for time to consider he walked out in a rage. She heard later that he had been offered a position in Chicago and had left the same night.

  She considered, frightened and uncertain. She had heard of people sinking out of place, out of life. Her father had once told her of a man in his class at college who had become a worker around saloons, polishing brass rails for the price of a can of beer; and she knew also that there were girls in this city with whose mothers her own mother had played as a little girl, but who were poor now and had grown common; who worked in stores and had married into the proletariat. But that such a fate should threaten her — how absurd! Why, she knew everyone! She had been invited everywhere; her great-grandfather had been governor of one of the Southern states!

  She had written to her aunt in India and again in China, receiving no answer. She concluded that her
aunt’s itinerary had changed, and this was confirmed when a post card arrived from Honolulu which showed no knowledge of Tom Bowman’s death, but announced that she was going with a party to the east coast of Africa. This was a last straw. The languorous and lackadaisical Yanci was on her own at last.

  “Why not go to work for a while?” suggested Mr. Haedge with some irritation. “Lots of nice girls do nowadays, just for something to occupy themselves with. There’s Elsie Prendergast, who does society news on the Bulletin, and that Semple girl — — “

  “I can’t,” said Yanci shortly with a glitter of tears in her eyes. “I’m going East in February.”

  “East? Oh, you’re going to visit someone?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, I’m going to visit,” she lied, “so it’d hardly be worth while to go to work.” She could have wept, but she managed a haughty look. “I’d like to try reporting sometime, though, just for the fun of it.”

  “Yes, it’s quite a lot of fun,” agreed Mr. Haedge with some irony. “Still, I suppose there’s no hurry about it. You must have plenty of that thousand dollars left.”

  “Oh, plenty!”

  There were a few hundred, she knew.

  “Well, then I suppose a good rest, a change of scene would be the best thing for you.”

  “Yes,” answered Yanci. Her lips were trembling and she rose, scarcely able to control herself. Mr. Haedge seemed so impersonally cold. “That’s why I’m going. A good rest is what I need.”

  “I think you’re wise.”

  What Mr. Haegde would have thought had he seen the dozen drafts she wrote that night of a certain letter is problematical. Here are two of the earlier ones. The bracketed words are proposed substitutions:

  Dear Scott: Not having seen you since that day I was such a silly ass and wept on your coat, I thought I’d write and tell you that I’m coming East pretty soon and would like you to have lunch [dinner] with me or something. I have been living in a room [suite] at the Hiawatha Hotel, intending to meet my aunt, with whom I am going to live [stay], and who is coming back from China this month [spring]. Meanwhile I have a lot of invitations to visit, etc., in the East, and I thought I would do it now. So I’d like to see you — —